Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Banned question: Does your baby sleep through the night?
10:18 PM | 
Posted by
Amanda J. Moreno
OK, I can’t possibly talk about sleep in only one post because sleep is related to other issues such as co-sleeping, breastfeeding, cry it out (or not), and others. I will address each of these eventually but one thing I first want parents to understand is this:
Human babies are not designed to sleep through the night – quite the opposite. They are designed to wake up often in order to increase their amount of interaction with you.
Now, while this may do absolutely nothing for your sleep-deprived insanity, you can at least be prepared to answer this ill-informed question, and be absolutely sure that, not only is there nothing wrong with you or your baby, you may actually be more evolutionarily fit! Remember I talked before about the imperfections in biological systems? Well, the biological systems involved in parenting are very, very clever, but not QUITE clever enough to put YOU on a baby sleep schedule for as long as your baby needs it, and then back to the grown-up one later. You are always on the grown-up schedule, which is why babies’ sleep patterns have driven most parents I know to the edge of cuckoo at one time or another. Thus, James McKenna has said, “Infants rarely have sleep problems, parents do!”
Never heard of James McKenna? Let me introduce you to your new BFF. McKenna is the foremost, and perhaps only, real expert in this country on adaptive infant and parent sleep (thought that was Ferber? I have some thoughts about him, too – not all bad – which we’ll discuss in a future post). McKenna has an actual lab, where he observes mothers and babies sleeping. He is the only expert commentator on these issues that I know of, who has real empirical data to support his claims.
McKenna taught me that human milk is the reason that babies are not supposed to sleep through the through the night. If you have ever expressed milk or seen it, you have probably noticed how lightweight it looks, especially relative to formula. Human milk also has a high sugar content, causing it to metabolize (burn off) quickly. All this means that human infants (as well as other primates) have a rapid and frequent feeding cycle, which was biologically built in to us to promote near constant contact between babies and moms. This does not become any less true at night.
You might wonder, but what if I don’t breastfeed or what about when breastfeeding ends? For babies 6 months and under, hunger cycles are still close enough together so as to promote more contact with you – breastfeeding was simply the built-in mechanism to try and insure this, but it exists either way. Starting after 6 months, hunger cycles begin to spread out a bit, so you might be lucky enough to have only one night waking during the second half of the first year.
After this point, sleeping and eating become even more “de-coupled”, but a child’s self-regulatory system is nowhere near fully cooked until 18 months, or maybe even 2 or 3 years of age. I can’t tell you how many times friends of older babies or toddlers have called me, crazed from sleep deprivation, believing that their child had un-learned everything they knew about sleep, and had entered into a hellish abyss of wakefulness, crying, or getting up out of crib/bed that would never, ever end. Even if you have experienced this, if you are not currently IN one of these phases, I promise you, you cannot fully call up the intensity and dread, which is why you too likely have asked your friends the banned question. (This is similar to the evolutionary reasons why we can’t truly recall the pain of child birth.)
For fear of sending my friends completely over the edge, I do not say, “Don’t worry, it will be better tomorrow”, or next week, or next month. But inevitably, it is. These are just hiccups in a child’s perfectly normal, but zig-zag process toward self-regulation. Perhaps just knowing this could lower the intensity just a smidge? Okay, don’t throw something at the screen.
For families in one of the hiccup phases, other than just knowing that it is normal, here are a couple of other things I always recommend:
-Wear a t-shirt around the house for a few days and don’t wear deodorant. Put this t-shirt next to your baby during sleep times (while assuring the baby cannot pull the t-shirt over his face, of course. If it is a crib, you can tie it to one of the slats). Maternal smell has been shown to reduce rats’ distress (hey, man, rats are people too) 70% toward what an actual mother would do.
- Even if you don’t regularly co-sleep, sleep next to your child. In other words, show your child how to sleep. If she is crying, do not constantly try to shush her or rock her or rub her. Just put your hand quietly on her, close your eyes, and try to relax, or fake it as best you can, during the crying. This gives your child nothing to fight against, and just gives a calm, constant presence. If she is old enough to get up and away, hold pretty tight until her body relaxes even a little– give her instant reward for this: Relax yourself, give a sleepy sigh and a quick back rub. If relaxing is nowhere to be found, just close the door, and lie calmly by yourself or perhaps grab a children’s book. This is bound to eventually at least pique your child’s curiosity. Maybe you start to play the “pretend to sleep” game. You get the picture.
In other words, you are not sending any message of “The way you are being right now is not OK” for your child to react against. None of this will “work” (you know why this is in quotes if you read the previous post) right away, but if you see your job as demonstrating what being relaxed looks like, you won’t be able to get to the usual level of crazed, and your child will eventually see the merits of sleep – I promise.
