Sleep

Sleep can be one of the most controversial topics amongst parents, I’ve noticed. No subtopic seems entirely safe, whether it’s how many hours a child sleeps at a time, how many naps he takes, or where she sleeps.

The exception is if one can correctly identify a like-minded parent or child expert. I remember one of the first conversations I had with the woman who is now my best friend. Her son was 15 months old and mine was 13 months; we were at a party with our children. I remember clear as day, how she looked up at me and asked, “Is yours sleeping through the night?”

Normally this question would have immediately brought my walls up--I kept a lie coiled on my tongue at all times for just such inquiries. But something in her face told me that she needed to hear the real truth, not just the “truth” of what’s expected of us by doctors, relatives and parenting books. So I shook my head slowly and said, “Noooo. Maybe twice a month, if we’re lucky.” The relief that flooded her face, and the words that spilled from her, I will never forget, because they confirmed what I’d been suspecting for several months: that it might very well be unfair for both mother and child to try to parent by means of averages.

Averages are meant to be helpful. They are included in parenting books to let us know what kids generally are capable of, so that we can be as informed as possible and not expect too much from our children. However, this convention has repeatedly backfired in our house, and never so violently as in the realm of sleep.

In the book Guide to Your Child’s Sleep, the American Academy of Pediatrics makes certain assertions about how babies should sleep, from birth on up to preschool years. Here are the basics of the AAP’s views on infant sleep:

--by 2 to 4 months, a baby “should” be sleeping 5 to 6 hour stretches at night (13, 34, 39, 75)
-- by 6 months, a baby “should” be sleeping through the night in one unbroken stretch typically 11 hours long (18, 34, 41, 42)

No matter how much they love or respect their kids’ doctor, many parents I’ve talked to seem to have an inherent distrust of the sleep-related advice given them by their pediatrician. With my first child, I was included in this group. At every checkup the stats would start flowing and I would be unable to maintain eye contact, sometimes barely able to hold back tears. It sounds silly now, but I felt powerless to live up to the AAP’s expectations for a baby they’d never met, who was held up against the most middling of average and found lacking. It didn’t occur to me then that, because my son was healthy in every other way, I had the freedom to tell the AAP where to stick their sleep stats.

But to be perfectly clear, I don’t believe that the AAP are a pack of child-hating liars, or that pediatricians don’t know what they’re talking about (unless they’re childless, but that’s another story). It’s likely that the doctor brain simply comes to think of averages as infallible figures of truth and hard fact because they spend so much time learning them and then repeating them to patients--and for good reason.

There are several serious conditions that can interrupt a baby’s sleep, including epilepsy, obstructive sleep apnea (where oversized tonsils and adenoids interfere with normal breathing), allergies and asthma, and reflux. Reporting scanty sleep in concert with other concerns to a pediatrician can assist in the diagnosis and treatment of severe conditions. However, an otherwise healthy, happy, well-fed baby with lots of wet and poopy diapers just might not fall in with the AAP’s sleep averages, and there is nothing wrong with that. Really.

Also to be considered is what is meant by the term “sleeping through the night.” On numerous occasions, GTYCS makes allowances for individual babies’ sleep patterns, but still admonishes parents to seek help if their six-month-old is still waking several times a night. It even contends that 90% of 3-month-olds are sleeping through the night. Then, on page 75, long after all the previous assertions about stretches of sleep, the authors drop the bomb: 5 hours is considered sleeping through the night!

This wasn’t news to me, and it may not be to many other people, but it is a little nugget of information that can get lost in the shuffle. When one goes in for baby’s 4 month checkup and the pediatrician says, “Okay, 4 months, he should be sleeping through the night,” one might not have the presence of mind to say, “Nyahaha! He sleeps from seven to midnight!” At least, I didn’t. I just stared at the doctor like a deer in headlights because E nursed something like 6 times a night. The scene repeated itself with minor differences at the 6 month checkup.

Our nights were rife with frustration and resentment. I felt like I’d tried everything, in the order that my desperation deemed certain methods acceptable. I’d been using Elizabeth Pantley’s No Cry Sleep Solution for a few months, and had seen little improvement in his nighttime sleep. This was not due to the inefficacy of the method, but rather was because E just wasn’t up to the task of sleeping long intervals at night.

Contemporaneously, my relationship with my mother-in-law was in an, um, interesting place, because she just couldn’t understand why my son didn’t sleep. Her son, my husband, took four-hour naps and slept like the dead (a talent he’s not lost in adulthood). Never one to swallow an opinion, she voiced her preoccupation with E’s nocturnal challenges at every opportunity.

I know she meant well, but after seven months of sleep deprivation and battling my own frustration and feelings of failure, I really did not need to hear someone else getting their panties in a wad about the issue. She mentioned the name “Ferber” several times, so I did some research.

Richard Ferber’s now-famous method (especially the recently revised version) might have worked for E if he’d been the type to mellow down and self-soothe, but he wasn’t. I had proof. One night we were exhausted, utterly spent, and decided to let E cry for a bit to see if he’d settle down on his own. He screamed for an hour. He showed no signs up letting up, and he did not wear himself out. When I finally went to his room, he was more agitated than when he began, and it took me forever to get him calm enough to go back to sleep. So much for, “Most kids will stop crying after about fifteen minutes.”

