MY THIRD BABY - Go the F*** to Sleep

You're a parent of a tiny baby, you're tired... Sorry? Oh alright, exhausted!!! You had no idea how bad it would feel to not sleep a full night for three months straight. Everything is suffering, you haven't got the energy to think about food so your system is running on coffee and sugar, you haven't got the energy to clean properly so your home environment is depressingly grimy, you haven't got the energy to be polite to your spouse...

You want some sleep! You're both tired of the same totalitarian regime of total unpredictability day after day, night after night. There must be something you can DO! There definitely is! Here I'm going to cover the main ways I help support my babies to learn to sleep through the night. This is not a formulaic approach. There is no a+b+c = sleeping baby! There are other books that make that claim, I have used a collection of resources to form an approach that works for me. 


Settle in people, this one is long-winded, and there's gonna be some self-justification.


The first one is that because you can't explain in words to your baby what you want them to do you need to communicate it to them through their senses. In fact, our own environment contains one of the most important cues, darkness. Night time should be dark, and daytime almost dazzlingly bright! Make sure your baby gets plenty of (indirect) sunshine and fresh air during the day, and then keep the nights dark and quiet and cosy. Baby will begin to get the idea because he cannot ignore the signs. Even a sleeping baby is absorbing the light and having the requisite bodily reactions when he is sleeping in the light. Get out and about during the day, make daytime life a hive of activity, so that by contrast night will be incredibly boring and sleep-inducing.

Once again, babies seem to come with an inbuilt fear that every time they're left alone they're in danger of being carried off by ravenous wolves. It's fair enough, I suppose, but it doesn't always make them pleasant to be around. Your job, if I may be so bold, is to show them that they won't. I think to some extent it's about balance. Baby wants to be near you (he's been INSIDE you for most of his life so far!) but he will also eventually have to accept that you have set the conditions for him to be fairly safe while you're out of the room. 

Babies will generally relax once they've had their quota of "in arms" time, so strap them in a baby carrier and take them along with you wherever you go! To a baby your day to day life is something akin to you watching a deeply engaging and exciting film; everything they experience when toted along with you, the smell of dinner cooking on the stove, the sound of siblings fighting, the sight of their father's smiling face, are all educational experiences. He is learning about his environment all from the safety of a high perch, close to Mum or Dad. I have found this to be especially true in the evenings, and that sometimes my baby was content to be worn while I cooked dinner, rather than needing to cluster-feed at this time. As someone who always "crammed" for exams, this also rings true for trying to catch up on in-arms time that bub might feel they missed out on during the day.

Having said all that, it's pretty easy for baby to be overstimulated, particularly by being passed around, having to learn a lot of new faces, voices, smells, and this can make it as difficult for them to sleep as a lack of stimulation. Having a mild hearing disability myself (which also means I don't wake up to my child's every snuffle or squeak all night long!) this is something I really sympathise with. I love a big social gathering but when I get home I find myself excessively worn out, even if I haven't really done anything energetic, simply from the effort of processing all the information with my faulty equipment. Don't let every guest at a party insist on having a hold, and don't expect baby to be the same after a busy day out as he is after a boring day at home. Plan for balance for up days and down days, noisy time and quiet time. When you observe your baby you will see him learning to anticipate playtime or sleep time. You will see that after a busy day out and about one day, he almost demands a quiet day in for the next day. 

Parents always establish some sort of routine for their child that indicates sleep is coming, and our baby learns to rely on these cues. I think we are best to take control of this routine so that we can go through the motions and know we have done all the things our baby associates with sleep. This way when baby is sick, or something is genuinely wrong, we will know because in spite of the usual routine baby is still not settling. If you have no normal, you will be hard-pressed to notice when something is wrong. I believe very strongly in bedtime cues; a story, a song, a process of kissing everyone goodnight, a "primer" that tells baby bedtime is coming. It's just courtesy.

I'm also a big believer in the "comforter" ie. small soft toys that are only used at sleep times. I have had two babies born "late", who are both thumb suckers and "found" their thumbs from a very young age, and one baby born early, not coordinated enough to find his thumb and I swear he was more trouble than the other two to teach to sleep because he had such difficulty comforting himself! I swear by the "comforter" because it gives you some control over how baby puts himself to sleep. You hand tired baby his comforter and he suddenly relaxes, his eyelids droop and off he goes! I start this as soon after birth as possible, though the effect might not take hold for a couple of months the foundation is laid for the association to take place. I carry their comfort object around in my bra for a couple of days (Hilarious when you forget, and leave the house with a bunny poking out of your cleavage. Not that I've ever done that.) so that it carries your comforting "boob smell" and then start putting it in the cot with baby, near his face, when he goes to bed. (Note: not over his face obviously. If you look up "baby comforter" you will see what I mean and why this is not a SIDS risk.)

Singing to your baby the same song every night might help him to know it is time for sleep, but it might also help you to feel calm as you put him down in confident anticipation that he will now drop sweetly off to sleep. Singing forces you to regulate your breathing, which helps drop your heart rate, and baby will read these signals that everything is ok. I really do think that teaching your baby to sleep (heck, teaching anyone anything!) has a lot to do with confidence. You have to believe that they can learn to sleep. If you never expect them to do it, they will know. I believe that babies can learn to sleep through the night by three months with no trauma. I believe this because I have seen it in action. I have deliberately and wilfully ignored my child to sleep, and proceeded to sleep blissfully myself, and I think I have quite a prickly conscience generally speaking.