Human babies are not designed to sleep through the night – quite the opposite. They are designed to wake up often in order to increase their amount of interaction with you.
Now, while this may do absolutely nothing for your sleep-deprived insanity, you can at least be prepared to answer this ill-informed question, and be absolutely sure that, not only is there nothing wrong with you or your baby, you may actually be more evolutionarily fit! Remember I talked before about the imperfections in biological systems? Well, the biological systems involved in parenting are very, very clever, but not QUITE clever enough to put YOU on a baby sleep schedule for as long as your baby needs it, and then back to the grown-up one later. You are always on the grown-up schedule, which is why babies’ sleep patterns have driven most parents I know to the edge of cuckoo at one time or another. Thus, James McKenna has said, “Infants rarely have sleep problems, parents do!”
Never heard of James McKenna? Let me introduce you to your new BFF. McKenna is the foremost, and perhaps only, real expert in this country on adaptive infant and parent sleep (thought that was Ferber? I have some thoughts about him, too – not all bad – which we’ll discuss in a future post). McKenna has an actual lab, where he observes mothers and babies sleeping. He is the only expert commentator on these issues that I know of, who has real empirical data to support his claims.
McKenna taught me that human milk is the reason that babies are not supposed to sleep through the through the night. If you have ever expressed milk or seen it, you have probably noticed how lightweight it looks, especially relative to formula. Human milk also has a high sugar content, causing it to metabolize (burn off) quickly. All this means that human infants (as well as other primates) have a rapid and frequent feeding cycle, which was biologically built in to us to promote near constant contact between babies and moms. This does not become any less true at night.
You might wonder, but what if I don’t breastfeed or what about when breastfeeding ends? For babies 6 months and under, hunger cycles are still close enough together so as to promote more contact with you – breastfeeding was simply the built-in mechanism to try and insure this, but it exists either way. Starting after 6 months, hunger cycles begin to spread out a bit, so you might be lucky enough to have only one night waking during the second half of the first year.
After this point, sleeping and eating become even more “de-coupled”, but a child’s self-regulatory system is nowhere near fully cooked until 18 months, or maybe even 2 or 3 years of age. I can’t tell you how many times friends of older babies or toddlers have called me, crazed from sleep deprivation, believing that their child had un-learned everything they knew about sleep, and had entered into a hellish abyss of wakefulness, crying, or getting up out of crib/bed that would never, ever end. Even if you have experienced this, if you are not currently IN one of these phases, I promise you, you cannot fully call up the intensity and dread, which is why you too likely have asked your friends the banned question. (This is similar to the evolutionary reasons why we can’t truly recall the pain of child birth.)
For fear of sending my friends completely over the edge, I do not say, “Don’t worry, it will be better tomorrow”, or next week, or next month. But inevitably, it is. These are just hiccups in a child’s perfectly normal, but zig-zag process toward self-regulation. Perhaps just knowing this could lower the intensity just a smidge? Okay, don’t throw something at the screen.
For families in one of the hiccup phases, other than just knowing that it is normal, here are a couple of other things I always recommend:
-Wear a t-shirt around the house for a few days and don’t wear deodorant. Put this t-shirt next to your baby during sleep times (while assuring the baby cannot pull the t-shirt over his face, of course. If it is a crib, you can tie it to one of the slats). Maternal smell has been shown to reduce rats’ distress (hey, man, rats are people too) 70% toward what an actual mother would do.
- Even if you don’t regularly co-sleep, sleep next to your child. In other words, show your child how to sleep. If she is crying, do not constantly try to shush her or rock her or rub her. Just put your hand quietly on her, close your eyes, and try to relax, or fake it as best you can, during the crying. This gives your child nothing to fight against, and just gives a calm, constant presence. If she is old enough to get up and away, hold pretty tight until her body relaxes even a little– give her instant reward for this: Relax yourself, give a sleepy sigh and a quick back rub. If relaxing is nowhere to be found, just close the door, and lie calmly by yourself or perhaps grab a children’s book. This is bound to eventually at least pique your child’s curiosity. Maybe you start to play the “pretend to sleep” game. You get the picture.
In other words, you are not sending any message of “The way you are being right now is not OK” for your child to react against. None of this will “work” (you know why this is in quotes if you read the previous post) right away, but if you see your job as demonstrating what being relaxed looks like, you won’t be able to get to the usual level of crazed, and your child will eventually see the merits of sleep – I promise.
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3 comments:
Brilliant!
Why weren't you around when you were a baby?
I'm going to start referring all my childbirth classes to your blog! JJAM
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