Question:
We have a family bed and our son, for the last 4 nights, has been getting
up every 1 hour or so crying loudly. Comforting by me (father) does not
suffice and he wants his mommy to breast-feed him. Sometimes he will go
back to sleep without nursing only if his mom pats him on the back.
For his mother (my wife), the nightly sleep is very very sacred and to be
woken out of it frequently by a crying child is _extremely_ irritating. I
try to comfort everyone but then stay up pondering over my concern about
my wife's outbursts and well-being of all of us. Fortunately, my wife does
not have to (and chooses not to) work and hence can get a good nap during
the day. I am no martyr, but have to leave in the morning as in today with
zero sleep. Is there anything I can do to provide all of us good night's
rest and relief from this problem? Specifically, is there anything like
nightmares etc at this age? I called the doctor and they said to bring him
in for an exam. Is his diet insufficient or is the bedroom too cold or is
he going thru some kind of phase? Sometimes, he will pass some gas and
then return to sleep. And sometimes, he will wake up only 30 minutes afterr
being nursed. All comments and constructive criticism is welcomed and
gratefully appreciated.
Answer:
I had a similar problem with my last 2 babies, and I had to just suffer
through it with the former, but by the time I was having the same problem
with the latter, my pediatrician was able to recommend a very good book that
exactly described what was going wrong and what to do about it. The book is
called "Solve Your Child's Sleep Disorder" by Richard Ferber, M.D., and it
is fascinating reading about sleep in general, and one chapter specifically
addressed my problem, so I read it first, then read all the rest of it.
My problem was that the babies had not started sleeping through the night -
not even occasionally - and they were 8 months old. In fact, I was having
to nurse them more often at night than I was during the day, and they cer-
tainly didn't need the nourishment anymore, but it was the only way I could
get them back to sleep again so *I* could go back to sleep.
Anyway, I found I was doing 2 things `wrong' (other people might be doing
these same things and "getting away with it" - i.e., baby doesn't wake up
during the night wanting to nurse [or want yet-another-bottle of something],
but it didn't work for my kids): (1) I was nursing them to sleep at night,
i.e., I would nurse them till they fell asleep then carry them sleeping to
their cribs, and (2) I was nursing them during the night in bed with me,
which actually allowed them to nurse without really fully waking up.
The problem this causes (and the book says this problem can also occur with
rocking a child to sleep, or letting them fall asleep somewhere where it's
noisy [like while the family is watching TV], or somewhere 'light' rather
than 'dark', or letting them go to sleep in the parents' bed and carrying
them later to their own, etc) is that the child associates certain 'circum-
stances' with going to sleep (nursing or bottle, pacifier, rocking, noise,
light, presence of Mom and Dad in the bed), and when s/he wakes up during
the night, those circumstances HAVE to be re-created in order to fall
asleep again.
What I hadn't been aware of until I read this book is how often we ALL
'wake up' during the night, but we usually go right back to sleep. This
book used an analogy something like this (I'm paraphrasing from memory):
Imagine you're an adult, and you usually go to sleep with your head
on a pillow and covered with a sheet. You will 'wake up' several
times during the night. Perhaps you will punch your pillow or push
your sheet away if you're hot or pull it up higher if you're cold,
but you probably won't remember any of it the next morning because
you didn't come very far out of your sleep. But suppose your pillow
or your sheet 'disappear' during the night. [Have you ever groped
around on the floor beside the bed for your pillow or had to wrestle
some covers away from your sleeping spouse?] If you can't *find*
your pillow on the floor beside the bed or your sheet is *gone*, you
then WILL wake up completely - in outrage and annoyance, probably.
You might even get out of bed, turn on the light and start stomping
around the room in frustration. In other words, the more difficult
it is to re-create the desired sleeping environment, the more awake
we will become.
And that's what it's like with some kids also. The book said if we want
to establish good sleeping patterns for our children and ourselves that we
all, starting from a very young age, need to learn to go to sleep at approxi-
mately the same time, in our own beds, in our own rooms, *alone* (most kids
at least have their own bed, even if they share the room with a sibling),
in silence, in a darkened room (a small night light was O.K.). Any devia-
tions from this MAY cause long-lasting problems with some children, and it
certainly did in both of my last 2.
The remedy that was recommended was to cease and desist from (or don't start)
any scenario besides the one described in the preceding paragraph. That
may mean you need to re-train your little tyke who has gotten used to roaming
the house until 11 p.m., then crashing on the floor somewhere and then getting
carried to the bed by Mom or Dad. It may mean that you need to nurse or
give the baby a bottle a little earlier in the evening, but then put her/him
to bed while still awake. It may mean that if your child is still too young
to be *expected* to sleep through the night that you still don't breastfeed
in your bed (I know some people have objections to this practice on other
grounds than the ones I'm talking about) such that you and your child are
both sleeping through it.
For my last child (remember *my* specific problem? she was eight months old
and still waking up every 2 hours during the night to nurse) it meant that
over a period of a few nights I had to: (1) respond more slowly to her
waking up just in case she would go back to sleep on her own; if she didn't,
then at least she would be fully awake to nurse (and believe it or not,
babies like this don't really WANT to fully wake up; they're sleepy just
like Mom and Dad; they just aren't accustomed to falling back asleep on
their own); (2) do nurse her during the night at first (there is a certain
amount of actual hunger in this in that the baby is accustomed to eating
24 hours a day, and her stomach needs to be retrained to a daytime-only
routine) but only briefly and only when we were both fully awake; that means
sitting up in a chair with a small light on and interacting with her while
she's nursing so that she can't fall back asleep while nursing; this is
tough because Mom can't fall back asleep either but, take heart, this only
lasted a few days; after that she seemed to realize that she was really more
sleepy than hungry and by then was accustomed to being put back into her bed
in the dark to go back to sleep.
This sounds a lot like the problems my wife and I went through with our
son Bradley. We(mostly my wife, and after a while he would only be rocked
to sleep by her) we up till 11 or later each night rocking him to sleep.
We're past all that(a long story), but this sounds like a great book
that would have been very helpful to us.
