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| Thomas, like many babies, is wide awake when he should be a sleeping train... |
My husband and I have recently implemented some sleep training with our little boy, who is just about one year and two months old. In the run-up to said implementation, I did some reading and some thinking and some writing about what I expected to happen. Here are those notes, which will be followed by a Part II in which I comment on the success of the training:
Sleep training.
Who invented the term? It sounds innocuous, like potty training or puppy training—and like both of those, is much more difficult and complicated and frustrating than you might expect. Google N-gram (a super-fun tool for word nerds like me) says that the phrase only started to appear in books around 1920, but its use has exploded in the 2000s.
This age of internet experts and mom shaming and myriad platforms for passing on advice has resulted in sleep training becoming standard practice, as established as breastfeeding and vaccinating (yes, I say that with full awareness of the potential irony). Naturally, when I became a mother, I started to read nearly everything the web had to offer on these topics and others. My Google search history for those early months must be hilarious. (Just checked…it includes such gems as “screaming during diaper changes,” “really sore nipples,” “baby wants to suck constantly,” ‘baby still hungry after nursing,” and “how to help your baby poop.” Later there are queries on the topics of crying, fussing, colic, burping, and gas.) I didn’t start looking up sleep till the baby was a few months old, but pretty early on, my husband wanted to establish his bedtime at 7:00–7:30 p.m. He said his ex had done this with their son, and that the child continued to go to bed at that time till he was a teenager. My husband also said that it would be good for the two of us as a couple to have adult time after the baby went to sleep.
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| Stolen from here. |
This sounds good in theory, but in practice it hasn’t quite worked out. We aim for 7:00, but depending on how many naps the baby has had that day, what he has eaten, how early we can each get home from work, and how stubborn he feels like being, bedtime has ranged from between 7:00 and 10:00 p.m. He has had a routine almost all his life that involves a bath, fresh pyjamas, a little song from each of us, and then nursing in the dark of the bedroom. That worked well for about the first 10 months, but he would always wake up within a few hours, and after the 10-month point he almost always woke up within an hour after I put him down. Then, as we approached the 1-year mark, it sometimes wouldn't work at all, and he would pull off the nipple smiling and playful and ready to slide off my lap and toddle around the room.
Recently there have been small improvements in his ability to sleep for longer periods of time during the night (after the first waking). He even spends large chunks of that time in his playpen (which we are still using in place of the crib we never got around to purchasing), and a few times he has come very close to sleeping through the night, waking only once to suckle a bit and then nodding right back off. I have no idea what caused these changes—maybe it was just time for him—but it gives us some hope that eventually we will not have to work so hard at this.
I am not sure if we have been “training” him in any real sense of the word, but I know we have never just let him fall asleep without some kind of aid (rocking, pushing in the stroller, nursing, etc.), and I do eventually want him to be able to put himself to sleep. However, from what I have read, it seems that even people who have properly trained their children by letting them cry or by the shush-pat method or the fading method or any other method still sometimes experience difficulties (or so-called sleep regressions), so I am not letting myself worry too much.
People have been telling me since he was four months old that “he ought to be sleeping through the night by now,” but for the moment we can’t seem to put into regular practice any of the methods or techniques. Because of the layout of our apartment, we are room-sharing, and because of our early mornings, we try to get to bed within two hours of putting him down. This means we risk waking him with our own noise and movements, and it means that we can’t use a regular white noise machine (my husband can’t stand them), and that we can’t just ignore him when he is crying in the night.
So we’re doing what we can to survive, and hoping that one day he figures out that sleep is awesome and that he wants to do it.
