Sleep Talk

Not surprisingly, sleep, or lack thereof, dominates conversations every time a group of parents with babies or young children congregates. So despite the real problems in our society - two seemingly endless wars, the worst oil spill in history and deficits at every level of government - all might still seem right with the world if our kids would just get some darn sleep. Or maybe us parents would have the energy to address these other problems if our babies were sleeping like, well babies. But with what little energy I did have, I was going to try to solve the sleep deficit one baby at a time. So I hosted a discussion on sleep training, Sleep Talk we called it, for the members of my moms group with the thought that if we got together and shared what we'd learned about sleep or experiences from our own kids, we'd all come a bit closer to making sense to something we had at one time assumed would come naturally.

I will admit that going into parenthood I was naive about sleep and babies, but given how little my husband and I knew about babies in general, (we thought we knew nothing before we had Oliver and then learned after he was born that we actually knew even less) the issue of sleep was just one of many topics we were just going to have to learn about on the go. So even though I knew babies wake up a lot during the night, I thought they otherwise just slept all the time and couldn't have told you in any more detail about the sleep patterns of newborns, let alone how and when those patterns change. I had no idea a baby could become overtired or that you need to help babies learn to fall asleep on their own, because I assumed that if they're tired, they'll sleep. That easy, right?

Chris and I got lucky with Oliver, because he figured out a lot of the sleep stuff by himself, and quickly, so we didn't have much time to inadvertently screw any of it up. Within the first few weeks of his life, we had figured out that rigorous rocking helped soothe him to sleep. He eventually grew too heavy for me to rock him for very long, let alone to rock him to sleep, and I'd put him down in his crib as soon as he settled down and he'd usually fall asleep. Only later did I learn that it's best to put babies to sleep "drowsy, but awake," because they're less likely to panic if they wake up in the same place and in the same condition they fell asleep. (So your arms and the rocking motion, even when done right next to the crib, are not going to be the same conditions as the still crib you set your now sleeping baby into.) This "drowsy, but awake" was what I ended up doing out of necessity, not with any deliberateness. Had I been a little stronger or had Oliver not been as obvious about how he didn't need the rocking anymore, I might have kept rocking him every night, well past the three or four month mark when babies grow out of needing motion to sleep, until he was fast asleep, and could have created one big sleep problem for him.

Oh, and that sleeping through the night that Oliver started doing around three months of age? That was totally him too. Chris and I were trying any supposedly magic sleep technique we had heard of - swaddling, white noise, bottle of formula before bed, socks on his feet so cold feet wouldn't wake him - and if any of those tricks contributed to Oliver's good night time sleeping, we'll never know.

The meltdowns (on Oliver's part)started to occur around four months, (my first occurred within hours of giving birth) and while exacerbating at first, because I couldn't figure out what could have gone so wrong for him so quickly, were also probably lucky, because when they happened in the evening and everything I did didn't comfort him, and then when I was out of options, I'd lay him down in his crib and voila, he went to sleep. I finally concluded he was tired. And over the weeks through his fourth and fifth month as his meltdowns occurred earlier and earlier, and I went from putting him to bed at 9:30 p.m. to eventually putting him to bed at 6:30 p.m., I realized only after the fact that he'd helped me set his bedtime. Had he been just manageable fussy, I might have mistaken his mood for teething, or typical "witching hour" type behavior, and not realized he actually needed to go to bed.

Only months later, after I finally read a sleep training book, did I learn that the moods of "happy" babies shift dramatically between the third and fourth months when the biology of sleep and their needs change, because their poor parents are often a few steps behind in understanding the development of sleep patterns, and the babies, therefore, aren't getting enough quality sleep. By that third or fourth month, the lack of sleep has added up and the baby is cranky...all the time.

Even though Chris and I ended up with a baby who slept through the night rather early on and goes to sleep and down for naps relatively easily, his "good sleeper" designation is relative. Even good sleepers go through developmental milestones that keep them up at times of night their parents had gotten used to them sleeping, or their naps or bedtime are thrown off by a change in their routine or they just mature and need to find a new sleep routine. Or they have parents who think they finally have it all figured out and are completely unaware that the sleep needs are in the process of changing.

