Precious little sleep, p.6
Precious Little Sleep, page 6
Bedtime Sucks
Once your child is no longer a newborn, bedtime should be your favorite time of day... literally. Kids in jammies are fantastic, second only to naked bathtub babies, which are inarguably the greatest thing that has ever existed in all of history. Cuddling and reading to or with your kids is the best. And having a few brief hours of kid-free time afterward so you can reconnect with your life outside of parenting, have an uninterrupted conversation with your partner, or read a book is essential to your very survival.
Bedtime can, of course, suck for many reasons:
It takes ages to soothe your baby to sleep.
You need to go back into your child’s room 5,000 times before they actually fall asleep.
Your child is up so late that you’re going to bed 5 minutes after they do.
Bedtime is one unendurable stretch of limit-testing cries for more [water/hugs/kisses/books/trips to the potty/blanket adjustments].
It’s time to figure out why bedtime sucks and develop a solid plan to improve it. That plan will vary depending on your child’s age and the specific source of bedtime suckage, and you may feel too tapped out to deal with it. But the first step is going to be tackling the wooly mammoth in the room, which is the subject of the next chapter.
* * *
I’ve received many fantastic emails from parents who colorfully describe their bedtime woes, but none captured it so well as this one: “That nugget on the right? That fat little cutie? Let’s just say that our bedtime routine currently consists of prayers, holy water, and a few ‘The power of Christ compels you!’”
4
How Babies Sleep
(a.k.a. The Chapter You’re Tempted to Skip Over Because It Sounds Tedious but You Shouldn’t Because It’s Fundamental to the Whole Enchilada.)
THERE ARE SO many mysterious things happening with your baby during the first year that it can sometimes feel like they’re an unknowable creature that has escaped from Dumbledore’s closet. One of the most unfathomable issues is why aren’t they sleeping? It could be:
a sleep regression
a growth spurt
teething
vaccinations
constipation
overtiredness
not being tired enough
because you blew off the nap this morning
because it’s Tuesday
too cold
too hot
illness
your partner did it
garbage truck noise
poop
So you call up your good friend Google and start trying to suss out why your baby isn’t sleeping, and Google tells you it’s due to some or all of the reasons listed above. This launches you down a rabbit hole of doubt that generally ends up somewhere dark, lonely, and smelling of cabbage.
Pro tip: Kids almost never wake up due to wet diapers. Parents have an instinct to change diapers in the middle of the night to avoid potential waking due to wet diapers. My advice is to avoid any nighttime diaper tomfoolery if at all possible. Unless Baby has pooped or pee is leaking through, a diaper is not waking up your kiddo. We are lucky enough to live in an age of unbelievable technology, which includes diapers able to contain enormous amounts of pee. Take advantage of it.
Figuring out why your child isn’t sleeping can be confusing (the world is chock full of bad sleep advice), but it gets a whole lot easier if you have a solid understanding of the fundamentals of how sleep works.
What’s Going On Under the Hood
To figure out how to successfully foster your child’s sleep skills, you should first understand how babies sleep. Specifically, it’s helpful to understand the following four concepts:
How Babies Sleep
Sleep has two key stages—REM and non-REM (REM stands for “rapid eye movement,” also referred to as “active sleep”)—and the amount of time you spend in each stage changes as you age. Babies spend about 50% of the time in active (REM) sleep,1 which by early adulthood has decreased to 20–25%.2 Active sleep is a relatively light phase commonly associated with movement—grunting, twitching, making funny faces, etc. The large amount of time spent in REM sleep is why babies are such noisy sleepers (and thus make bad roommates) and partially explains why they wake so frequently. Also, the amount of time spent in active sleep increases toward morning, which is one of the reasons babies wake more frequently as the night progresses.
