Sleeping Through the Night

This book was the only book on infant and toddler sleep that wasn't checked out of the library. That made me feel a little better. Apparently I am not alone in my quest for my baby to sleep all night, or alone in the desire to sleep all night. Or at least for more than three hours at a time.

I've been down this road before. I swore I would never make the same mistakes twice. But then I did. Because the mistakes are easier at the time, and because I was trying to figure out how to get two kids to nap and go to bed, and because I was flying solo a lot of the time.

In my quest about a year and a half ago, I read many sleep books and articles on the internet. I read Ferber and Sears; I read the No-Cry Sleep Solution and the Baby Whisperer; I read Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child, which was my favorite and the approach that ultimately worked for my son.

For those of you who've never had to pry your bleary eyes open for the third time in a night at 4:00 am, I doubt you've given much thought to how to get a baby to sleep. I know I never did. I love to sleep! It's one of my favorite things. Little did I realize how complicated it really can be.

Most sleep books talk about the basic structure of sleep, how it works, etc. So I skipped right on through those chapters. In essence, every human wakes up multiple times in the night. And every human figures out ways to fall back asleep, often without even realizing they awoke (or they have insomnia). Babies begin to associate "conditions" with sleep at an early age.

Parents unwittingly (or in my case, knowingly) cause negative sleep conditions by providing "sleep props" that help the baby sleep and consequently must be there when the baby awakes naturally several times a night. If a baby gets a bottle, or breastfed, or rocked or sung to (you get the idea) to fall asleep, then they expect that at night. Wouldn't you be a little disturbed if you awoke and your favorite pillow and blanket had been removed in the night and placed in the hallway?

Experts disagree about how best to respond to night-wakings. Some advocate straight crying-it-out and others promote a gentler approach. Still others say do whatever it takes to get your baby to sleep as it's your responsibility as a parent. And as a parent, there can be a lot of guilt and angst involved when sleep-training occurs.

Jodi Mindell provides the most moderate, middle-of-the-road approach I've read yet. Basically, you do the sleep-training only when you are putting the child to bed in the evening. After you've established a set bedtime and a bedtime routine (something all experts agree is crucial) then you lay the baby down awake in the crib and leave. Most babies will cry, some will scream. The parent should continue to check in and stay no more than a minute, then leave again, continuing this until the baby falls asleep. On average, the first night babies cry 40 minutes, the second night 60+minutes and the third night 20 minutes. After that most babies will simply fall asleep, maybe with a little crying.

But what is different (and so encouraging if it works) about this book is that the author advocates continuing to do whatever you normally do in the middle of the night to get the baby to sleep. She says within two weeks of sleep training at bedtime, most babies will learn to console themselves to sleep and will begin sleeping through the night.

When we did sleep-training with our son, we did cry-it-out in the middle of the night. It was awful...he screamed for more than an hour (from midnight to one thirty) the first night. Personally, I'd rather go through the crying earlier in the evening when I'm not desperate for sleep. And I also now have a two-year-old that I don't want to awaken from his sister's crying for long periods in the middle of the night.

We've got a trip coming up so now isn't a good time to start, but the book provided several ideas for changing things that I can do now without implementing the full-on training. I feel like this book and this author finally gave me a solution I can live with. Highly recommended.