Co-Sleeping: Getting the Sleep You Need
What is the most common question people ask when they see you with a baby after, "Is it a boy or a girl?" How about: "Is she sleeping through the night?" The sleeping-through-the-night issue is raised again and again. In our culture it is the barometer by which every new family seems to be measured. The implication is that if your baby sleeps through the night you are a "good" parent and you have a "good" baby. Smug parents will tell you "Oh, my little angel was sleeping through the night at two months!", as if it is universally accepted that that is a good thing. Most people don't even know that the medical definition of "sleeping through the night" is sleeping five hours at a stretch. Getting baby to "sleep through the night" is the number one concern of many new parents, and the most common method used in our culture to achieve that end is sleep training.
Sleep training is the practice of "training" one's baby to go to sleep by himself, and to sleep through the night, using the following method or one similar: Baby is put awake in a crib alone in his room. The first night, baby is left to cry for five minutes before mother or father comes in to comfort. The second night baby cries for ten minutes, the third night fifteen etc. Sleep training is pervasive in our culture and it is the method most pediatricians still recommend for "sleep problems".
Sleep training is bad for babies. Human babies are born with one primary method of communication: crying. Human babies are genetically designed to cry when they need something. Imagine for a moment the adaptive value of that. If a mother living on the savanna thousands of years ago set her baby down to gather food and misplaced the baby, the baby had a way to call the mother to him. If a predator snatched him, mother could follow the baby's cries and come to the rescue. The baby had the ability to let mother know if he was thirsty, hungry, cold or in pain. When your baby is crying he is saying "Help! Notice me! I need something!" The prevailing belief in western culture is that a crying baby is trying to manipulate the parent into coming to him, but your baby does not know the difference between want and need, and his developing brain is certainly not sophisticated enough to grasp the concept of "manipulation".
Now imagine a baby crying all alone in a crib. She can not conceive of mother in the next room. Babies do not develop the concept of object-permanence until sometime towards the end of the first year. She can't remember being kissed good night. She doesn't know someone is going to come back for her in the morning. She has no concept of past or future, but lives in the moment. She knows only that she is crying now. She can only remember crying. She knows that she is alone and thousands of years of evolution tell her that a defenseless baby alone, is a dead baby. When your baby is alone and crying, her instincts spur her to call out in the only language she knows, "Mother hear me! Find me! You have lost me!" If mother does not come then baby cries more frantically "Find me, before a predator does!" "Find me before I starve or die of exposure!" The baby does not know she is safe in a snug house, in a snug crib. She knows only that she must cry loudly enough for her mother to find her in the wilderness. So she cries more and more loudly and frantically.
I might add that babies who sleep alone show higher levels of stress hormones in their blood 24 hours a day than infants who sleep next to their mothers. Science has demonstrated again and again how stressed organisms are more susceptible to illness than non-stressed organisms. And how must we imagine those stress hormones act upon a baby's developing brain?
Babies who sleep next to their mothers have a lower rate of S.I.D.S. than babies who sleep apart. Why? It may be the impact of the stress hormones weakening their physiology. It may be the fact that babies who sleep alone sleep so deeply, (and they do sleep more deeply) that they may not be able to rouse themselves when they are in trouble. Some researchers hypothesize that mother may act as a sort of respiratory pacemaker for the baby sleeping next to her, teaching her the rhythm of breathing. It may just be that the mother who is next to her infant is more likely to notice that something is wrong before the worst happens. It may be a combination of all of the above, but the fact remains that baby is safer with you than alone. (See contraindications for sleep sharing below!) This is particularly true if there is a fire in your home, an earthquake, or some other kind of emergency.
Western culture, and its satellites are the only cultures in the world where you will find babies sleeping alone. Africans, Indians, Chinese, Pacific Islanders, traditional Japanese, people from cultures all over the world are shocked when they discover we force our babies to sleep alone. Not only does the practice seem cruel, but it seems outrageously impractical to them. "How do American parents get any sleep?", a young woman from Sri Lanka once asked me. I was too embarrassed to tell her about sleep training. Even in western culture the practice of solo infant sleeping has only been the norm for about one-hundred fifty years.
Sleep training is bad for parents. It may seem like a godsend, but in fact, unless you are one of those people who puts plugs in your ears and leaves a baby to cry unanswered all night, many parents find that everyone in the family gets a lot more sleep when the family sleeps together. To begin with, a baby doesn't need to come completely awake to get mother's attention. He simply has to begin to squirm and she can put him to the breast before he starts to cry. He doesn't really wake up. She barely wakes up. Dad doesn't wake up at all. Everyone is back asleep in no time. As the baby gets older many mothers find they don't remember nursing in the night at all because baby becomes adept at finding the nipple himself when he needs it.
