A report on the sleep-training

[nlazarus]

So, we had a big debate about sleep-training, when I started it with Elizabeth a few months ago. We decided to sleep-train her because I found that I was spending the vast majority of the day putting her down for naps or bed, and then getting her up when she cried, letting her play a bit and trying again. Putting her down involved cuddling and

Comments

Hopefully I'm not jsut repeating myself, but apparently I can't just leave it alone :P

[fruitkakechevy]

Maybe it's the difference between nursing to sleep (contains sleep-inducing stuff) and bottles (I remember you had a hard time with nursing, and did all you could). Maybe it's cosleeping vs cribs. Maybe it's my trust that Josh will sleep when he's tired, or catch up the next day. Maybe it's my rabid dislike of any sort of schedule to my life that Must Be Followed Or Dire Consequences Ensue. Maybe it's because I don't have anything scheduled during the day that I can't cancel, or bring a tired baby to so that he'll nurse to sleep in my lap or walk to sleep in a carrier. Maybe it's my trust that any problem we're having will be short-lived and is developmentally appropriate, not a problem to be solved Or Else He'll Never Sleep Again, like most sleep books state. Maybe it's the people I have as parent-peers. Maybe it's just a matter of different children needing different things, and I'll totally eat my words when the next one comes along, but I doubt it :P

It could be any or all of these things, but I don't think I could ever consider letting my child cry alone and lonely in a room until they lose their trust that I'll come, night or day. I think kids need to know that, and most "sleeping problems" are in the mind of the parent due to our strange cultural expectations of babies. You told me what you saw in your situation, and I'm sure that you are doing what you think is necessary. You say that Elizabeth is a loving, trusting, securely attached little girl, and I believe that.

And no one can ever see what their child would be like if they'd made different choices; the momiverse is full of people that say, "Well I did it, and junior turned out ok!". Brain research and research about how children develop (incl. some very cruel things done to baby monkeys) all state that it's a dangerous and potentially damaging practice. I think we've fully hashed out why you did it, and why you thought it was important, but I'd never recommend leaving one's baby to cry to anyone. Ever. I don't think there's any middle ground here, but I'm happy (resigned?) to agree to disagree. Again :)

2/2

[nlazarus]

I haven't read any research (on baby monkeys or anyone else, and, by the way, I'd like to see your sources on that because the only references I've seen denouncing sleep training have been pretty sketchy), but I have observed hundreds of kids, as the eldest of twenty, as a nanny, as a shopgirl at the kid's market, as the kiddie play director at Clinton, etc, etc. And the kids who are the most confident, the most independant, the happiest and the most respectful of others are the kids who grew up with structure, discipline and consistency. I have a remarkably happy, confident baby, who has never had a "shy" phase, who takes "no" for an answer, who is affectionate and also independant and self-entertaining. I can't take credit for most of that; she was born this way. But I can fairly confidently say that I haven't fucked it up with sleep training. I might eventually fuck it up some other way, but so far she's doing great.

I put her down for a nap just before I started writing this. She's just fallen asleep. For the half an hour in between, she finished her bottle, and then lay in her crib, playing and talking cheerfully to herself. She doesn't have an issue with naptime, or bedtime. I don't need to hold her or nurse her to sleep (which, by the way, is INCREDIBLY bad for baby's teeth. You should brush their teeth and then give them only water at bedtime). I don't need to deal with a cranky baby, ever. I can make plans with other people and be confident that we will show up, cheerful and rested. And she TRUSTS ME MORE. Because she knows she can count on me. She knows that I will show up at the time she expects, to feed her or change her or put her to bed. And, believe me, she is already very clear on what time of day is what; She's lately started saying "Dadadada" around 4:30 every day, if Jason is late coming home.

We don't co-sleep anymore, because as soon as she learned to crawl, she had a couple of very bad spills off the bed. We sleep-trained because she wasn't getting enough sleep. As romantic as the idea of breastfeeding my baby, and keeping her with me all the time in a sling, and letting her sleep in my bed whenever she wants to is, it simply doesn't work. She needed this. She is better off for it. There really wasn't any choice in the matter. She was suffering from a lack of consistent sleep schedule. To not do this would have been neglectful.

I have spent thousands of hours observing all kinds of parents and all kinds of parenting. I spent thousands more talking and reading and thinking about what kinds of decisions I would make, when I became a parent. The biggest conclusion that I came to is this; it's not always pretty, it's not always easy, it's not always comfortable, to do what is best for your child. Sometimes it means making them cry. Sometimes it means KNOWING you're going to make them cry and doing it anyway. I'm not her friend. I'm not her fairy godmother. I'm her mom. No one will ever love her more, but that means sometimes saying "No". Even when I REALLY don't want to. But I love her enough to do that.