Another factoid that sometimes gets buried (and I wish I could find where I read this, but I can’t, so please just trust me on this one despite the lack of citation) is that most babies will begin to sleep longer intervals on their own around nine months. No one really knows why, it’s a bit of a developmental oddity. Fortunately, blessedly, E conformed to this model of behavior and began waking up only once a night.

There was a dark side to this happy turn of events, however. Although he was sleeping longer, more manageable intervals, his nightwakings were the stuff of legend. Worst-case scenario, it would take us three hours to get him back to sleep. We would rock for an eternity in the rocking chair, only to have him scream as soon as he hit the sheets. A few times we had to take a break and walk away, when exhaustion and frustration had chewed through our patience and resolve like moths from hell. In these instances our respite was brief; we would lay in our bed in a zombie-like state of half awareness, holding hands, holding each other, wondering what it was we could have done better x number of months ago. Then it was back to the fray.

Around fifteen months of age, E slept completely through the night for the first time. Two days after his 2nd birthday, the nightwakings resumed. Over the next two years he averaged about 2 days a month of uninterrupted sleep. The one exception was the week we went to Puerto Rico, right around his third birthday. He played hard in the water during the day and slept in bed next to me at night. He was so well rested, I almost didn’t recognize him. We got home and it was status quo again.

When J was born, the nightly interruptions increased to fever pitch. E began coming to our room three, sometimes four times a night. Since I was getting up to nurse J, my husband was the one who had to deal with our oldest. Most nights he would give up after two or three incidents and spend the rest of the night in E’s room, wedged into a tiny sliver of free mattress space in E’s little twin bed. J woke up every time E came in the room at night, which meant even less sleep for me. The area under E’s eyes was a weird greenish-brown, and he was getting in trouble at school.

I’d had enough and took some action. One day while E was at school, I moved the baby’s crib to E’s room and put E’s bed in our room, where the crib used to be. I didn’t care that the new sleeping arrangement scandalized my husband’s family. I didn't care that our realtor gave the bed a long, sidways glance when she came to inspect our house. I didn't care that our four-year-old for a very brief period of time took precedence over the goings-on of our marital bed (when you're sleep deprived, there aren't really a whole lot of goings-on anyway). I didn’t care what anyone thought because guess what? It worked.

The first night was nothing short of amazing. J woke up once to nurse. E didn’t wake up a single time. We kept this arrangement for about six weeks before moving to our new house. When we moved in, I put E’s bed in his new room. The nightwakings have not recurred.

If I had to take a guess now, looking back over the broad experience of E’s sleep challenges, I’d say that the main problem was transitioning. He woke up every time his sleep cycled into light sleep. As a baby, this meant that moving from arms to crib was a jarring event that pulled him sharply back into full wakefulness. As a toddler/preschooler, this meant that he woke up, realized he was alone, and immediately went in search of comfort. Transitions in other aspects of daily life and his development weren’t a problem, they never have been. So, what was the deal?

The deal was, and is, that he is nothing other than himself. E, I realized one day in a flash of inspiration, is the kind of person for whom middle ground does not come naturally. He’s either on or off, and “off” takes more work to achieve than “on.” He’s not hyperactive or hypersensitive; for lack of a better word, he is excitable. He sometimes comes unhinged and has now idea how to re-hinge himself. He was simply born that way, and four years later he is very gradually learning to temper himself.

Where does a kid like this exist in a world of averages? What recourse do parents have, when doctors and books give advice that only works for the natural Buddhas of the nursery? It takes a certain bullheaded constitution on the part of the parents, I think, to gracefully navigate the choppy waters of the “most children” sea. Extra patience is needed for effective parenting, and also for dealing with outside advice, which can have the double blade of being ill-suited to a non-average child and being totally unasked-for.

Little by little my parental skin has become more rhino-like. I learned to stand strong for E when his sleep challenges gave other people epileptic fits, either by dead-heading the conversation when I could sense the topic coming up or by stating that we weren’t having problems, thanks. Let them have a seizure, I thought, that way I don’t have to.

I wish I could say that, upon discovering my son’s polarity, I magically was able to get him to eat regular meals, go to the potty by the age of 2, whisper in a library, march in a line, and a bunch of other nonsense that the world expects kids to do. I can’t. Bringing up a non-conformist is not like making pancakes. Sometimes I wonder if I’m going to pull a Ben Kenobi and raise a Darth because my kid is thoroughly out of my league and I don’t have a single parenting book to fall back on.

Right now the only thing that is important to me is that my son understand that it's okay to be himself. When people hear the phrase "being himself," they may think of someone who dresses eccentrically, or indulges in anachronistic hobbies. With children, it encompasses so much more. For E, the freedom to be himself means the freedom to figure things out on his own no matter how long it takes or what circuitous path he chooses; the freedom to wear his Batman costume to the grocery store; the freedom to refuse any and all food for however long he wants; the freedom to be vulnerable and silly and occasionally whiny; the freedom to voice that he does not like his brother from time to time.

For me, I just want the freedom to enjoy my son.