While our exacerbation wasn't as dire as those with a baby who won't sleep, we still struggled with naps. Babies don't develop their sleep patterns overnight. It can take weeks or months as they first work on consolidating their night sleep, then their morning naps and later their afternoon naps. We noticed around the fourth month that Oliver consistently wanted to take a nap about an hour and half after he woke up for the day, but it was a months-long process to establish a pattern with his other two naps. And we went three days with some semblance of harmony with a predictable schedule for three naps a day when we realized we should be transitioning him to two naps. Sigh...

And all this lead up to the Sleep Talk. For us moms gathered at my house on that cool summer night to talk about sleep, there was nothing we could do about the mistakes we'd made in the past. We could only move forward, even if that meant correcting the sleep problems we may have created before bringing peaceful nights (and days) to our households. Since sleep is so vital to our emotional and physical well-being and ranks up their with food as necessary for human survival, I look back on the last nearly nine months of Oliver's life and the subject of sleep is one of the top "I wish I had known" subjects. I spent so much time worrying about what I needed for the baby, when I should have devoted some of that time to reading a book on sleep. But I do go easy on myself here, because I don't think I even knew there were books on "sleep training" and I didn't know it was something I needed to learn about.

For parents who've struggled with getting their babies to sleep and finally found some help from a particular author, they are often so thankful, they promote the methods from their particular book or the author like born-agains want you to come to Jesus. For some of us, the book was Dr. Marc Weissbluth's Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. And for a parent who's gone months or even over a year without more than a couple hours of sleep at a time, being able to sleep for a full eight hours is like finding salvation.

I had wished some expecting parents had been able to attend Sleep Talk, because I'd want them to learn from all of our experiences and/or mistakes. So one of my top pieces of advice for expecting parents (and I know I have a lot, but really, pay attention to this one) is to read, or at least skim, a book on sleep training. Go to a bookstore and there will probably be a whole shelf full of books - it really is a much-written-about topic. Skim the books and look for an author whose philosophy jibes with yours, or what you think you'll be like as a parent, or whose recommendations will be realistic given your lifestyle. I'm a huge supporter of libraries and check out dozens of books, but this is one you should buy so you always have it for reference. Then actually read it, or again, at least skim it. If you're a first-time parent, you have a gift you won't have in any sizable quantity until you become an empty-nester - time. The catch-22, of course, is that you do have the time, but not the frame of reference. A lot of the book won't make sense until you actually have a baby and it's 3:00 a.m. and you're on hour number two of trying to soothe your baby to sleep. Until then, you may scoff at something you read and not believe it's necessary or that important, but at least you're giving your brain a chance to file nuggets of information away. And then when you're at wits end about what to do with a baby who won't sleep, that's when you have your "aha" moment and remember some tip some sleep expert had mentioned. Although a lot of parenting is learned by doing it yourself, at least you'll go into this parent thing with an understanding of the sleep needs of babies at different stages.

Every parent who's dangerously sleep-deprived and can't imagine another night with two-hour chunks of sleep looks for the magic bullet. There is none. It's possible to see progress overnight, but nothing will be completely solved. If what you're reading isn't working, it helps to talk to other parents who've read the same book (part of the reason behind hosting the sleep talk) and do some trouble-shooting. It's also a good time to reevaluate whether you're able to diligently follow the recommendations of a particular expert and if it's possible given your situation or parenting philosophy to follow his or her advice.

I laughed when one woman changed her R.S.V.P. to no for Sleep Talk because her five-month-old baby's sleep problems had been solved. Solved for that development phase in the baby's life, I thought. It's not just with sleep, but with every aspect of a baby's development, you think you have it figured out, and then it changes. Our sleep discussion was both an opportunity for trouble-shooting, to try to help each other solve specific problems in the current sleep development stages of our babies' lives, but also learn more about the biology of sleep and sleep development stages. It is with this latter knowledge that we'll be better prepared for future developments.