This was what was best for my child. You may not agree or approve, but the results speak for themselves. She is happier. She is healthier. She is well-rested. We are closer. She is more trusting.

You refer to research done, and yet you ignore the fact that the vast majority of parents who have done sleep training swear by it. I'm going to take that over tortured baby monkeys every time.

Re: 2/2

[fruitkakechevy]

Oops! Didn't see this one.

Here's an overview, with links to some non-sketchy research with actual footnotes: .

Here's her rebuttal to some of the comments she got after posting the first one:

And I DO believe that kids need consistency, and a general sort of pattern to the day. Some kids (though apparently not yours) need a house to be "run like a Nazi military base" once they've lost basic trust in their parents to consistently meet their needs. They need to cling to something, and that something is the almighty SCHEDULE. I know parents that panic if they have missed the second yawn, because it means that they have missed the beginning of the Bedtime Ritual, and their child will not sleep at he appointed hour (and thus really struggle) without the hour of snack-bath-books-bed. It seems like Elizabeth hasn't needed to attach herself to this, so lucky you! I don't believe, however, that kids need a lot of structure beyond the general biological necessity of meals and (usually) naps. What they need most is a comfortable, familiar person that they trust utterly. A lot of our childrearing practices in North America are bent on breaking this trust early, and then wondering what went wrong once they're teens.

Doing what's best for your child not always easy, but it should feel right. Letting your child cry in the arms of a parent isn't easy, but it feels better than giving them cake for breakfast. Letting them cry alone feels wrong for a reason.

Erg. Never mind about the baby monkeys. I spent some time looking for something juicy, and it's all either crap or not directly applicable :P I'll let you know if I find it, but I think it was a brainfart since the stuff I found was more directly related to touch then separation.

Happy long weekend!

1/2

[nlazarus]

Well, maybe Josh does sleep when he's tired. Elizabeth wasn't. Now she does. I don't know how or exactly when she lost the simple common sense of going to sleep when you're tired, but she did. Now she goes to sleep. It's not hard and fast. Sometimes she stays up a bit later, sometimes she naps a little longer. Sometimes she plays quietly in her crib for half an hour before going to sleep, and sometimes she conks out right away.

The other night she woke up around 12:30 am, screaming her head off. There was something _wrong_. I could hear it in her voice. I could tell because a) she rarely wakes up completely in the night, b) her cries were panicked and hysterical, instead of bored and cranky (which is what they were when we were sleep training her). We _immediately_ went to see what was wrong, got her up, held her, talked to her, tried giving her a bottle, tried burping her, tried gripe water, eventually tried infant Motrin. It took less than an hour to get her back to sleep, although it seemed like longer. Once the gas bubbles? headache? whatever-it-was passed, she took her bottle and went straight to bed, and to sleep.

She knows we will come if there's a real problem. I know my baby, and I know her responses. What she learned from sleep training is not "Nobody will come when I'm in distress" but, rather, "Now is the time for going to sleep, and there's no point in making a fuss about it because it won't work".

As for the dislike of schedules, well, I dislike them, too. But they do happen. Even if you don't have a set schedule at home, the rest of the world is pretty heavily scheduled. And, frankly, I'm concerned about what I've seen of children who grow up without schedules. Aside from their complete disregard for other people's time, they also suffer from a lack of structure in their lives. Children DESPERATELY need structure. They need to know that they can count on certain things happening at certain times. Which isn't to say we run our house like a Nazi military base. She does miss naps. She is fed when she's hungry. But, we definitely have a pattern. We wake up, I feed her, I feed myself (she eats much more slowly than I do). She plays around the house for about two hours, then takes a nap. She wakes up, I feed us again, and then we go out on some adventure. We get home, she takes another nap. Jason gets home, she wakes up, she has a snack, plays with her dad. Then we all have dinner together, he gives her a bath and I put her to bed. Sometimes a nap gets lost in the shuffle. Sometimes Jason works late. But, we try and get the pattern back as quickly as possible, because when we don't, she gets very confused and unhappy. She's a baby. Her world's stability is created by us, and she needs to be able to count on that world.

The point is, she hasn't lost her _trust_. She _trusts_ us to be consistent. To be there when she really needs us, and to provide what she needs when she needs it. She _trusts_ us to keep her world in order. She's fourteen months old. She's not able to order her own world, and she needs us to do it for her.

Re: 1/2

[fruitkakechevy]

Hey, I know that our kids are different, and I know that you are doing what you think is necessary. I can't really comment on what you're doing, or not doing, because I don't hover over your shoulder every minute of every day :) I assume that you are a loving mom, and sensible human being.