Researchers have discovered that mothers and babies who sleep together develop synchronized sleep cycles, so when baby comes to the surface and wakes, mother is close to the surface too, and it is not really hard for her to wake for a second to get baby situated at the breast. This experience is very unlike that of a mother whose baby is in another room. In that scenario mother is out of synch with her baby and is often dragged out of a deep sleep to stumble painfully into the nursery to nurse her baby, or even worse into the kitchen to warm up a bottle while baby gets hungrier, and more frantic, and more and more awake. In that scenario baby has to completely wake in order to cry loudly enough to get mother's attention, and takes much longer to be get back to sleep. Everyone loses sleep: Baby, mother and father.
Perhaps the worst thing about sleep training is the emotional distance it puts between parent and child. Mothers are genetically programmed to instinctually respond to their baby's cry. When a mother suppresses that response she puts distance between herself and her child. The mother and father must develop detachment in order to resist their natural inclination to comfort the baby. The relationship suffers from the baby's side too. The baby learns that she can not trust her parents to come to her when she needs them. They will only come to her when it suits them. This affects children of different temperaments in different ways, but the one constant is the development of distance and communication difficulties in the parent/child relationship, difficulties that can last a lifetime. And we wonder why our teenagers won't talk to us!
Sleep training may seem like a solution for tired parents, but it is at best a damaging, short term solution for one small issue that takes care of itself in a relatively short amount time. Our children are little for such a small percentage of our lives. It is the mark of parental maturity to be able to put their needs ahead of our own, at least temporarily, until they can take care of themselves.
Contraindications for sleep sharing:
1. Never sleep with your baby if you have been drinking or using drugs!
2. Never put your baby to sleep on a water bed or other soft surface!
3. It is better to have a young baby on the side of mother away from dad, as not all fathers have the benefit of the mothering instincts that keep mom from rolling over on the baby.
4. Smokers should not sleep with babies because the toxins that remain on their skin and clothes have been shown to increase the risk of S.I.D.S..
5. Mothers who are morbidly obese should avoid sleep sharing.
References:
1. James McKenna et al. Infant-Parent Co-sleeping in an Evolutionary Perspective: Implications for Understanding Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Sleep, Vol 16, No.3, 1993
2. James McKenna et. al. Experimental studies of infant-parent co-sleeping: Mutual physiological and behavioral influences and their relevance to S.I.D.S. . Early Human Development 38 (187-201), 1994
3. William Sears, MD Nighttime Parenting. Schaumberg, Illinois: La Leche League Intl., 1985
4. William Sears, MD and Martha Sears, RN The Baby Book. Little Brown and Co., 1993
What is the most common question people ask when they see you with a baby after, "Is it a boy or a girl?" How about: "Is she sleeping through the night?" The sleeping-through-the-night issue is raised again and again. In our culture it is the barometer by which every new family seems to be measured. The implication is that if your baby sleeps through the night you are a "good" parent and you have a "good" baby. Smug parents will tell you "Oh, my little angel was sleeping through the night at two months!", as if it is universally accepted that that is a good thing. Most people don't even know that the medical definition of "sleeping through the night" is sleeping five hours at a stretch. Getting baby to "sleep through the night" is the number one concern of many new parents, and the most common method used in our culture to achieve that end is sleep training.
Sleep training is the practice of "training" one's baby to go to sleep by himself, and to sleep through the night, using the following method or one similar: Baby is put awake in a crib alone in his room. The first night, baby is left to cry for five minutes before mother or father comes in to comfort. The second night baby cries for ten minutes, the third night fifteen etc. Sleep training is pervasive in our culture and it is the method most pediatricians still recommend for "sleep problems".
Sleep training is bad for babies. Human babies are born with one primary method of communication: crying. Human babies are genetically designed to cry when they need something. Imagine for a moment the adaptive value of that. If a mother living on the savanna thousands of years ago set her baby down to gather food and misplaced the baby, the baby had a way to call the mother to him. If a predator snatched him, mother could follow the baby's cries and come to the rescue. The baby had the ability to let mother know if he was thirsty, hungry, cold or in pain. When your baby is crying he is saying "Help! Notice me! I need something!" The prevailing belief in western culture is that a crying baby is trying to manipulate the parent into coming to him, but your baby does not know the difference between want and need, and his developing brain is certainly not sophisticated enough to grasp the concept of "manipulation".
Now imagine a baby crying all alone in a crib. She can not conceive of mother in the next room. Babies do not develop the concept of object-permanence until sometime towards the end of the first year. She can't remember being kissed good night. She doesn't know someone is going to come back for her in the morning. She has no concept of past or future, but lives in the moment. She knows only that she is crying now. She can only remember crying. She knows that she is alone and thousands of years of evolution tell her that a defenseless baby alone, is a dead baby. When your baby is alone and crying, her instincts spur her to call out in the only language she knows, "Mother hear me! Find me! You have lost me!" If mother does not come then baby cries more frantically "Find me, before a predator does!" "Find me before I starve or die of exposure!" The baby does not know she is safe in a snug house, in a snug crib. She knows only that she must cry loudly enough for her mother to find her in the wilderness. So she cries more and more loudly and frantically.
