Train Wreck
Night after night, I listened to my son wail and the Sleep Lady scold me.
I was up half the night, too, but I wasn’t convinced I had a problem. Night waking, I thought, was normal, and easy to manage if I slept with my baby and nursed him on demand. But by the time I’d finished the introduction of Good Night, Sleep Tight, I was incredibly anxious, convinced my baby wasn’t getting enough sleep because he was always waking to nurse. “Uninterrupted sleep,” the Sleep Lady says, is what a baby needs to “produce growth hormones, build the immune system, and work on memory storage, organization and retention – the foundations for learning.”
All of a sudden, I felt as if everything I was doing at night was wrong. Not only did the Sleep Lady lodge her pseudo-scientific sleep facts into my vulnerable new-mother brain, she also somehow tapped into my childhood anxiety around falling asleep. I remember miserably staring at the clock, one, two and three hours after being put to bed, stressing out that I wasn’t going to get enough sleep. So, I was extremely tempted by the Sleep Lady’s confident answer to all infant sleep problems: self-soothing.
“Babies find all kinds of safe things to suck, twirl, rub,” to help them fall asleep, she says. “Corners of blankets, legs of stuffed animals, even their own hair or ears.” Besides the fact that my baby didn’t have hair to twirl yet, I understood that the Sleep Lady’s strategy for the elimination of night nursing was created for a baby’s self-confidence and security around sleep – something I had surely lacked as a child.
We’ll follow the Sleep Lady’s program of night weaning and everything will be great! I thought. We’re all going to sleep through the night and wake up refreshed. Plus, my baby will no longer be losing brain cells!
The Sleep Lady, a.k.a. Kim West, is a pert, blonde social worker and mother of two. The back of the book says her program is “a godsend for tired parents everywhere” and can “[spare] years of sleep deprivation.” With the gentle-yet-domineering smile she wore in her jacket photo, she reminded me of an inspirational speaker, one who truly wanted to help my husband, my baby and me to sleep more. She exuded calm authority. Soon I started to hear the Sleep Lady’s voice in my ear even when I didn’t have the book in front of me.
“One of my hardest tasks,” she warned, “is convincing mothers that most healthy six-to-eight-month-old babies on a normal growth curve don’t need to eat at night. Even a smart, thoughtful mother who knows this in her head may still have a fear in her gut of letting her child go hungry.”
She was right. I did have that fear. And I appreciated how she understood that and conceded, in her suggestions for getting rid of night-time nursing, that I may have some tears for a couple of nights. Keep calming him, she told me. Sit by his crib, and say sh-sh-sh to make him feel better. Rub his back if you want to, just don’t take him out of the crib. “It will only take a few nights for him to stop waking for the breast,” the Sleep Lady said.
Tears for a couple of nights? In theory, that seemed manageable. Besides, I had the Sleep Lady to help me through it. “When the baby wakes up at night and doesn’t need to nurse,” she said firmly. “Don’t nurse. It’s really that simple.”
The Sleep Lady recommends three techniques to reduce night feeding. First is a “dream feed.” You rouse the baby just enough to nurse right before you go to sleep yourself and then don’t feed him again until six in the morning. The second is to feed him when he wakes up at night, as long as it’s at least two hours after he falls asleep. But you’re only allowed to nurse him once. The third technique, called “go-for-the-stretch,” involves counting back from the baby’s usual wake-up time, using as your number of hours the longest amount of time your baby has ever slept. So if he wakes at one a.m., and he once slept six hours in a row, you don’t nurse him again until seven in the morning. (If you’re finding this confusing, you’re not alone.)
The dream feed didn’t work for me, as my baby always woke up after I finished nursing and attempted to lay him back down in his crib. The other two time-based systems had me trying to sleep while watching the clock. I anticipated a wail every time he woke up after the one permitted feed, and this dread made me an insomniac. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t bring myself to consistently practice any of the Sleep Lady’s lengthen-the-time-between-feeding techniques. I felt curiously guilty: toward my baby for sometimes denying him nursing in the interest of the program, and toward the Sleep Lady, whom I’d let down. Her disapproving voice echoed in my head.