I wanted to say, not necessarily for you but for any other people that might be reading that are new moms and are considering letting their baby cry, that it's not a panacea. There are some very valid concerns with this technique, and I (apparently!) can't let this pass without mentioning them.

Re: 1/2

[nlazarus]

Sorry, by non-sketchy, I meant not a mom who disagrees with it blogging about it. I read her bona fides, and she's not a researcher, not a psychologist, not an expert of any kind. She may have read the research, and may even be accurately summarizing it, but it's still secondary documentation.

And, her rebuttal basically says, "Nobody really knows if this is actually harmful", which, counteracting a visible and tangible improvement in my baby's life and relationship with me, doesn't really hold water.

Re: 1/2

[fruitkakechevy]

True! That was unclear. I posted her blog because it seemed like a good roundup of reputable sources, not because of the actual content of the post. And her assertion that no one really knows if this is harmful compares (as I remember?) crying to drinking while you're pregnant.. it has been shown to be harmful in some cases (perhaps they were extreme cases, perhaps not), but not as a strict rule in scientific tests because any test that proved it would be unethical. Perhaps not in your case, but I still wouldn't recommend that glass of wine, and in fact would recommend against it whenever the topic came up.

Re: 1/2

[nlazarus]

That's not entirely an accurate analogy. Drinking wine has no benefit for the baby to counter the risk. Try vaccinations. There are lots of websites out there linking vaccinations with autism (despite it having been proved to have no connection), and every once in a while I child has a bad reaction to a vaccination (that actually is true). So, did I choose to put my child at risk, while doing something that FELT HORRIBLY WRONG (believe me, holding my baby still while a stranger repeatedly stabbed her was MUCH worse than sitting outside her room listening to her cry for an hour)?

Yes. I did. Because it was the lesser of evils. Because the risk of a bad reaction was significantly lower than the risk of her catching something truly nasty if I didn't vaccinate her.

(Now, that's actually false logic. There is such a high percentage of parents who do get vaccinations for their kids, those diseases actually can't get very far, so, chances are good that, if I didn't vaccinate Elizabeth, she'd probably not catch Typhus or German Measles or Polio. But, if enough parents stopped vaccinating, we'd be looking at another epidemic in the next generation, and I'm not interested in contributing to that.)

I didn't sleep train Elizabeth for my own convenience. I sleep trained her because she was suffering. She wasn't getting enough sleep, and it was affecting her. We were spending so much of the day dealing with the problem that she wasn't getting the stimulus she needed to develop properly.

Also, a friend of mine (whose grown kids are now in their twenties, and are all exceptionally bright and have no sign of fetal alchohol damage) was prescribed a glass of red wine a day while she was pregnant, by her doctor. I can't remember why. Anemia or something. Anyway, they knew drinking while pregnant was bad by the late 80's, but studies have shown that a glass of wine a day gets metabolised by the mother's body before it can affect the baby. It's when you start getting into 5, 6, 17 glasses that it becomes a serious problem. Which isn't to say that I drank when I was pregnant (ok, I had half a glass of champagne on New Year's Eve), but the doctor, again, felt that it was the lesser of risks.

The keyword to my parenting style is moderation. Not too much coddling, not too much neglect. Find the balance. Find the comfort zone for us both. Know my limitations. Know her limitations.

There is a philosophy of parenting (which I'm not saying you are following) which was first tried in the 60's and 70's. It's child-directed parenting. The children make the decisions. They decide what they eat, when they sleep, what their activities are, what their discipline is. They're never forced to do anything. The parents trust them to know what's best.

It's a style of parenting that has been, frankly, found wanting. Now that these kids (and I grew up with a lot of them, and suffered from the influence of their parents on mine) are grown, they are foundering. They have no self-discipline, low self-esteems, poor track records with jobs and relationships. They're narcissistic and lazy and unfocused. I attribute all my tendencies in that direction to this lack of direction from my parents, growing up. But, again, the nazi military base approach doesn't work, either. It creates terrified, self-ignoring drones. I'm hoping for somewhere in the middle. I'm the grown-up. I make the decisions. I am a benevolent dictator, however, and have decided that she needs to express herself, articulate her needs and be heard, learn to negotiate, learn to argue, learn to take chances, to fail, and to recover. So, within the bounds of my benevolent dictatorship, I'm going to let her. But, when I see a problem (like her not getting enough sleep), I'm going to be the one who decides how we fix it.