A sleep cycle is made up of both REM and non-REM sleep. Adults have a mature sleep cycle of about 90 to 110 minutes, while a baby will cycle through the sleep stages about every 50 minutes. Adult sleep is also characterized by long, uninterrupted chunks of sleep: although you cycle through light-sleep phases, you don’t fully wake during them but rather transition back into deeper sleep.
Babies, however, have much shorter and lighter sleep cycles than adults, which leads to a natural pattern of waking up anywhere from two to eight times a night.3 Sometimes they may need your help or a quick meal to fall back asleep. Sometimes they just scuttle about a bit and fall back to sleep independently (you are probably unaware of these arousals). But I promise you that between bedtime and morning, your baby wakes frequently—probably more often than you realize.
The Process of Sleep
We have many circadian rhythms (the term circadian is derived from Latin, meaning “approximately one day”),4 but the one most relevant to our purposes is the sleep/wake rhythm. It is because of the sleep circadian rhythm that adults have a long, uninterrupted stretch of sleep at night and are able to stay awake for a long, uninterrupted stretch during the day. We are born, however, with an immature sleep circadian rhythm, resulting in sleep being somewhat randomly distributed around the clock for the first few weeks; a more mature consolidation of day/night sleep occurs between 1 and 2 months.5
When you have a mature sleep circadian rhythm6 and you go to bed at the same time every night, your biology (including the hormone melatonin) regulates itself to promote sleep.7 This is some powerful sleep juju.
Babies Wake Up More Than You Know
Sleep is further propelled by the sleep drive.8 (The technical term is homeostatic sleep drive—impress your friends!) Sleep drive is the pressure to sleep that increases the longer you’re awake. For adults, our sleep drive builds up throughout the day, peaking just before bedtime, when the pressure from this accumulated sleep drive combines with our circadian rhythm to compel us to sleep. Sleep drive dissipates as we sleep, becoming weaker as we get closer to morning, then rebuilds when we’re awake during the day.
The circadian rhythm is relatively puny during the day,9 so nap sleep is largely regulated by accrued sleep drive. I like to visualize sleep drive as a limp balloon. While your child is awake, the balloon slowly fills with air. If you put your child down for a nap too early and their sleep balloon is sad and saggy: no nap. Wait too long, and your balloon overinflates and pops: no nap. The balloon also deflates easily—fall asleep for 10 minutes on the ride home and the balloon deflates: no nap.
The circadian rhythm and sleep drive combine their wonder-twin powers at bedtime, making the compulsion to sleep then the strongest of the day. This compulsion gradually erodes as your child sleeps, which is why you’ll find your child waking more frequently and struggling to fall back to sleep as they progress toward morning.
Object Permanence
Object permanence10 is a fantastic new skill your child will eventually acquire (slightly less cool than giggling, but far cooler than the ability to reach into their own diaper for a handful of poo). Object permanence means that infants remember things exist even if they can’t immediately see or touch them. Until it develops, out of sight is out of mind. Object permanence is why babies find a game of peek-a-boo such a hoot, and why they will hunt for a toy you’ve shown them and then hidden under a blanket.
It is also closely linked with stranger anxiety and separation anxiety, which occur because now your child actually remembers that you exist when you aren’t physically present. For the first time, they are capable of missing you—which is really sweet but hard to enjoy when they burst into tears the second you leave the room. (Say goodbye to your ability to go to the bathroom alone!)
Scientists used to believe that object permanence didn’t develop until babies were 8 months old, but recent research suggests that babies as young as 3.5 months are aware that objects exist after they’ve been removed from view.11
While the scientific community continues to debate the age at which you can reliably play “Where did Mr. Froggy go,” anecdotal experience suggests that object permanence tends to become an issue for your child’s sleep at about 6 months (give or take a month or two).