“When our babies are newborns, they need us to help them get to sleep, they need us to make that magic, but then it’s time to pass them the wand, to let them make their own magic,” she writes, adding, patronizingly: “Go ahead and do it now. Good night, and sleep tight.” I didn’t recall the midwife handing me a magic wand after my baby made his messy appearance. I resolved to toss the book and go back to the way things were before.
But it wasn’t that easy. I felt fine about my decision to bring my baby into the spare bed with me to sleep the remainder of the night once he woke up. And yet, I could still hear the Sleep Lady’s faux-gentle voice reprimanding me. “He’s using the breast as a sleep crutch,” she scolded, night after night as I nursed my son back to sleep.
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Comments
12 Responses to “The Sleep Lady: my tormentor. By Tamara Faith Berger for Babble.com.”
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Excellent article!!
By this point, The Book had become my sworn enemy. Sleep training requires the
shutting-off of the instinct to go to a crying baby, and in following the Sleep
Lady, I’d shut off not just that instinct, but all of them… amen sister.Thank you for writing this.
I feel like I haven’t had a full night sleep since Dec. 2003 when I got pregnant. I’ve tried everything…Ferber, Weissbluth, Pantley. Now, at this very moment we are trying to get our two boys (27 months and 9 months) to sleep in one room for the first time. The baby has been in our room, and it’s killing me to breastfeed in the middle of the night. So I’m hoping that this room transfer will start to do the trick. But then again, the 27 month old has his own issues…he won’t go to sleep and wakes up at 5 am. We’re trying to convince him he has to stay quiet so that he doesn’t wake his brother. So we’ll either solve both of their problems, or make it worse. Cross your fingers.
This article illustrates for me the fact that no program is one-size-fits-all. I came across the Sleep Lady when my daughter was 5 months old, and it was a godsend, but I really feel you have to be dedicated to a program, whatever it is, to make it work for you. I wasn’t willing to cosleep, we had snack-and-snooze issues that were making life hell, and Ferber seemed too callous. I was at the end of my rope. It wasn’t always easy, but it was worthwhile for us.
Great Article! I have yet to read a book on parenting or sleep, etc. that isn’t condescending. They all claim to have a one size fits all solution. While it’s helpful to talk with other parents or learn what is going on developmentally with my baby, I think that parenting is about trial and error and I always believe in trusting my own instinct.
As young mothers, we are taught or it is presumed that infants awaken because they are hungry, and therefore, feeding is the normal middle of the night practice.
But how many of us question whether infants awaken not because they are hungry, but because they are lonely for the womb?
It’s difficult to imagine that an infant could arrive safely in the world and not miss such a cozy atmosphere, along with the maternal biology it had previously had. Perhaps this is why co-sleeping of mother and infant works so well.
But it may not be necessary after all, though it has yet to be tested.
If a body-temperature hot water bottle or some such “substitute” is placed with a child when sleeping, perhaps there is not the compulsion to awaken through a sense of absence, and it’s possible that the senses of an infant can be trained to fool his or her brain into thinking the mother is there when she isn’t, hence, perhaps allowing the mother the rest she may need, alone, or with her spouse.
Since Doctors are not apt to imagine the sensations that infants have when they awaken every 2-3 hours, it’s possible that they have been mistaken all along, and what the child misses is mommy, not food. After all, the child spent 9 mos intrauterine without the ability to express its food needs.
It would be interesting if mother’s could try this, and announce their success with it to see if it makes a difference. Perhaps they might be able to miss one but not two anticipated feedings. It’s an interesting experiment for baby and for Moms.
