The No-cry Sleep Solution (17 page)

• Don’t use strong-smelling perfumes or lotions that may affect your baby’s delicate senses.

• Do not allow pets to sleep in bed with your baby.

• Never leave your baby alone in an adult bed unless it is perfectly safe. For example, placing Baby on a mattress on the floor in a childproof room when you are nearby or listening in with a reliable baby monitor.

• As of the writing of this book, there are no proven safety devices for use in protecting a baby in an adult bed. However, as a result of the great number of parents who wish to sleep safely with their babies, a number of new inventions are beginning to appear in baby catalogs and stores. You may want to look into some of these nests, wedges, and cradles.

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Learn Basic Sleep Facts

Much of the literature about babies and sleep suggests that a parent read an entire book of facts on human sleep before making any changes. When your eyelids threaten to droop before the first chapter is read, this becomes an exercise in futility. The facts aren’t learned, the plan doesn’t get made, the problem doesn’t get solved, and one more parent is resigned to another year or two or three of sleep deprivation.

So here, I’ll try to give you just the information you need, short and concise, with a few basic and important sleep facts that are important to know. This way, you can get on to the real reason you’re reading this book: to devise and implement the right sleep plan for you and your baby.

How Do We Sleep?

We fall asleep, we sleep all night, and then we wake up in the morning. Right? Wrong! During the night, we move through a sleep cycle, riding it up and down like a wave. We cycle through light sleep to deep sleep to dreaming all through the night. In between these stages, we briefly come to the surface, without awakening fully. We may fluff a pillow, straighten a blanket, or roll over, but generally we fade right back into sleep with nary a memory of the episode.

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The No-Cry Sleep Solution

Our sleep is regulated by an internal body clock scientists have dubbed the
biological clock
or
circadian rhythm
(“around a day” in Latin). And they have discovered that, strangely, this clock is set on a twenty-five-hour day—meaning we must continuously reset it. We do this mainly with our sleep-wake routines and exposure to light and darkness.

This biological clock also has specific times of day that are primed for sleep or wakefulness. This is the cause of jet lag as well as the sleep problems that plague shift workers. This is also why it’s often difficult to awaken on Monday morning—sleeping in and going to bed late during the weekend disrupt established rhythms, and we must reset our internal clocks, starting with the moment the alarm rings on Monday morning.

This circadian rhythm affects how alert we feel during various parts of the day. There are natural times for sleep and for wakefulness. The brain seeks a state of biochemical balance of sleep and wakefulness, and when the scale is heavy toward sleep, we feel tired. This rhythm explains why many people have a midafter-noon slump, and why some cultures routinely incorporate a siesta (afternoon nap) into the day. The human biological clock has a natural afternoon drop in alertness, followed by a period of wakeful energy that lasts until later in the evening, when there is an onset of drowsiness. These patterns change as life stages do. A baby’s pattern is not the same as an older child’s, a child’s is different from an adult’s, and an adult’s is different from an elderly person’s.

How Do Babies Sleep?

A baby is not born with an adult circadian rhythm. A newborn baby’s sleep-wake cycles are spread throughout day and night,

Learn Basic Sleep Facts

43

Gavin, ten months old

gradually settling into a pattern of defined naps and nighttime sleep.

A baby’s biological clock begins maturing at about six to nine weeks of age and does not work smoothly until about four to five months. As the biological cycle matures, a baby reaches a point when she is mostly awake during the day and mostly asleep during the night. At about nine to ten months, a baby’s sleep periods consolidate so that she wakes up and goes to sleep at about the same times every day, and her sleep spans are longer.

Because the biological clock is the primary regulator of daily sleep and wakefulness patterns, it is easy to see why a baby does not sleep through the night—and why this pattern so adversely affects new parents!

Babies move through the same sleep cycles as adults do, but their cycles are shorter and more numerous. Babies also spend much more time in light sleep than adults do, and they have many

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The No-Cry Sleep Solution

more of those in-between stages of brief awakenings. There are two reasons why a baby sleeps like a baby.

The first is developmental. A baby’s sleep pattern facilitates brain growth and physical development. Babies grow at an astro-nomical rate during the first two years of life, and their sleep patterns reflect biological needs that differ vastly from those of adults.

The second reason why a baby sleeps like a baby is survival.

They spend much of their time in lighter sleep. This is most likely so that they can easily awaken in uncomfortable or threatening situations: hunger, wetness, discomfort, or pain. In fact, acclaimed pediatrician Dr. William Sears, in
The Baby Book
(Little, Brown and Company, 1993) says, “Encouraging a baby to sleep too deeply, too soon, may not be in the best survival or developmental interests of the baby.”

All the stages of sleep are important for your baby’s growth and development. As he matures, so does his sleep cycle; attaining sleep maturity is a
biological
process.

A Baby’s Sleep Cycle

Understanding that a baby naturally and necessarily follows a particular sleep cycle is crucial to understanding her problems with falling asleep and staying that way. A typical baby’s nighttime sleep cycle looks something like this:

Drowsy; falling asleep

Light sleep

Deep sleep for about an hour

Brief awakening

Deep sleep for about one to two hours

Light sleep

Brief awakening

Rapid eye movement (REM); dreaming sleep

Learn Basic Sleep Facts

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Brief awakening

Light sleep

Brief awakening

REM (dreaming sleep)

Brief awakening

Toward morning: another period of deep sleep

Brief awakening

REM (dreaming sleep)

Brief awakening

Light sleep

Awake for the day

The Likely Culprit of Your Sleep Troubles?

Those Brief Awakenings!

Now you know that brief awakenings (night wakings) are a normal part of human sleep, regardless of age. All babies experience these. The difference with a baby who requires nighttime care every hour or two is that he is involving the parent in all his brief awakening periods. This conclusion was the lightbulb moment in my own research—and seems so obvious, now that I understand sleep cycles and their physiology.

Typically, when a frequent night-waking baby wakes up and starts to cry, he’s not hungry or thirsty or wet or even lonely; he’s just plain tired, as desperate for sleep, perhaps, as his parents but, unlike them, clueless as to how to fall back asleep!

Imagine this.
You
fall asleep in your nice, warm, comfy bed with your favorite pillow and your soft blanket. When your first night waking occurs, you may change position, pull the covers up, and then fall right back to sleep without ever remembering this happening.

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The No-Cry Sleep Solution

What if you woke up to find yourself sleeping on the kitchen floor without blankets or a pillow?

Could you simply turn over and go back to sleep? I know
I
couldn’t! You would probably wake up startled, worry about how you got there, fret a bit, go back up to bed, get comfortable, and eventually fall asleep—but not too deeply, because you would worry about winding up back on the floor again. This is how it is for a baby who is nursed, rocked, bottlefed, or otherwise parented to sleep. She falls asleep rocking, nursing, sucking a pacifier, and so forth and wakes up to wonder, “What happened? Where am I?