Prenatal, Parenting and Victoria BC

I believe that children learn to sleep to their family's standards in the same way that they learn to eat the way their parents do. Vegetarians will teach their children to love vegetables and night-owls will have children who like to stay up late. But while we can accept that it may take five or ten years to get our children to eat the way we do, we can't wait that long to get a full night's sleep.

My advice to parents of young babies is to be patient. Give the baby a lot of cuddling and holding. Sleep with baby if that is necessary for everyone to get sleep. Make nap-times peaceful and cosy and consistent. Take naps with baby so that parents get extra sleep during the daytime. Introduce bed-time routines and rituals that help baby to associate certain cues with sleepiness. Read gentle parenting books like The No-Cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley or the Sleep Book by William and Martha Sears.

Give your baby at least six months to settle into this new world. It's difficult to learn to sleep alone, rather than inside or on top of another human being. Give your baby at least six months in which all you try to teach him is "We are here for you, whenever you call us, whenever you need us."

Some babies are very easy going and move gradually from waking every 2-3 hours around the clock to consolidating their sleep into longer naps and night-time stretches. By six months or so, many babies are taking two good naps and sleeping a five-to-six-hour stretch at night, which allows their parents to say: "Oh yes, she's sleeping through the night," without feeling like total liars!

For a large number of parents though, the baby does not make this easy gradual shift. These babies are sometime those who had a difficult early baby-hood, those who cried a lot, seemed to have a lot of "gas" or "colic," those who needed a lot of physical contact and bouncing and patting and singing to get to sleep. These hard-to-sleep babies often don't nap well either.

Some parents can doze as they cuddle or nurse their baby through the night. These parents go to sleep quickly and easily and are not upset by the frequent night wakings. For these parents it doesn't matter if their children take a long time to learn to sleep on their own. And it doesn't matter to their children either. There is NO NEED to do any "sleep training" in a family where everyone is content with the sleep patterns.

Some parents are absolutely desperate by six or seven or eight months. They may not have had a decent night's sleep in months. Sleep deprivation is making them angry or depressed. Lack of sleep or disagreements about how or where baby should sleep may be interfering with their relationship as a couple. Resentment and fatigue is making them impatient as parents.

These unhappy parents of non-sleepers need help. They need a plan. They need a system to teach their baby to sleep. The gentle Pantley or Sears methods take too long and involve being patient and accepting. And these parents are past that.

Often, these desperate parents are also in disagreement with each other about their baby's sleep. They need help to come to an agreement about how to teach their baby to sleep. Often one or both of them are anxious about the "cry-it-out" methods of sleep-training. The "tough-on-sleep" books, like those by Ferber or Weissbluth or The Baby Whisperer offer one-size-fits-all solutions which don't really fit anyone very well. Even privately hired sleep consultants (who are quite expensive) can be inflexible.

In my work with new parents, I meet many families who are at their wits-end about sleep issues. In response to their need and their requests, I have started to offer sleep consults myself. My goal is to help the parents formulate a plan that will suit their values, their baby and their family.

In this work, I rely on my training and experience as an parenting educator and breastfeeding counsellor. I meet with both parents - without the baby present - and I ask them about their beliefs about babies, their values about parenting, their understanding of sleep issues. I listen to what they perceive the problems to be, what they need, what they want and how they would like to achieve it. I make sure both of them get to have their say and that they listen to each other.

Then I help them formulate a plan. It might involve letting the baby cry a little, it always involves having one parent sit with the baby or visit the baby frequently. It never involves abandoning the baby to cry for long periods of time alone and unsupported. It might involve night-weaning. It does not need to involve weaning the baby completely.

When parents formulate a plan they can both agree to and decide when to implement it, and are CONSISTENT about it, they are almost always successful within a week or two.
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