Let Sleeping Babes Lie
Oh how we took those thousands and thousands of pre-parenthood nights of sleep for granted! A new mama from Calif. asked for some thoughts and resources on sleep:
What a push button topic this is for parents. You hate when people ask you how your baby is sleeping. It feels like a measurement of your fledgling parenting skills. You desperately want to sleep but you have evolved into a bug with freakishly tuned antennae; you are up and running at every snuffle or snort and it is making you crazy. As you consider various sleep approaches, my opinion is that you need to think about the temperament and any particular health needs of your babe coupled with what you instinctively feel comfortable with as a parent. No single method will work for everyone or should serve as a marker for success or failure. I’ll point you to some resources, and offer a window into our sleep journey; ultimately, you will need to decide what works best for your family.
First, to get grounded on some basic facts about infant sleep, check out this useful article that offers description of infant sleep patterns, needs, special circumstances, and general pointers to improve sleep patterns.
As for the specific approaches, the battleground has been set by Sears vs. Ferber, with a couple of recent approaches (Pantley, Karp) gaining popularity. In a nutshell, Sears advocates attachment parenting and encourages co-sleeping (and doing whatever else is necessary to help your babe get back to sleep, e.g., breastfeeding) while Ferber promotes letting the babe “cry it out” until they learn to fall asleep on their own (or exhaust themselves crying and trying). Pantley’s “no-cry” method involves gradually detaching the need for external comforting stimuli (i.e., nursing, bottle, pacifier). Karp’s idea of the “fourth trimester” proposes that babes will be happiest when the world is made to feel more like the womb (via techniques such as swaddling, side/stomach position, shhh sounds, swinging and sucking).
So what did we try? EVERYTHING. And while no one method was a miracle solution, all of them offered bits and pieces that ultimately helped us figure out what did and did not feel comfortable to us:
During the first months while feeding occurred around the clock, we incorporated Karp’s methods into our soothing repertoire (although the specifc sequence never ended up working as systematically as described) and tried suggestions from Sears’ “The Baby Book” (e.g., working on differentiating night and day) to help the babe get back to sleep in the middle of the night. After the babe got bigger (i.e., her belly could hold more), and we could use the “tank 'em up” Sears approach to feedings during the day, she ended up sleeping really well for several months.
Then, around 7-8 months, when she started mastering crawling, the nights became torturous. The babe was “sleepcrawling” and knocking into the crib rails, waking herself up, and wasn’t able to get back to sleep. Sears’ co-sleeping wasn’t an option; we had tried it a handful of times and the babe was so noisy and such a squirmer that we couldn’t sleep at all. So I next set to work on Pantley’s methods. I loved the ideas behind the approach, but we couldn’t get out of stage 1. Every single time I was positive that the babe was totally relaxed and 99% asleep I would try to extract myself from the room and the crying started again. All told, all of this went on for maybe a month or two but my husband and I were like zombies and felt as if it had been years since he had a good night's rest.
Finally, at 9 months, on suggestion of a pediatric colleague at work, my husband broke down and bought the Ferber book. I was skeptical, thinking that Ferber = bad parent, but I also was too tired to read anything with print that small. Jon read the book, found nuggets of wisdom, and suggested we try the approach with our own leanings. We decided that the babe had basically been training us over the last couple of months and that we needed to present her with our new united front (tough talk, no?). We bought our upstairs neighbors expensive coffee and sets of earplugs, and promised to reward them further for their assumed suffering (their bedroom was about our babe’s bedroom).
First we decided to take turns on evening duty so there was consistency in approach and so the other person could know they were off duty and actually go to sleep (this was FANTASTIC - I never slept so well as those nights when I knew that I was off the clock). We went through our whole relaxing bedtime routine and once the babe was nice and relaxed and drowsy the parent-on-duty left the room while she was still awake, at which point she started crying. Then the plan kicked into action: we let her cry for a minute (it felt like an hour) then the parent-on-duty went in to offer comfort and hugs but did not take her out of the crib unless there was a poop or some other extenuating circumstance. Parent-on-duty told her we loved her and that we were still outside and then left the room. If the crying continued, parent-on-duty repeated the cycle at slightly longer waiting intervals until the babe fell asleep. This plan applied to any other nightwaking episodes.
I later read that the first night is bad, the second night is worse, and then it gets better quickly. I’m not sure whether my husband knew this advice in advance but he took the first night. The first night was bad in terms of what we were used to doing, but not that bad in retrospect (one initial 45 minute period of on/off interaction) and otherwise one midnight squawk (then silence) with no action needed. We were thrilled!
The second night – my night – was hell. I was basically in and out constantly and ultimately so was my husband because by 3am I was ready to either throw in the towel and nurse her to sleep, submit my name to Jerry Springer for a feature on "Negligent Mamas," or throw myself in front of a bus. But I hung in there, comforting myself with the thought that the next night I would be off duty.
It's all a blur now of course, but looking at my ridiculous, meticulous notes, after 10 days with variable results (i.e., some nights were super easy, others there were a few nightwaking episodes), the babe was sleeping soundly through the night. And while we have bumps here and there corresponding to teething, or illness or whatever, largely we all have been sleeping happily. And so far, at nearly two years, the babe is cheery and appears to be unscarred psychologically. We shower her with an awful lot of love in general, and at night we also continue to tell her “sleeping is fun!” (we would never lie, after all). After a moment’s pause, now she says “Night Night Daddy” or “Night Night Mommy” and that’s that.
All books are available at Amazon: Sears (“The Baby Sleep Book
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” (of the Sears parenting series) to be a handy reference (the book covers topics from birth to two years). While the attachment approach isn’t for everyone (and we certainly didn’t follow every single suggestion despite being pro-breastfeeding and into baby wearing, etc...), the basic baby care and developmental information is extremely useful. We were able to do a lot of successful troubleshooting at home with this book as a reference (with the web as backup here and there) and it saved us many unnecessary trips to the doctor's office. 
"Miffy’s Magnifying Glass
($13.95 at Amazon).
? Multicultural education is a bargain at $7.95.