Some parents are happy to feed or rock their child to sleep, and have that be their child's routine for sleep. (With some babies feeding them to sleep is the only option because they keep falling asleep while you feed them!) I prefer to offer them comfort in the form of a soft toy because this is more sustainable for me in the long run. My almost four year old is still using the same comfort object that he did at six months, I was not willing to continue to breastfeed him to sleep beyond babyhood (I am also not keen to establish links between food and comfort that could set a debilitating lifelong pattern in a child's mind... But that's a whole 'nother post!!) and he quickly grew out of this anyway and then needed to be bounced to sleep. For SOME people it DOES work, and THEY are HAPPY to do this "long term", and THEIR child weans organically when THEY are ready, and it is NEVER a problem for THEM. Bully for them, I am not that patient.

Most importantly of all, you must learn to pause. You must learn not to rush in as soon as baby makes a noise. Give him a minute, or two, or ten. How serious is he about getting your attention do you think? Is he crying flat out, or only in short bursts? Does he sound frantic, or just angry? And even then, can you give it just one minute more? I now have three children, so I simply cannot always drop what I am doing and rush to the bedside of every forlorn whimper baby utters! 

The hardest part is teaching them to self-settle, and yes I will admit there is always some "crying" involved in my experience, but once it's done, it's done. And I feel like once it's done there's a lot less crying in general; baby won't cry because he's tired, he'll just put himself to sleep. There's a lot that babies can't do for themselves, they literally cannot find their own food, or change their own nappies, but they CAN learn to sleep. Even if some people think it's barbaric to insist that they do, they CAN. And, as the wonderful Maria Montessori says, "Never do for the child what he can do for himself." The best advice I can repeat comes from a dear friend who is a mother of seven, who says "put him down when he's tired, making sure he is fed, clean, warm, etc, then go hang the washing on the line." Don't sit there listening to him settle, make and drink a cup of tea, and THEN listen. I make little deals with myself, and my husband, "Lets give it two more minutes" or "If he's still crying at the next ad break I'll go get him." This might make me sound like a monster to some people... But I'm a well-rested monster!

Many of us rush in to resettle, justifying ourselves that we want to get him back to sleep before he is really awake... However in doing this we don't give him a chance to find out for himself that he is fine. The goal (and you must keep the goal in mind) in any "sleep training" process is not just for the child to settle himself at bedtime, it is that once he learns to settle on his own at bedtime he will be able to put himself back to sleep whenever he wakes in the night. All of us sleep in waves of deep and light sleep, however tiny babies (and my husband) tend to jolt themselves awake when they go into light sleep. Helping them learn to put themselves to sleep in the first place is also helping them learn to ride those waves so that when they are tired they can fix the problem without our help! Once they master that initial settle they will stop waking at that dreaded 40 minute mark, or two hour mark, they will just cruise over that wave into the next wave. Once they "get" it, they will only wake when they're hungry or dirty or sick or for whatever genuine reason. When they DON'T "get" it, they are essentially waking up because they're tired!!! ARGH! Have you had the experience of being tired and unable to sleep?? It's infuriating!!

A final thing to consider, with all things baby, is how well do you sleep? Do you (as a lifelong pattern, before the rigors of pregnancy and parenthood set in) find it hard to relax into sleep? Do you wake for no reason? Do you sleep deeply and wake feeling rested? Do you sleep fitfully and wake feeling like crap? Are there things you can do to support or improve your own sleep? Have you resigned yourself to always being a bad sleeper? I ask you to ask yourself these sorts of questions because I really think our children learn our beliefs through what we show them. If they can see that sleep is not a value for us, they will have less priority for it too.

My original reason to finally bite the bullet and DO something about getting my eldest to learn to self-settle (aside from selfishly wanting him to DIY so I could do something else with my life, instead of bouncing on an exercise ball for hours every day) was that I realised that while he was awake he was reacting to stimulus, but he wasn't learning. In order to learn, his brain needed sleep to organise and store what he had been exposed to over the course of the day, AND he needed sleep to have the energy to do it all tomorrow. I saw lots of other babies sleeping through the majority of nights, and not looking like the pale, listless, dejected little lambs I was expecting subject to this torture when I read the anti-crying literature that I took on so readily BEFORE I had the baby. 

The pressure I put on myself to be everything to my child was not sustainable, and I'm not just talking about the prospect of tandem breastfeeding three children under four who all needed to be rocked to sleep every two hours throughout the night... I mean just day to day, face to face, with ONE baby. Getting enough rest allowed me to be a much kinder gentler mother, and closer to the image I had had in mind of me, serenely rocking my child to sleep... Than the truth of needing to rock my child for every sleep and feeling resentful of the baby I had so lovingly prepared for. When he learned to self-settle (at 4.5 months, after four days of sleep-training, and after two weeks he was reliably sleeping through the night, and in fact the first time he slept through the night was in his portacot, not even his familiar comfy bed!) my whole world opened up again. I was excited to see him in the morning! He woke up with a huge grin on his face, and I could see he was grateful (in his own baby way) to finally be empowered to put himself to sleep when he needed to.

Isn't that what this parenthood game is all about?



And for goodness sake, FORGIVE yourself if you get it wrong! If baby doesn't settle after twenty minutes of "just five minutes more" deals, or you decide to relent and go get him only to find he's got himself into some sort of awkward predicament in the cot bars, just untangle him and rest assured he'll never know unless you decide to tell him! Failure is inevitable as a parent, there's always tomorrow to start again. Your child will forgive you, what right have you to hold it against yourself if they won't??