Oh my goodness – since starting to follow blogs etc 2 years ago with the start of pregnancy, I have never read such a fabulous article – one with which I completely identify. I wish I could have been so eloquent and convinced husband and in-laws that maybe I had the ‘instinct’ of her mother to know what would work with my baby or not. I think every mother knows her child – not to lessen the fathers’ role any, and that crying patterns don’t have to be studied or challenged, just attended to naturally – and every day (and night) goes along calmly (I admit sometimes frustratingly/tiredly for the mother) till the end appears and everyone forgets it was ever difficult!I know I can’t even remember wandering round the house at 3am with my 2 month old on my shoulder – although my husband will identify the exact days for me. Life is short, take the cuddles and kisses and adoration while you can.
As usual Americans have to over analyze and get wound up over everything including the amount of sleep a baby gets. The gist of this is that you have to do what works for you and that might be different from what works for many other moms. My experience with nursing is that if you choose to nurse at night it is very unlikely you will have a good sleeper on your hands before the age of a year or year and a half. If you go into it with this attitude then sign up for the sleep deprivation and don;t have qualms with cosleeping with your baby and try to get any sleep anywhere you can. Some on demand breast feeding moms are lucky that their kids sleep well early and some can follow the sleep advice books and get their kids to sleep. Others cannot. My first was a preemie and I had to bottle feed and supplement with pumped milk. He gained weight and was sleepign through the night at 3 months and was always a good sleeper…I was just lucky not anything I did. But having him on a bottle at times helped too and made me realize that its easier to regulate night sleep with a bottle feed. My second was exclusively bf and he had HUGE sleep issues. By the time he was a month old I knew that night time bf was not going to work for me bc it was going to be a case of him nursing every 45 mins aroudn the clock and he would most likely do it even at 6 -7 months old. Put another way I was not willing to take that chance and I did not want to sign up for a year of bf martyrdom and zombiehood from lack of sleep. So I nursed during the day and stopped bf after 5 pm and it was bottles through the night. He went longer and longer between bottles and after a week he was down to 2 bottles a night and by 4 months he was sleepign 7 hours without a bottle. I never had to use ferber or any other method. He got breast milk and formula and he was fine. I was fine and rested and could be a mother to a toddler and a baby! What worked for me is bf during the day and bottles of formula at night and a baby that learned to sleep through the night early on. So yes I don’t advocate exclusive bf as the be all and end all of infant nutrition and maternal happiness. So sue me.
Sadly in our culture its always angst and handwringing over these kinds of decisions. My kids are older now and I feel that the amount of time we waste over these kinds of parenting choices and condemn others for their choices is so stupid. Your baby is goign to be more impacted by the quality of 13 years of schooling and the choices made at that time of life rather than whether they got breast milk or formula or if their brain cells are lost due to less sleep in the first year of life! Seriously. Worry about the quality of math education in our country…the poisoning of our food supply…why there are so many kids with autism…
Marsupial, great points! I so agree about all the more important worries down the road and why we agonize so much over these bf and sleep issues. Just do what works! By the time you’ve changed your “system” or “plan”, the baby is another month older and has different food/sleep needs. It all changes so constantly in the first year of life, that it’s crazy to try to keep implementing any one system.
I 100% agree about bf in the day and formula at night. I did exactly the same with great success. My son bf constantly for the first 2 months of his life (I mean constantly), and then I introduced a bottle of formula in the evening before he went down, and then one more in the middle of the night. He went straight to waking up just the once for a bottle at about 2 AM, and that was it. It worked so well. I recommend it to anyone.
I tried every method available and nothing worked for my baby. He started sleeping throught the night when he turned 14 months old. When he was first born he will wake up about 4 times at night and then he started waking up once at night until 14 months old. I refuse to read any books written by the so called experts because they think they know every single baby and I think EVERY BABY IS DIFFERENT. I gave my baby formula and he still woke up and then cereal but still woke up and I was hurting because I was and still work full-time. I think that my baby waking up at night was perfectly normal for him and I do not expect my future kids to be the same way because EVERY BABY IS DIFERRENT. I wish that Sleep Lady and all the “experts” get that in their heads one day.
