After co-sleeping when her kids were babies, Jolie Nichols and her husband slowly transitioned them to their own beds. "My oldest was not okay with phasing out of being in my bed. The younger one was better," she says, because they were a bit stricter with him.
Nichols would lie in bed with her daughter, read stories, then wait until her daughter fell asleep. Trouble was, Nichols often fell asleep too, which meant her night was basically over. If she tried leaving while her daughter was awake, there was a battle. "It's pretty consistent," says Nichols, who lives in Minneapolis. "She's always been the one to fight it."
Of course, bedtime isn't all unhappiness at these houses, just like it isn't at mine. There's something fantastic about falling asleep with your child nestled in your protective embrace. Nichols, Mass and other parents speak with real joy about snuggling up with their kids, especially after a day away from them. As you're drifting off to sleep, it's hard to believe there's a downside.
But parents and children sleep lighter and get more stimulation when they're together.
5 Reasons Gen-X Parents Obsess About Kids' Sleep
1. Talk Shows
In the '80s, long before Dr. Phil, talk show host Phil Donahue provided a televised, national forum for private family drama. Oprah, Geraldo, Sally Jesse and a host of imitators soon jumped on board, and afternoon TV was dominated by talk of messed-up lives. More often than not, parents were to blame. At the movies, we heard it too: The decade started with "Ordinary People" and ended with "Rain Man." In between, we saw "On Golden Pond," "Terms of Endearment" and other Oscar-winning odes to destructive parenting. Even John Hughes explored it. Yes, "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club" were about falling in love. But the backdrop was a chronicle of wrongs done by parents. So, the sound of tears at night can trigger awful visions of our kid in therapy - or making out with Judd Nelson.
2. Boomer Backlash
Whether they actually held the title "latch-key kid" or just knew kids who did, Gen X'ers know about the laissez-faire approach to childrearing. To compensate, some of us have become as hands-on as Boomers were hands-off. Even those of us who haven't memorized Dr. Sears' entire library are way more involved in trying to make things go well for our kids than most Boomers were. Making matters worse, we've heard plenty from Boomers about our alleged slacker self-absorption. Who wants to be that kind of parent?
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"In the sleep laboratory at the University of California's Irvine School of Medicine," wrote Notre Dame professor and attachment parenting cheerleader James J. McKenna, "we found that bed-sharing infants face their mothers for most of the night, and that mother and infant are highly responsive to each other's movements, wake more frequently, and spend more time in lighter stages of sleep than they do while sleeping alone."
That's cited as evidence that you won't roll over on your kid during the night and you'll know if they stop breathing. Comforting to those fearing SIDS, yes. But we're wired to need deep sleep. Sleep lightly for too long and you end up exhausted.
Even parents currently getting rest with their infants worry about what comes later. Megan Odell's five-month-old son starts his night in a bassinet, "falling asleep with us nearby," she says. "When it's time for us to go to bed, we pick him up and carry him upstairs. He'll just sleep in the transition or I'll nurse him a little to get back to sleep." It's good right now, she says, but "I'm aware there's gonna potentially be problems down the road."
Families sleeping most soundly seem to be those who enforced, gently in most cases, a steady set of rules about self-soothing and independent sleeping early on.
"I had a big thing with sleep from the very beginning," says Stacey Lohr Graves, a mother of four in St. Louis. "When I see these overstimulated, overcrazed kids at a mall at eight p.m. on a random Wednesday night, I'm thinking, 'Get your kid in bed.'" With each baby, she started at four months "doing that thing where you go in and pat them, and then you don't come back in." There was crying, but it never lasted long. The babies soon learned to go to sleep on their own. Today, bedtime at Graves' house is calm and smooth.
©2008 Melissa Rayworth and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Melissa Rayworth writes about American culture, sexual politics and parenting for The Associated Press and other national news outlets. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two sons, making frequent trips to New York City for work and play. |
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