Last night I spoke with a friend of mine who has a 3 month old baby. With all due respect, she sounded tired. She wanted answers. She was ready and willing to do anything, if only to help her baby learn to sleep.
If it had been 3 months ago, when my LO was her age, we probably would have cried helplessly on the phone together. Her snapshot of everything she’d tried, heard, and read resembled my efforts just the blink of an eye ago.
She had a friend who told her that she had successfully sleep trained her baby at 4 weeks old. She had read Baby Wise, The Baby Whisperer, and a host of other baby sleep training books. Not only that, but she has a Masters in Early Childhood Education. As a teacher, she could completely relate to her desperation: according to the book, she was doing everything she could to help her son, but on paper, nothing was working.
When will they get all those much-needed Z’s back?
I remember trying to train my LO to sleep at the same time her friend claims to have been successful. With a background in applied behavior analysis, I thought this would be simple. She knew not to reinforce the behavior (crying) by entering the room, and she knew that intermittent reinforcement (entering the room some times and not others) was even worse than entering every time.
“Blood-curdling screams.” My friend also used that term last night. That’s what I heard when I tried to sleep train so young. Internally, I imagined throwing my fist through a wall.
I couldn’t handle it. I remember one day, after a valiant attempt at naptime sleep training, I ran to daycare, picked up my little girl, and just cried, hugged her, cried, and promised her I would never leave her again. (Behaviorists will probably cringe at that reinforcement.)
What the books don’t tell you is that every child is different. As much as we want to compartmentalize learning (and we look at our school systems), it’s just not the reality. My mom swears I slept through the night at 3 months, never cried, and went straight from breast to cup. Does that mean my son will do those things? No. Does that mean my mother’s memory might be a bit tainted? Maybe just a little.
This is what my sleep training timeline looks like (give or take, I’m already having a hard time remembering), from birth to 6 months:
– From birth to 6 weeks – Sleeping a lot during the day, numerous unsuccessful attempts to wake my child for daytime fun, and inconsolable crying between 6pm and 2am
What helped? Walking around the house carrying my baby *sometimes* made her cry a little quieter. Sitting with her wasn’t an option, rocking her in a rocking chair didn’t help, and she didn’t care if the lighting was low (I once tripped over a dog toy trying to calm her down with the lights off at 1AM, but she miraculously stayed safe in my arms.)
– 6-10 weeks- Noticed improvement in nighttime sleep, still waking up every 3 hours at night to eat. However, the only way to make her fall asleep (and this was true from her birth) was to put her on a vibrating bouncy seat, bounce her on one foot, and play the guitar for her. We really wanted to put her inflatable seat in her crib and call it a night, but it just wasn’t safe. My husband stayed in the living room with her while I winked at myself in her bed; then when he moved to eat, he picked her up, carried her to her room, nursed her, and put her in her crib. Most of the naps were in the car or on the inflatable seat.
– 10-14 weeks- More of the same, with interspersed attempts at sleep training. Once I was at my parents house trying to put my LO down for a nap. “We totally support you,” my mom told me as we heard the screaming outside the door. However, her face told a completely different story: she longed for me to stop torturing my son! I still wake up every 3 hours at night to eat.
– 14 weeks to 5 1/2 months – I think it was around this point that we said, “She has to lie in her crib at night.” To make the transition, when we saw that she was beginning to fall asleep in her hammock, we moved her to her crib. With the lights low, we take 15-minute shifts from playing guitar to a screaming baby. After just over an hour our little girl was asleep and we never slept in the bouncy chair again. As for the naps, I feared that I was really torturing my little girl, and kept rocking her in my arms at the expense of my back. I still wake up every 3 hours (and often more often) at night to eat.
– 5 ½ – 6 ½ months: This was when we upgraded to the video baby monitor. My back just couldn’t support the weight of my 97th percentile baby whenever she needed to sleep. By this time we were good at recognizing the signs that she was sleepy: she was rubbing her eyes, yawning, irritable, and after reading her a book or two and putting on a classical music playlist, I started scheduling her for nap and bedtime. bedtime. without turning back.
I also recently spoke with the doctor’s office about his nightly wakefulness. “97th percentile? She’s definitely getting all the food she needs. Let her cry herself to sleep when she wakes up at night and she’ll learn to kick that habit.”
It was not easy. When she first woke up and I didn’t go in, it was an hour and a half before she fell asleep again. But between the monitor, her age, and the support of my husband and the doctor’s office, I was able to do it.
Now she cries for about 10 minutes after 6 hours of sleep, goes back to sleep and wants to breastfeed after a good 8-9 hours of sleep. (She even goes back down after this, sleeping in total at night for 11-12 hours).
It gets better that way! But I really believe that every child is different. You have to do what is best for your child, for yourself and for your family. And for people who love to apply the information learned, this can be very frustrating. Being a mother takes the concept of trusting oneself to a whole new level. “It’s humbling,” my friend said last night, and I couldn’t agree more.