Parents rally around mom who called herself 'the worst mom' for struggling to get baby to sleep

Motherhood is difficult and especially so when you're taking care of a young child. Night times can get extremely stressful for the entire family if the infant struggles to sleep and keeps crying. Hannah Charles found herself in such a situation earlier this year and was left feeling like the worst mom in the world. Many online could resonate with her when she shared a video confessing that she felt inadequate as a parent for not being able to get her one-year-old baby to stop crying and sleep. The exhausted and sleep-deprived mother—who goes by the username @hanzcakess on TikTok—spoke to the camera at 5 in the morning about how she feels like "the worst mom."

In the video, Charles explained that her one-year-old was going through a sleep regression. Throughout the night, she tried to breastfeed the child and only later realized that her milk had dried up. She didn't figure out the entire time her daughter was not getting any milk. "I was just doing what I knew, and she was latching! Like, I thought she was eating," Charles said.

She added that the child was up for four hours, during which she tried everything she could think of to calm her down. "I gave her pain medicine, I let her play, I held her, I bought her to my bed, finally I put her in the crib and let her cry. I just sat in bed and waited for her to fall asleep," said Charles. 

After some time, she took her daughter out of her crib to let her play, out of options of what to try to make her feel better. She was too exhausted to breastfeed again. Finally, Charles decided to give her a bottle. "Normally she needs it heated up. Got the bottle out of the warmer, 'you're just going to lose your mind it's cold milk you're not going to want this.' She chugged it and went straight to sleep," Charles shared.

"So I was getting frustrated with my daughter for being thirsty," she concluded. 

While Charles was feeling horrible about how she handled the night, many on the Internet sent her words of comfort and support. A TikTok user wrote, "You are not a bad mom! I've had something along these lines happen to me as well. It seriously happens to all of us!"

Another said that staying up all night with her daughter and trying to help her through it is what makes her a great mom. "You are trying your best! And the fact that you tried a million things to console her, that is the best example of what being a really good mom means!" they assured.

However, some social media got worried that one's breastmilk could dry up out of nowhere. One wrote, "That can happen?? That suddenly?? Just one day it dries up? I'm so sorry!" Charles responded to it with another video. "In my case, I think it's been happening slowly because I have been weaning my daughter," she explained. "I think my body just slowly stopped producing and then last night just completely stopped."

"So a lot of things can contribute to your milk drying up: diet, hormones, weaning, exercise, stress. There's a lot, but in my case, I think it was because I was previously weaning her from her daytime feeds and when she slept through the night those few times, my body just decided to stop producing..." she added.