Adventures in Infant Sleep

In the lead up to O’s first Christmas, in December 2020, I thought I had this whole parenting thing figured out. My three month old son was sleeping soundly from 10 pm to 7am and was having regular two hour naps throughout the day. He was rocked to sleep for all of his sleeps but it worked. I was well rested, had time to get all my Christmas preparations done - which included hand stitching a stocking for the little one - and even had time to relax and unwind. I had given birth to a unicorn: one of those mythical babies that just know how to sleep. I was flying high!

O is my first child. Those of you who have survived the first year of parenting can likely guess what will happen next. For those of you who are only beginning your journey, or who maybe haven’t started it yet, let me let you in on a little (to me at least) known secret: sleep can regress. I say “can” because I am sure there are one or two of you out there who will insist that your child never went through a sleep regression; who have a child that has slept through the night since birth and never once had a streak of bad nights. If you are out there, know that I am envious of you.

Sleep regressions are usually linked to developmental leaps and the four month sleep regression is a brutal one. At four months old, a baby’s sleep pattern is changing and their sleep cycles are maturing. They begin to shift from a two stage sleep cycle of REM and non-REM sleep to an adult sleep cycle which has four stages (https://www.sleepfoundation.org/baby-sleep/baby-sleep-cycle). A baby won’t finish the four month sleep regression able to sleep like an adult but when they come out the other end of it, and they will, they will be able to sleep for longer periods at night.

The beginning of January 2021 is when O began the four month sleep regression. It started innocently enough. A short nap here; a night waking there. The interruptions were so slight that I barely recognised it for the first few days. After a couple of weeks his two hour naps had shortened to thirty minutes and his (and my) uninterrupted, nine-hour night sleep transformed into short 1-2 hour sleeps with lots of crying - from both of us.

It was at this time that I was diagnosed with postpartum depression. In hindsight, I had had postpartum depression since my son was born (maybe even before) but I was unable to identify it because most of the more obvious symptoms (low mood, crying, irritability, loss of energy) were only intolerable when I was sleep deprived, something that hadn’t happened since O was a few weeks old. What I had felt since O was born were feelings of anxiety, hopelessness, worthlessness and inadequacy. These feelings were what led me to believe that there was nothing different about my child; that nothing had changed within him and therefore the problem with his sleep must be me. Therefore it was my responsibility to fix it.

Anyone who has ever been pregnant will be able to tell you that when you’re pregnant everyone and their mother feels like they are in the position to give you advice. Most of this advice is unsolicited and the giver of advice will look at you like you’ve just kicked a puppy if you don’t immediately pull out a pen and paper and take detailed notes demonstrating just how grateful you are for their help (this is hyperbole and I know that 90% of the time it is coming from a place of love and support but you get the picture). Because of this tendency to tell parents how to parent, I had been given more than one book on how to get my baby to sleep and even more opinions on whether or not to sleep train (a very divisive topic in my circle). Each side essentially boiled down to “if you don’t do it this way, you don’t love and care for your child”. What a load of bullshit.

I believed the problem was me. I believed that if I just followed the right advice, found the right sleep training program, performed just the right dance under the full moon, my baby would sleep well. So I read book after book, visited parenting forum after parenting forum, and googled article after article. What did all this reading teach me: I had committed a cardinal sin of infant sleep. In rocking my child to sleep, I wasn’t showing him love, I was creating a sleep crutch. My baby would never be able to sleep on his own if I didn’t fix this problem that I had stupidly created! I should have known that rocking a baby to sleep would cause irreparable harm to his sleep for the rest of his life! Had I put my enjoyment of cuddles with my baby over developing good sleep habits? How could I have been so selfish!?

In preparation for the birth of our son, A and I read a couple of books about baby brain development. One of these books was John Medina’s Brain Rules for Baby. The book goes over the science behind infant brain development in easy to understand language and explains how to use that science to nurture your baby’s brain. One of the chapters in this book that I paid close attention to was the “sleepy baby” chapter. Medina explains the science behind both the Cry-It-Out (CIO) method and the Nighttime Attachment Parenting (NAP) method.

I have never been a good bed sharer. Ask my husband. The thought of sharing my bed with my baby sends shivers down my spine. What happens when I roll over in the middle of the night? What happens when I pull the duvet up to my chin to get snuggled up under the covers? What if, in my sleepy state, I actually push the baby out of the bed? Parents who share their beds with their babies will tell you that these things don’t happen; that you are aware of your child in the bed and you instinctively will not do anything that might endanger them like push them out of the bed. But, if I am unwilling to sleep train because of the developmental harm it might cause my child, how could I do something that might put my child in physical danger?