2/3

[nlazarus]

And, I disagree about doing what's best for your child always feeling right. The only other mother who posted an objection when I announced I was deciding to sleep train was on my Facebook page and she said, "Listen to your heart, Rose!" Well, my heart isn't in charge here. My feelings aren't in charge. My heart and my feelings want to hold her close, never let her go anywhere without me, never let her fall down, never let her cry or be disappointed or lose. My heart is a sucker. My _brain_ tells me that she has to venture forth, she has to lose, she has to fall, she has to fail. She has to learn the lessons that come with these unpleasant experiences. She had to learn to go to sleep at bedtime. And she did. And she is better off for it. She's also ahead of the development curve, the social curve and the physical size curve (although I attribute that last to having a klingon for a father ;).

And, while she knows generally when things are supposed to happen, she doesn't freak out if they don't. If she's hungry, she lets me know. If she's thirsty, she lets me know. If I put her in her highchair when she's not hungry, she carefully and meticulously drops each piece of food on the floor (I'm learning that, like her father, she's not particularly hungry first thing in the morning) until I get the message. If she's obviously tired an hour earlier than usual, she naps an hour earlier than usual. If she's doing fine an hour after bedtime, we generally go with it. If we've been out late and it's too late for a bath, she doesn't have one. Sometimes she gets one story, sometimes two. Sometimes she just gets two songs instead. Sometimes we dance, slowly, holding on to her lady bug, which projects stars on the ceiling, and sometimes she goes straight to bed. And, if she cries after we put her to bed (which happens about once a month), we listen for what kind of cry it is, and if it's a pain cry, or even a fear cry, we deal with it right away. If it's an "I'm bored and irritated" cry (which she doesn't, anymore. She plays and talks quietly to herself in her crib until she falls asleep, which is better than any radio play on the monitor), we leave her alone. Like I said, we have a general pattern, which she's used to, and comfortable with, but if it shifts, it shifts, and she shifts quite cheerfully along with it.

What I'm saying is, it worked, it improved things, it was the right thing to do, it did no damage. So, saying that it's always a mistake, is a mistake. In some cases it may be a mistake. But, in our case, it was the right thing to do, and I'm very glad I did it.

I am also fully aware that I have been blessed with the World's Easiest Baby. She's happy, self-entertained, trusting, sociable, brave, obediant (for 14 months), and easily distracted when upset. We are incredibly spoiled. Which does not bode well for her adolescence... ;)

Re: 2/3

[nlazarus]

So, I don't know. I do know that part of our job, as parents, is to figure out the personality of our child, and respond accordingly, doing what is best for her. My baby is happiest with a pattern she can rely on, some active stimulation, and a lot of time each day left along to explore on her own. She likes to play with me and cuddle and tickle, but soon she's squirming to get down so she can chase the cat or eat crayons or play with her toys. She loves books, loves to turn the pages for me, and she always tries to rip open her pop-up and special effects books to see how they work. At 14 months she can accurately identify specific animals on a page or body parts on herself. She likes to sing, loudly, and off-key, with no discernable melody. She likes to clap her hands, and wobble her hand over her mouth while she sings, making an intermittent noise. She likes to put things into other things, and then take them out. She's extremely patient when learning a new skill and has intense concentration. She likes to put her books away on the shelf after we've read them. She likes to put her toys away, too, but then takes them out again right away. She at least tries every kind of food I give her, although she has her preferences. She likes to feed me her half-gnawed food bits. She likes other babies and kids, and leaves, and she _loves_ dogs and other animals. She spends a lot of time staring at things and people, as the tiny gears whir and spin in her head. She loves to dance, and loves music in general. She loves to play with shoes; her shoes, my shoes, doesn't matter. She likes to carry them around the house. I have no idea why. She doesn't pay a lot of attention to the TV, but has one show she really likes, and comes running whenever she hears the theme song to it. Once the theme song is over, she tends to wander off again. She cheerfully waves goodbye when I go out, and all her babysitters rave about how easy she is. She doesn't like having her diaper changed, because she finds it boring to lie on her back while I do it, but if I give her a toy she's patient with me. She's very tolerant of me taking things from her that she's not supposed to have, and doesn't cry when I do, but, the moment I'm distracted, doggedly goes after them again. She likes to lie back against me, her head next to mine on my shoulder. She likes to be upside down. She's spoken ten words; "Hi", "Food", "Good", "Mum", "Dada", "Corwa" (our room mate's name is Corvyn), "Seezie" (our cat's name is Suzie), "Yes", "Up" and "All done". She's started signing "Thank you" and "Please" this week.

And, she goes to sleep cheerfully, sleeps through the night, and wakes up cheerfully, in the morning, all by herself.

That feels far more right to me then letting her cry for a few nights felt wrong. So, I've got to count the score at Brain: 1, Feelings: 0 on this one.