Object permanence affects sleep because your child falls asleep with you (rocking, feeding, nursing, cuddling) and wakes up later only to find you missing. Due to their mad object permanence skills, they can now remember that you were there, and now, mysteriously (from their perspective), you aren’t! In fact, any change in their environment between falling asleep and waking can be problematic, including:
Mom or Dad are missing (there when they fall asleep, gone when they wake up)
location changes (they fall asleep in your bed, wake up in their crib)
devices that run on timers and shut off (white-noise machines, swings on timers, mobiles, musical devices, etc.)
things that can fall out (I’m looking at you, pacifier!)
Babies who have not yet developed object permanence can be happily rocked, bounced, or nursed to sleep. They’ll wake at night to be fed or rocked back to sleep, but they’re not waking because you’ve disappeared—they’re waking because they subsist on a liquid diet or because, as newborns, they need a lot of help to cycle through light arousals at night. But for a time, putting your baby down 100% asleep will seem like a winning strategy because it is winning.
Once your baby develops object permanence, however, they remember that something has changed since the time they fell asleep—typically, you’ve gone missing. Where previously they fell back to sleep on their own from a light-sleep phase, now they wake themselves fully... because you were there, and now you aren’t. Worse, they’re generally pretty upset about it. Instead of waking and looking for a quick bite to eat or a cuddle, they’re grumpy and difficult to soothe. In their own baby way, they’re yelling, “Hey! Where did you go! Dude, not cool!” When this happens, the best-case scenario is that your child will wake occasionally to check on you. Worst case, sleep will totally hit the skids.
If you continue to surprise your baby by changing the circumstances after they fall asleep, you’ll find yourself with a baby who starts fighting sleep. They become hyper-vigilant12 at bedtime because they know you’re trying to sneak out. The baby who used to cuddle and laugh with you at bedtime is now agitated and anxious. Falling asleep can take hours because the biological pressure to sleep is warring with their desire to keep an eye on you.
Imagine if you went to sleep in your own room only to later wake up in your neighbor’s bed. Assuming your neighbor isn’t Tom Hardy or Emma Stone, you would rightly be pretty upset about the mysterious change of scenery. You would immediately become fully awake, and even after you tromped back home, sleep would be all but impossible. The mystical teleportation into your neighbor’s house would make it challenging to fall asleep the next night as well, because you would lie there worrying about it happening again. Which is a great segue into...
Sleep Associations
All people have sleep associations—activities, locations, or items that are closely associated with sleep. My sleep associations involve my husband’s presence, being in a bed, and reading before I turn out the lights. Remove any one of those, and I struggle to fall asleep. This is why I guilt-trip my husband about how I never get enough sleep when he travels for work (it has nothing to do with staying up ridiculously late binge-watching trashy TV, obviously).
Human beings lock in on sleep associations and then need those associations whenever they’re falling asleep (or at least sleep better with them). They also may need them when they cycle through light sleep during the night. Adults, however, have a mature sleep rhythm with less REM sleep, so while I have a sleep association of “reading in bed,” I don’t wake up at 2 a.m. needing to read some more in order to continue sleeping. #thingsmyhusbandisgratefulfor
Waking Up in a Strange Place: Less Fun Than You Think
Babies don’t sleep like adults.
Your child’s sleep associations are those activities and objects that occur near to or at bedtime—your wonderful bedtime routine, their sleep place, any Baby Sleep Power Tools (see Chapter 5) you’re using, white noise, lovies, etc.
This is an important but often misunderstood distinction. Most people are convinced the goal is to have their child fall asleep without direct parental involvement. While that may be true for some babies, activities that happen near to sleep can result in sleep associations even if the child is awake at the end of that activity.
Sleep associations cause problems when they’re not persistent through the night. If your child associates sleep with particular things that are persistent throughout the night—being swaddled, nightlights, lovies, being in the crib, being in your bed—then you’ve got great, sustainable sleep associations. Every time your child wakes at night, they’ll find their sleep associations present and unchanged, and will readily and independently fall back to sleep.