The anxiety of the situation was real. It was my fault the baby wasn’t sleeping so it was my responsibility to fix it. I was not willing to accept the risks of the two most common solutions to the infant sleep problem. Could there be another approach? A middle ground between the cry-it-out methods and attachment theory methods of sleep training? Enter “gentle” sleep training.

The idea behind gentle sleep training is simple. You teach your baby to sleep independently, in their own cot/bed/bedroom, without them crying by soothing them, patting their backs, speaking to them or even just being in the room with them. The key to gentle sleep training, or any sleep training for that matter, is to stick with it. The reason I was having difficult was I just hadn’t been trying hard enough or for long enough. I had found the holy grail of sleep training! All my problems were solved!

If only a Holy Grail of sleep training - or anything parenting related - existed. It doesn’t. This is what I wished I knew about infant sleep: there is no fool-proof, one size fits all way to get your baby to sleep.

Most of the infant sleep experts are parents, usually mothers, who have had great success with their own children’s sleep and have become infant sleep consultants. I am not suggesting that sleep consultants don’t work or that if you’ve hired a sleep training consultant you’ve wasted your money. What I am saying is, there is very little research to suggest that any method of getting your child to sleep is better than another. Strict routines work for some children; others will never take to a schedule. Some children will adjust quickly to a cry-it-out or gentle sleep training approach; others will need to be held to sleep. There is no right answer; just the answer that is right for your child.

For those of you that are still anxious about messing up your kid by making the wrong choices about your child’s sleep: when was the last time you heard about a 40-year-old that needed to be rocked to sleep? Or a 24-year-old that still needed to share a bed with their parents? Do you know a 32-year-old who feels abandoned as soon as they’re alone in their bedroom? Me neither.

Here is how our sleep journey ended. I tried several gentle sleep training approaches:

• pick up/put down, where you hold your child when they begin to cry and soothe them until they stop crying then put them down again and repeat until they are asleep

• sush-pat, where you soothe your crying child in their cot until they fall asleep

• the disappearing chair, where you sit next to your baby until they are asleep and the next night you sit further away and continue moving further away night after night until you no longer need to be in the room.

I cannot remember which method we were trying when I finally reached my breaking point but I remember how I was feeling vividly. The day so far had consisted of two naps of 30 minutes each. For each nap it took 45 minutes of the gentle sleep training method before he would fall asleep. 45 minutes of crying and rocking and sush-patting for a 30 minute sleep! I was exhausted. By the time he was ready for his final nap of the day, I was dreading what was to come.

I followed our nap/bedtime routine very carefully. Feed, nappy change, story time, cuddles and then put him in the cot drowsy but awake. Cue the screaming. I read to him. Scream. I shushed him. Scream. I picked him up. Scream. Nothing I did would get him to calm down. My poor baby had begun to dread sleep and I was dreading having to get him to sleep.

I was bouncing him around the living room, trying to get him to stop crying when I broke. His crying broke me. I brought him back into the bedroom, put him in his cot, told him I loved him, left the room, shut the door and began crying myself. I berated myself about what an awful mother I was. How could I leave my child to cry? Surely, this was causing him irrevocable harm? What would my husband say? Would he come rushing out of the “home office” (read spare bedroom) demanding to know what I had done to make his son so miserable?

I was startled out of my self-mutilating thoughts by silence. Deafening silence. I didn’t even give myself a chance to think about what might have happened before rushing back into the room, phone in hand, ready to call emergency services. I placed my hand on his chest. He was breathing softly and slowly. He was sleeping! Without any help from me. How could that be? And he slept for longer than he had in weeks.

It turns out that my son just needed to be left alone to sleep. The anxiety and fear that I had around his sleep that was causing me to search for all the answers to infant sleep was actually what was preventing my son from sleeping. He didn’t need a gentle method of sleep training. He didn’t need any formal method of sleep training. He just needed to have the time to figure it out on his own and for me to leave him alone to do it.

I am not saying that this is what every child needs but it turns out it was what my child needed. It also wasn’t magically fixed. Over the next few weeks we would follow our normal sleep routines and I would put him in his cot drowsy but awake and quietly leave the room. Some days the crying would start immediately and I would go in and help him settle down again. Other days he would quietly babble to himself until sleep took over. There were and are still times when he needs to be rocked to sleep. Thankfully those are few and far between.

We made it through the dreaded four month sleep regression and the eight month sleep regression. It’s now teething that is keeping us up at night but I am comforted with the knowledge that his poor sleep has nothing to do with me and it’s not within my power to fix it. All I can do is try to comfort him through it the best I can and nap in the meantime.