Sleep. It becomes an obsession (well, it does for me, anyway) when you’re looking after babies. Or children, for that matter. There is so much literature out there, all giving you different ‘science based’ advice, and there is immeasurable pressure to somehow get your child sleeping ‘through the night’ and to teach them to ‘self soothe’.
When I had my first child, I drove myself crazy about her sleep. I was completely inexperienced, and while I knew that babies don’t sleep and parents are generally sleep deprived, I had NO idea of how hard it would be to simply accept the situation for what it was and ride the sleep deprivation wave. I realise now, as I go through the same process with my second, that it is nearly impossible to simply allow yourself to accept the situation without putting yourself under pressure to ‘fix’ it. There is plenty of well – meaning advice out there to help solve the so – called issue of infant sleep, but very little out there to reassure you that actually, whatever your baby is going through, is perfectly NORMAL for them.
They are little humans, not machines, and sleep is not a cut and dry mechanism in human beings.
Adults have different approaches to sleep – different people have the ability or inability to sleep well. Some need more sleep, some need less. The variations are endless. So why can’t we just let babies do their thing and stop trying to force things? There are many reasons – discussed HERE. But this article isn’t meant to be a deep analysis of why the societal expectations of women are being rolled down into how we expect babies to behave and how utterly unrealistic that expectation is. This is an article to say the things that I wish more sleep experts would say to struggling Mums.
SLEEP IS NOT A REFLECTION OF YOUR PERFORMANCE AS A PARENT
Sleep can become a competitive arena in the motherhood world. If your baby sleeps well, it somehow means that YOU are doing well. That you are doing something particularly special to create that situation. Now, there are definitely things that you can do to help your child along (I am not pretending that there aren’t plenty of tried and tested ways of helping your child to understand and learn to sleep), but ultimately, each baby is unique.
My two children are very different. My first absolutely hated sleeping on her own. She loved to sleep in the baby carrier, and I could reliably expect long naps on something of a schedule from 6 months onwards with her, as long as she was in the carrier. She didn’t want to sleep alone at night, so we co-slept. She would sleep for solid stints overnight. It worked for us (except for when she had the dreaded feed to sleep association – post on that here!). My second wriggles and wriggles between sleep cycles, and if he’s in the carrier, he wakes right up and complains because he doesn’t like feeling constrained. When he’s going through a regression, we can get short naps out of him as an emergency measure, but he prefers to have his space. At night, he is absolutely fine sleeping in his own space, but he still wakes every x hours for a cuddle or a feed (depending on whether he is in a dreaded sleep regression or not!). They are very different, but my fundamental approach is the same. I listen to their cues, observe how they behave in different situations, and modify what we do according to what I notice.
I now understand that the way that my children sleep is not a good or bad reflection on me as a parent. It’s a reflection of their unique makeup, their individual responses, and pure happenstance.
If your child struggles to sleep, don’t beat yourself up about it. You’re not doing anything wrong. You may be able to do things to help, but you are looking after a little person. We’re all different. Sometimes we’re just going through stuff and our sleep suffers. Babies are no different.
SLEEP IS A PRIORITY
I come from a family where routine isn’t held in particularly high regard. I cling to routine, in some ways, to overcome the fundamental anxiety that anything replicating my household growing up causes. Some of my nearest and dearest family roll their eyes if I insist on play being stopped because I sense that it’s naptime, because they believe that children should be adaptable. And that if they want to play with the baby, it shouldn’t be stopped just because the baby has yawned. It is very difficult to understand, unless you are the primary caregiver ( i.e. the one who is up at night, the one who is ultimately left holding the baby if they are cranky and overtired, the one who spends weeks feeling like a shell of themselves because they haven’t slept properly for ages – you get the picture), just how important sleep is for a baby, or a child. I mean, it’s important for an adult, but adults can hold it together when they are exhausted. Babies and children can’t. When they miss out on the sleep that they need, the entire day, possibly the day after, and the day after that, can become absolutely hellish.
It is difficult to say that you can’t stay at a family event because the baby needs to go home to nap, or to ask people who are at the house to keep the noise down because the baby is sleeping. It causes knots in my stomach if family members are over and having fun with the baby (despite it being very clear to me that he is crying out to be left alone), and I have to take him away for a nap. I sense the eye rolling, the commentary about my being too controlling, or too wedded to routine, but I know the consequences of the baby missing a nap. So BE STRONG! Sleep is a priority, and you are ALLOWED to take ownership of it whatever anyone else’s view may be.
