Whew! Now that I'm caught up on my pending Draw Something games, I can finally blog about our sleep learning adventures :-) Get yourself a snack and refresh your cup of coffee before you sit down to read this novel. I promise it'll be worthwhile, but it's a commitment!
Let me start by saying that I know that we haven't had it
nearly as rough as some new parents. On the other hand, though, I think that any new parent will tell you that regardless of the severity or duration of your sleep problems, they are - far and away - the most trying part of early parenthood. Patience wears thin in the dark. Tolerance flies out the window. Irritation and frustration are disproportionately amplified.
Everything feels worse at night.
The first 6 or 7 weeks are a blur to me. I know that I woke up a lot to feed him, but that was to be expected - nothing out of the ordinary. I do remember that our first few nights with him were
rough, but we quickly settled into a reasonable pattern and we survived. Miraculously, around 7-8 weeks, my sweet little darling started sleeping 6 hours stretches, and by 10 weeks we were getting a solid 8 hours straight. That lasted about a month - around 3 1/2 months we were suddenly back to square one, waking to feed every 1 1/2-2 hours. It was quite a shock to my system. I held out hope that it was "just a phase". At our 4-month check-up with the pediatrician, she advised us that he really ought to be able to go at least 6 hours at night between feeds, and so we should try to see if he would go back to sleep without feeding. Lo and behold, we tried and it worked - he didn't really need to eat, he just needed help getting back to sleep.
That was when we realized that we had a "sleep problem". At first, it was no big deal to just pick him up and snuggle him back to sleep a few times a night. When this "problem" spread to nap time, I knew we were in trouble. At night, he would go back to sleep with help - it was dark, his body was programmed to be asleep, and he was still tired. At nap time it was light out, and he wasn't on any kind of "schedule" that had him programmed to be sleepy. If he woke up after 20 or 30 minutes (and he often did), he'd had enough sleep that he would have a
very difficult time drifting off again even with my help. And so we fought, constantly. I spent weeks trying to let him set his own nap schedule, hoping he'd settle into some sort of pattern that never materialized. He was sleep-deprived and grouchy during the day (
all day
every day) and the night wakings were getting worse and worse. I tried to let him self-soothe at night in hopes that he'd apply those skills at nap time, but it rarely worked at night, much less during the day. I stopped picking him up and just tried to help him find his fingers to suck on, but I could tell that I was frustrating him - I was there and interacting with him and touching him, but not picking him up. Those fights would last as long as an hour and a half sometimes... it was brutal. I would often cave, pick him up and hold him in my lap to help him settle down, and then put him back in his bassinet to start over again. No two nights were ever the same, with respect to both his behavior and my responses.
I really hated the idea of trying to force my child into a pattern through some sort of formal "training" process. It just felt wrong to me. After about a month and a half of trying to figure it out on my own, though, I realized that I
was "sleep training" him... just informally. And then I realized that being informal, while it made me feel better, also meant that I was being inconsistent and haphazard, sending mixed signals and really frustrating him. I had the best intentions - I wanted to let him lead and figure out what was going to work for him. As a result, I was constantly "trying" this and "trying" that, trying to stick to some "plan" that was too loose to be called a plan anyway. Things were always changing, from where he slept, to when he slept, to how many times a day he slept, to how I responded when he woke... poor kid.
I started noticing that the more I "helped" him (or did things that I thought were helping him), the more upset he got. I began to feel like I had no clue what I was doing - how could I even know when he really needed to be sleeping and when he didn't, when I should try to get him to sleep longer and when I should just get him up, how to get him to settle down once he was awake and upset? I felt completely helpless and frustrated, and it became clear to me that I was doing him a disservice just flying by the seat of my pants like that. As a parent, it was my responsibility to do something about what was obviously becoming a terrible situation. He wasn't getting good sleep, he was constantly cranky, nights were getting worse and worse... it just wasn't healthy for anyone, and what I was doing clearly wasn't working.
The solution certainly involved some crying, but no more crying than was already happening on a daily (and nightly) basis! Looking back, I feel
far more guilty about what I was doing to him before when I
thought I was avoiding "letting him cry". Instead, I was
making him cry longer and harder, but I only know that now because I gave him a chance to show me how quickly he is capable of settling down on his own. There have been a few really tough nap times and crying jags in the middle of the night, but only a handful. Overall, I have been
tremendously impressed with how quickly he has developed his own self-soothing skills - I just had to pull back a little and give him the time and space to do so. It hasn't been without difficulty, of course. Babies (like adults!) are resistant to change, and as I mentioned, there was certainly a handful of very resistant episodes that tried my resolve beyond what I thought I could bear. But the times that I've had to let him cry over the past few weeks, it has been
for a purpose (as opposed to the crying he was doing before)
- he has learned so much and made tremendous progress. Learning to sleep is a life skill that he needs, not just because we all need sleep, but because his little developing brain and growing body desperately need sleep nutrition as much as they need food to eat and air to breathe.