I wanted to see what she had to say. I was very skeptical. Being that I was an “experienced” mother, I did not want information out there that was going to make new moms feel horrible (you know because I am the New Mom Police and I will RID the world of anything that makes a new mom feel inadequate). Anyway, TSL surprised me THOROUGHLY.
I LOVE how she talks to parents. Plus, she is so practical. Some of her tips include darkening the room so the child/baby will know that it’s time to sleep and boring them to sleep–meaning don’t get them all riled up during reading time and cuddling time.
My favorite thing she said though was that those first few weeks are difficult and you need to get through them however you can find the sleep you need. AND she doesn’t suggest starting sleep training until 6 months. Especially if you want to be successful.
PRACTICAL!
Our babies and kids are people. They can read cues and signs. So let’s do the same ol’ same ol’ to help them to sleep.
Her main thing she talks about is the Sleep Lady Shuffle. She goes through the Shuffle very specifically so that you don’t have any questions about how to do it for each stage. The shuffle is her way to help you as a parent help your child learn to sleep but still be involved without leaving them to cry it out. She doesn’t promise that there won’t be tears, but she promises that you will have fewer.
I wanted to make sure I pinpointed some of the things that I especially appreciated about her.
She states that the first 4 months you can’t really expect your child to get into a solid rhythm. Some babies are magic and fall into one very early on. I know this because I happen to have a magic baby right now. But please remember I have had 3 other babies, and numbers 1 and 3 (Wordgirl and Dash) were anything BUT magical. I remember at 10 months with Dash wondering when in the world he was going to be on a schedule. And with Wordgirl I was crying because I thought I was going to ruin her at 9 months. New Mom Police Importance: I haven’t seen much out there that states this. For a new mom who needs to be encouraged (especially those with Post Partum Depression), this needs to be stated with a timeline. I tell every new mom (and I know I’ve said this before): If you can make it to 6 weeks, you start to figure it out. If you can make it to 8 weeks, your baby starts to figure it out. If you can make it to 12 weeks, AAAAAaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
TSL also states that in the first 2 weeks, you are not going to get much night time sleep. New Mom Police Importance: Another thing that every new mom needs to know is that they are not alone.
TSL repeatedly says that you don’t have to use her techniques. She continually states that you just need to be consistent to be effective. Consistent, Consistent, Consistent. New Mom Police Importance: The pressure of doing something only one way and not being able to do it effectively just makes you more stressed. (I know. Looking back on it, Babywise probably wasn’t as bad as I thought, but because I felt pressured to do it their way, I felt trapped.)
I would recommend this book to any new mom because I feel it’s so gentle. She writes with understanding and gentleness, and I really appreciate it.
Our boy is nearly 19 months and has never slept well. He and his mom have essentially coslept for his entire life. He’s become increasingly hard to get down to sleep with her standard nurse-to-sleep technique and now cries, fusses, and scampers around the house until 10 every night. He’s still up at 7 or 8 am and naps poorly (20 – 40 minutes often, never more than 90). We’re at the end of our sanity. I’ve been reading TSL and plan to try to implement it with him in his converted crib (now in bed form, as he won’t put up with being in a crib). I heartily agree that nothing works for everyone. I also agree with Glanna that TSL, despite its odor of self publicity, seems rationally written and worthy of a serious try. Lord knows we all need the sleep.
This article was well written but is very misleading. This is truly an opinion and all moms should read the book for themselves before judging. The method was also done wrong by this author and that is why the author had such a hard time. I have read the book and used it on my kids and it saved me from severe depresssion from extreme sleep deprivation. My kids sleep well and are happy. Lots of kids don’t suddenly sleep through the night by some miracle. those are the minority. Most either have it naturally or have to be trained. Please moms if you are sleep deprived and about to lose it do what method feels comfortable to you. Don’t suffer unnecessarily