I might add that babies who sleep alone show higher levels of stress hormones in their blood 24 hours a day than infants who sleep next to their mothers. Science has demonstrated again and again how stressed organisms are more susceptible to illness than non-stressed organisms. And how must we imagine those stress hormones act upon a baby's developing brain?
Babies who sleep next to their mothers have a lower rate of S.I.D.S. than babies who sleep apart. Why? It may be the impact of the stress hormones weakening their physiology. It may be the fact that babies who sleep alone sleep so deeply, (and they do sleep more deeply) that they may not be able to rouse themselves when they are in trouble. Some researchers hypothesize that mother may act as a sort of respiratory pacemaker for the baby sleeping next to her, teaching her the rhythm of breathing. It may just be that the mother who is next to her infant is more likely to notice that something is wrong before the worst happens. It may be a combination of all of the above, but the fact remains that baby is safer with you than alone. (See contraindications for sleep sharing below!) This is particularly true if there is a fire in your home, an earthquake, or some other kind of emergency.
Western culture, and its satellites are the only cultures in the world where you will find babies sleeping alone. Africans, Indians, Chinese, Pacific Islanders, traditional Japanese, people from cultures all over the world are shocked when they discover we force our babies to sleep alone. Not only does the practice seem cruel, but it seems outrageously impractical to them. "How do American parents get any sleep?", a young woman from Sri Lanka once asked me. I was too embarrassed to tell her about sleep training. Even in western culture the practice of solo infant sleeping has only been the norm for about one-hundred fifty years.
Sleep training is bad for parents. It may seem like a godsend, but in fact, unless you are one of those people who puts plugs in your ears and leaves a baby to cry unanswered all night, many parents find that everyone in the family gets a lot more sleep when the family sleeps together. To begin with, a baby doesn't need to come completely awake to get mother's attention. He simply has to begin to squirm and she can put him to the breast before he starts to cry. He doesn't really wake up. She barely wakes up. Dad doesn't wake up at all. Everyone is back asleep in no time. As the baby gets older many mothers find they don't remember nursing in the night at all because baby becomes adept at finding the nipple himself when he needs it.
Researchers have discovered that mothers and babies who sleep together develop synchronized sleep cycles, so when baby comes to the surface and wakes, mother is close to the surface too, and it is not really hard for her to wake for a second to get baby situated at the breast. This experience is very unlike that of a mother whose baby is in another room. In that scenario mother is out of synch with her baby and is often dragged out of a deep sleep to stumble painfully into the nursery to nurse her baby, or even worse into the kitchen to warm up a bottle while baby gets hungrier, and more frantic, and more and more awake. In that scenario baby has to completely wake in order to cry loudly enough to get mother's attention, and takes much longer to be get back to sleep. Everyone loses sleep: Baby, mother and father.
Perhaps the worst thing about sleep training is the emotional distance it puts between parent and child. Mothers are genetically programmed to instinctually respond to their baby's cry. When a mother suppresses that response she puts distance between herself and her child. The mother and father must develop detachment in order to resist their natural inclination to comfort the baby. The relationship suffers from the baby's side too. The baby learns that she can not trust her parents to come to her when she needs them. They will only come to her when it suits them. This affects children of different temperaments in different ways, but the one constant is the development of distance and communication difficulties in the parent/child relationship, difficulties that can last a lifetime. And we wonder why our teenagers won't talk to us!
Sleep training may seem like a solution for tired parents, but it is at best a damaging, short term solution for one small issue that takes care of itself in a relatively short amount time. Our children are little for such a small percentage of our lives. It is the mark of parental maturity to be able to put their needs ahead of our own, at least temporarily, until they can take care of themselves.
Contraindications for sleep sharing:
1. Never sleep with your baby if you have been drinking or using drugs!
2. Never put your baby to sleep on a water bed or other soft surface!
3. It is better to have a young baby on the side of mother away from dad, as not all fathers have the benefit of the mothering instincts that keep mom from rolling over on the baby.
4. Smokers should not sleep with babies because the toxins that remain on their skin and clothes have been shown to increase the risk of S.I.D.S..
5. Mothers who are morbidly obese should avoid sleep sharing.
References:
1. James McKenna et al. Infant-Parent Co-sleeping in an Evolutionary Perspective: Implications for Understanding Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Sleep, Vol 16, No.3, 1993
2. James McKenna et. al. Experimental studies of infant-parent co-sleeping: Mutual physiological and behavioral influences and their relevance to S.I.D.S. . Early Human Development 38 (187-201), 1994
3. William Sears, MD Nighttime Parenting. Schaumberg, Illinois: La Leche League Intl., 1985
4. William Sears, MD and Martha Sears, RN The Baby Book. Little Brown and Co., 1993
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