Put Your Baby to Sleep While He Is Awake
I used to run ninja. Sitting on a glider in the nursery, I would feed her while her eyelids slowly closed, and then I carefully, carefully, put the baby time bomb in her crib and crawl out the door. I exhaled with relief and silently gave my husband a five, adhering to the universal parental mantra: “Everything that works.”
Many young parents I have met have used similar methods to get their children to sleep. They rocked their babies until motion sickness began to indicate them. They let their children suck on the bottle and then put it out of the way as soon as they nodded. Some moms and dads admitted that they climbed into the crib with their baby, like this sweet and desperate father , and pressed them to sleep, damn the curves of their necks.
But, as I later learned, the peculiarity of these very common habits is that they all ultimately backfire. Alexis Dubif, author of ” The precious dream: a complete guide to children’s sleep for modern parents” , wants parents to understand this. While newborns can usually be rocked / fed / cuddled to sleep without issue, Dubif tells me that between four and eight months, the swing / feed / cuddle technique for sleep will “fail,” and the baby will start waking up from five to five. eight times a night for more wiggles / feeds / hugs. “Parents are justly confused,” she says. “They think, ‘This used to work. Why doesn’t it work anymore? “
The reason, she says: object consistency .
Your baby’s brain is developing rapidly. “When they were very tiny, you could help them completely fall asleep and sneak away with them,” Dubiev says. “Now they are literally older and wiser. They remember that you were there and now you are not. Every time they go into light sleep mode five or eight times a night, they shout: “Hey, where are you going? Come back! ‘”
She explained it this way : Imagine going to bed in your bedroom. Then, a few hours later, you wake up on your front lawn. “Could you just roll over and fall asleep in the grass again? Or would you get up and start screaming? ” she asks. (Okay, maybe you’re so tired that you don’t care where you are, but you get the idea.)
The solution to this problem is to try to get your baby to sleep while he is awake.
When babies wake up all night (and they wake up all night, whether you know it or not, says Dubif), you don’t want them to be surprised that their circumstances have changed since they fell asleep ( ie I was sucking on a nipple and now I’m gone. The music was playing and now it’s gone. Mom was holding my hand and now she’s gone . If everything is the same, they’re great. Everything is fine and they can go to next sleep cycle.
Of course, it is easier said than done to put a child to sleep when he is awake. (One day I saw how mom did it – her child literally waved her hand when she left the room, and I thought, “What is this magic?”) But it is possible, both in her book and in this blog post Dubie some tips on how to do this at different ages.
Your child may have other sleep problems, so this may not be a reliable solution, but this is an important concept to understand and I wish I had learned it sooner. On poor sleep habits, Dubif tells me, “This cycle will continue until a) in college or b) your child learns to fall asleep without your help.”