SLEEP IS PHASIC
This is pretty well documented, but we all need reminding of this regularly. Sleep is NEVER a set thing with little humans. Just when you think you’ve got things in some kind of routine, your little one goes through a growth spurt, a regression, or a developmental leap. They start teething, or they get ill. Being able to come to terms with that is a huge step in being able to cope with the stress of dealing with baby sleep – things change, constantly, and we have little control over it. Often I find that my stress levels escalate not because the situation itself warrants it (though this does warrant stress, sleep deprivation is SO hard), but because of the pressure I am putting myself under to somehow expect things to be different. If you honestly believe that by following a specific sleep plan or sleep training you are never going to have to deal with regressions due to loads of different, uncontrollable factors, you will be wracked with anxiety every time anything changes. Given how often things change with little humans.. That’s a lot of time spent in a high stress state over something that cannot be changed or controlled.
Often I find that my stress levels escalate not because the situation itself warrants it (though this does warrant stress, sleep deprivation is SO hard), but because of the pressure I am putting myself under to somehow expect things to be different.
Sleep experts are full of wonderful strategies for dealing with baby sleep, and much of it is valid advice, but they would be doing themselves out of business if they were to tell you in bold letters that SLEEP CHANGES AND THERE IS NOTHING TO BE DONE ABOUT IT SOMETIMES! It’s much more of a challenge to come to terms with the chaotic nature of a little human growing up and all of the changes that it brings – but once you learn to roll with the punches a bit more, those regressions can be handled a little bit more philosophically (and again, you will be less inclined to beat yourself up about something that you cannot control).
SLEEP IS DEVELOPMENTAL
Babies come into the world knowing very little about how to work within our structures. Sleep is a good example of this. They are in the dark, all the time, in the womb. They sleep when they want, and wake when they want, and they don’t use light cues to dictate that pattern. The one thing they do tend to do – is sleep when Mum is moving. So when they are wrested from the womb and confronted with the bright lights of their new environment, it must be very confusing for them! They are supposed to sleep when it’s dark and play when it’s light, but also nap when it’s light…Huh? I’m confused writing that out! They are supposed to sleep without any kind of help – even though they have spent 9 months being rocked to sleep. We are all in a rush to have our babies adjust to our routines, and it’s very understandable. There are so many things to do now, so many responsibilities, and babies often cannot be given the time they need to adjust to being part of that ecosystem.
They are supposed to sleep when it’s dark and play when it’s light, but also nap when it’s light…Huh? I’m confused writing that out!
I don’t know about you, but it would take me more than a few weeks or even months to learn to sleep in a totally different environment. Babies do learn – they are adaptable – but they have A LOT going on. Sleep is not something that we can just click our fingers and ‘fix.’ For babies, it is very much developmental. There’s nothing to be done – their sleep cycles change with their brains. We can’t control that. We can help by providing healthy sleep associations and consistency of course, but again, that comes down to development. They have to be able to create those associations in their brain before they can affect any change. Fundamentally, we are supporters in the process. Believing that we can control it makes the whole thing more difficult on both of you.
SLEEP IS PERSONAL
This is a big one! Everything about the way that you raise your child is PERSONAL. Everything about the way that they behave is PERSONAL. What works for one parent won’t always work for another. There are so many factors at play when you are helping your baby to navigate the world and many of them simply come down to the fact that we are all different. That is a beautiful thing! But it does mean that you can try every ‘sleep training’ method going and still have a baby who wants to wake up every 3 hours for a cuddle until they are whatever age.
You will google frantically and come across terms like ‘sleep crutches’, ‘self soothing’, ‘consolidated sleep’ and these will all make you feel like you are missing a huge trick, or making you feel bad about yourself when you succumb to your most natural instincts and hold your crying baby, or nurse them and hold them as they sleep. There simply isn’t a one size fits all method to getting a baby to sleep.
Some things will work for you, some things won’t – and experiment, of course – but honestly, we all have different quirks when it comes to our sleep, and your baby is no different. We all hope to have the baby who wants just the right amount of cuddles, but not so many that we are up all night with them, frustrated and exhausted, but that is the luck of the draw. The difficult phases will pass, and if you follow your instincts and are able to accept that sleep is a personal thing to your baby – that it is not a milestone based thing – you will feel empowered to make your own decisions about how to handle anything that isn’t working for you and your baby. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try things if you are really struggling – of course you should – but I want you to feel safe to make your own choices, and to stop wondering what is wrong with you or your baby if you are still up all night with them while the other mums at soft play sit, bright eyed and refreshed, happily sharing stories about how their bundle of joy ‘just slept through the night one day, and that was that!’
However your baby is sleeping, YOU are doing an amazing job. Please don’t let the rushed pace of the world make you feel that you are somehow a failure for holding your baby to sleep, or feeding them to sleep, or doing whatever it is that your instinct tells you. It’s okay to follow your instincts. If that instinct is to sleep train, that’s fine too. Just keep being kind to yourself and whenever you feel unsure or frustrated, read through this article and remind yourself that the baby sleep issue thing is really all about surrendering to the chaos, rather than controlling it.
Now, I’m going to sneak downstairs and treat myself to something really naughty. Is 5am too early for hot chocolate?!