Most of us take sleep for granted - we know how to close our eyes, relax our minds and bodies and allow sleep to overtake us. Babies have to learn how to do that - they don't just naturally settle down when their minds are racing and it's time to sleep. It's all well and good for them to have our help in falling asleep initially (nursing, rocking, etc), but what happens when they wake in the middle of the night? They need to have those same conditions recreated in order to help them fall asleep. Same thing with napping. It's a little easier at night when their bodies are programmed to sleep for longer periods of time - it's tempting to just get up and nurse them back to sleep if they wake up every couple of hours. But when he was waking up 20 or 30 minutes into a nap and refusing to go back to sleep, I couldn't just keep nursing him every 20 minutes. Something had to change.
I did a lot of research on Amazon before purchasing a book on baby sleep - I didn't want a strict, "Ferberizing", cry-it-out method, but I could see that constantly touching him, picking him up and otherwise trying to help him to sleep myself was just making him angry. We were constantly fighting, and I wasn't winning. I settled on The Sleepeasy Solution. The method outlined in this particular book is referred to as the "Least-Cry Method" (as opposed to the two extremes, known as the "cry-it-out" and "no-cry" methods). I feel that it offers a very helpful balance of encouragement and realism, and addresses the heartbreak of listening to your child cry for any period of time. It also acknowledges the reality that all children truly are different, and some babies won't need every piece of the book's advice applied to them, making it feel much easier to tailor the plan to your situation. The authors offer practical advice for creating the necessary conditions for sleep by outlining seven "sleep stealers" to eliminate:
- No consistent bedtime routine
- Your child needs you to fall asleep
- Poor sleep environment (light, sound, safety hazards in the crib)
- Misusing sleep aids (pacifiers, music, swaddling, etc... not that you shouldn't use them, but sometimes people misuse them and they become detrimental to sleep)
- Mistimed sleep schedule (this was the biggest one for us!)
- For older children, limit testing
- Night feedings
One of the keys for me was the sleep schedule that it suggests, and it's all about intervals. That made a lot of sense to me. I never understood how I could expect him to sleep at the same times every day, since wake time and nap durations often vary quite a bit. The basic gist is:
- Wake time should come 11-12 hours after bed time. Some children do well with 10 1/2 hours, but it's only ok to settle for 10 1/2 hours if your baby regularly wakes at that time and acts well-rested.
- At 4-6 months, the first nap should start 2 hours after wake time, and the 2nd and 3rd naps should start 2 1/2 hours after waking from the previous nap. Those intervals change with age as the 3rd nap is dropped and the child develops the ability to remain awake for longer periods of time.
- At 4-6 months, your child needs 3 hours worth of naps. The goal is for each of his 3 naps to last at least 1 hour, so that by the end of 3 naps he has had at least 3 hours of sleep.
Now, the hard part is dealing with wakings outside of this "plan". The method suggests "check-ins" at defined intervals that extend gradually - 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, etc. When your child wakes and starts crying, you give him 5 minutes before checking in. When you check in, you enter the room far enough that he can see you and talk to him in a calm and reassuring tone for no longer than 30 seconds, then leave again. The next check-in will be at 10 minutes and you'll repeat the same process.
The theory behind this method is that your child needs the opportunity to figure out what works for him as far as self-soothing is concerned. If he never has the opportunity to self-soothe, he'll never figure out what it is that he needs to do to fall asleep on his own - sucking a thumb, twirling his hair, kicking his legs rhythmically, finding a particularly comfortable position... whatever combination of factors will help him settle. Why only 30 seconds per check-in? The goal is to try not to tease or frustrate your child with your presence. If you have been picking him up and otherwise soothing him previously, your child expects that from you, and your presence in the room can feel like a frustrating tease when you don't do what he's expecting. I found that to be absolutely true for Eli - just standing there in the room with him only made him cry harder, and distracted him from any effort he may have been making to self-soothe. It's tough, because your gut tells you that your presence should be soothing, or should at least make him feel a little better. The book does recognize that your child needs to be reassured that you're still there and shouldn't just be left alone to cry indefinitely, but also offers a perspective that you may not have considered - that your extended presence may feel like a tease, and also robs your child of the opportunity to learn how to fall asleep on his own.
As with any aspect of parenting, the key is CONSISTENCY. The authors promise that if you are truly consistent, you won't be dealing with much crying at all after the first few nights, and most likely none at all after the first week. They're not kidding (in my experience). Now, if you're not being consistent, this will be a very long, drawn out, ugly process - and it's truly unfair to your baby. The few times that I was forced to cave for one reason or another, I honestly felt horrible for caving because it meant that the crying he had done was for naught. I felt worse about caving than I had felt about letting him cry in the first place. And I noticed that once we had a stretch of two or three truly consistent days, things suddenly improved dramatically.
I'll save the details of our experience and how we have implemented the plan for a "part two" post. This one has obviously gotten long enough, and I'm sure you need a potty break by now anyway. I know I do. Until next time...