Negative sleep associations, on the other hand, include:
falling asleep with a pacifier, which falls out of the mouth during sleep
falling asleep nursing or eating, waking later without the bottle or nipple in their mouth
falling asleep cuddling with you, waking up alone later
falling asleep in your bed, waking in their own bed
falling asleep in your bed with you, waking in your bed but you are missing
falling asleep with music or a mobile playing, waking in silence
A common example of a problematic sleep association is rocking a child while singing a few bedtime songs. Baby falls asleep and is placed gently into the crib, but later wakes throughout the night and is unable to go back to sleep unless a parent rocks her. Similarly, a child who is nursed at bedtime then goes awake into the crib, where he falls asleep independently, may wake at night and resolutely not go back to sleep unless nursed.
You may have noticed that this looks a lot like an object permanence problem, because they’re related. If your child associates sleep with some non-persistent item, location, person, or activity, when they wake up (as babies frequently do), they won’t be able to successfully fall back to sleep independently. You’ll know this has happened to you because you’ll try to help your child fall back to sleep in other ways and absolutely nothing but [insert non-persistent sleep association here] will do.
How Baby Sleep Goes Off the Rails
Blah blibbity blah brain stuff blorgle sleep blah. Even to me, this sleep stuff is pretty dry. But the bottom line is this:
Baby sleep is different from adult sleep.
Babies wake up a ton at night, and these wakings become more frequent as you move closer to morning.
The longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep occurs just after bedtime.
It is normal for babies to move and make a lot of noise when they sleep.
When you have an appropriate and consistent bedtime, the biological compulsion to sleep is powerful.
The compulsion to sleep declines the longer you sleep until poof! it’s gone and you wake for the day.
The drive for sleep at naptime is relatively puny and subject to wake time (too long/too short) issues.
The inability to fall asleep independently at bedtime leads to frequent and persistent night waking.
Surprises are great at birthday parties but terrible after bedtime.
Not falling asleep independently at naps and/or bedtime is the root cause of 99.8% of all chronic baby and toddler sleep problems. (The remaining 0.2% are due to failed Sleep Fairy intervention. Sleep Fairies are just the worst.) Hopefully, understanding how sleep works will save you many tears, sleepless nights, and unnecessary hours with Google. How sleep works is the answer to most of the sleep questions you will have, will see on the internet, or will hear bandied about at your playgroup. It is the key to gently weaning your child off night feedings, lengthening naps, and avoiding crying it out. And it will make your hair grow thicker and more lustrous (okay, I’m making the last part up).
Lack of independent sleep can cause problems in many ways, but consider this common scenario:
A loving new mom nurses her newborn baby to sleep at bedtime then sneaks Baby into the crib. This newborn wakes up once or twice to eat at night, but it’s manageable, and after hearing horror stories from friends, both parents are thrilled at how well things are going. On nights Baby wakes only once, they start whispering excitedly about the possibility of gently weaning off that feeding, with the goal of landing in the Shangri La of truly sleeping through the night.
A few months go by, and instead of fewer feedings, more feedings are popping up, like malevolent mushrooms. Often those feedings are happening barely an hour after the last.
Finally, Mom, quite reasonably, deduces that Baby can’t possibly be hungry. “She just ate!” So she sends in her partner to help Baby go back to sleep. “Maybe she pooped? You go check.”
Well, despite all Dad’s best efforts at rocking, bouncing, singing, and massaging, Baby is just not having it. And rightly so—none of those activities, no matter how lovely, are associated with sleep. Nursing is. So Dad feels like a failure. He assumes he lacks some essential “baby soothing” skill, concedes defeat, and requests that Mom go deal with it. Mom resents Dad for not trying hard enough or for feigning incompetence so he can go back to sleep (don’t blame Mom for this—she’s super tired and cranky), but goes in to nurse because “Fine, whatever, give me the baby, you big oaf.” (Both partners probably feel the other is being unreasonable in this scenario.) Mom nurses kiddo, who, boom, falls back to sleep. Everybody goes back to bed for an hour... and the cycle repeats.
