Parenting Post: Baby Sleep

When baby sleeps, everyone is happy; when baby doesn’t sleep, no one is

The only thing that really scared me at all about parenthood was the prospect of sleep deprivation. I had heard and read that this is the #1 problem that new parents regularly experience due to the irregular sleep patterns of infants, and I knew from personal experience that it was something to take seriously. When I was younger, much younger, many years ago, I had terrible sleep habits that eventually caught up to me and landed me in the hospital with a panic attack after not sleeping for a few days.

After that experience I re-wired my brain to prioritize sleep at nearly any cost. If I couldn’t get enough sleep during the night for any reason and felt it the next day, I didn’t hesitate to take a nap at the first opportunity. I made myself go to bed and lay there at a regular schedule at night, even if I stayed awake for an hour or two after getting into bed. I took up meditation and began playing white noise from my computer or phone in my bedroom. I probably did some other things that I don’t remember too. The end result was that I’ve gotten plenty of sleep and been generally well-rested ever since.

I remember what it was like to be sleep-deprived, though. It’s a special kind of hell that I won’t try to really describe. Suffice to say that if you’ve ever experienced it, you know it’s a serious threat to your well-being.

With that being the case, I went into parenthood gearing up for what I thought of as “the sleep battle.” Is baby going to sleep when I do? No, certainly not at first. What am I going to do about that? How do I defeat sleep deprivation when my sleep schedule may no longer be up to me, but instead up to the whims of a newborn? I went online and read a bunch of crap, listened to some podcasts, etc. There’s all kinds of stuff out there and my impression is that there is an entire cottage industry out there which is centered around this.

I can’t pretend to be any kind of credentialed expert or wizened guru, so I can’t ultimately tell you with any certainty what’s right or what’s wrong. I’m just a guy who has had a baby for a while now; all I have to offer is my personal experience, which I will recount here. I will start off by saying that I think I got very lucky. My daughter is not yet six months old and she sleeps at least eight hours a night, every night, like clockwork; sometimes she will sleep for closer to ten hours at a time, from approximately 8 PM to 6 AM.

Of course, she didn’t start out that way, and I’ll get to that in a minute. First I want to clarify that I’m not sure if she is actually sleeping that long in a solid block every night, and certainly she wasn’t at first. My understanding is that up until four months of age, infants have drastically shortened sleep cycles compared to us adults and physically cannot sleep for more than a few hours at a time, tops. My daughter developed the baby superpower of simply being awake in her crib and not crying about it. Sometimes I would look on the baby monitor in the middle of the night to see her wiggling around with her eyes open, silent and apparently quite content.

As she’s gotten closer to the six month mark this has mostly gone away and now anytime I look at the baby monitor after bedtime, her eyes remain closed, although she still wiggles sometimes. I’m not sure if she’s wiggling in her sleep or has just figured out that she can actually keep her eyes closed even while she’s awake (either way is fine with me, of course). She has also developed a ridiculous behavior where she flops her head from side to side at rapid speed when she’s sleepy, which is a trick I have yet to try for myself, but I’ve been meaning to next time I’m having trouble falling asleep.

Anyways, the moral of the story is, if you have a baby and you see them awake in the middle of the night, don’t worry about it. It’s normal, and as long as they aren’t crying or upset, it shouldn’t matter. They’ll either pass out again or, if they need something, fire up the scream engine. Back to my “sleep battle,” the journey I took to eventually arrive at my current place of baby sleep heaven. I believe the overall journey was also smoother for me than most parents, and certainly much smoother than for some, but maybe I did something along the way that helped it turn out like that, at least a little bit. I’d like to think so.

When we very first got back from the hospital, our plan was to have everyone sleeping in the same room together, myself, my wife, and baby in her bassinet next to us. I don’t think any of us had slept well in the hospital, for obvious reasons, so I was really hoping to reclaim that sleep debt as soon as we got home. Unfortunately, baby had other plans. She was not sleeping any better than in the hospital, and if anything, she was sleeping worse. She quickly started crying anytime we tried to leave her in the bassinet and so we took turns trying to console her, exhausted and clueless as to what we could possibly do to help.

Baby did eventually settle down and sleep for a few hours around two or three in the morning. Thankfully, from there she woke up for a bottle then passed out for a few more hours, repeating that cycle a couple of times until about noon. So I actually did manage to get a reasonable amount of sleep—I was interrupted every few hours by bottle time, but fortunately I am someone who has no trouble swiftly falling back asleep once I’ve passed out for the night. This was still better than I’d slept at the hospital, but it was a rockier start than we were hoping for. My wife was trying to go to sleep no later than 8 PM, and while I’m generally a night owl, I left my days of staying up until 2 AM behind me when I graduated from college.

The next couple nights were no better and so I quickly concluded that we would have to change tactics. Everyone sleeping in the same room together was simply not working. I went into this with a mindset that I would do anything possible, within reason, to get us all sleeping well, so I was very willing to try different approaches until I found one that worked. As I think I’ve mentioned previously, I tried sleeping alone with baby on the bed next to me while my wife stayed in another room, but the baby didn’t seem to appreciate this very much. From there I decided to give her a go sleeping in her crib in her own room, by herself.

This produced the best results right away—the first time that I tried it, she fell asleep easily and slept for 4 hours straight without much fuss. Considering she’d been home from the hospital for less than a week, and wasn’t even two weeks old overall, I think this was a pretty major achievement. From what I’ve read, most parents do not leave baby alone in a room by herself for at least a few months, and professionals recommend sleeping in the same room for the first six months. In our case, that would have been patently insane. There is no way that enduring months of sleep hell for no tangible benefit would have made any sense for us. Baby did well being alone in her room in her crib, so that was what we did from then on.

She still had to wake up for her bottle every 3-4 hours but went back to sleep without any trouble. Not every night was as smooth as this but on the whole this was far better than where we were before and I was back to being well-rested in no time. Since I had to get up and interrupt my own rest several times, our “nights” were quite lengthy, but at the end of them I had gotten about as much sleep as I would normally before baby was born. I could have handled things from here if I had to, but my mother-in-law very kindly offered to come stay with us and take care of baby during the night for a while, which we gladly accepted.

This arrangement went smoothly and got us through the initial recovery period until my wife was able to feed and care for baby on her own, approximately 2-3 weeks post-partum (as I mentioned in my first post about becoming a father, my wife had a C-section, so she could not initially help out with baby at all). My mother-in-law then departed and it was up to us to take care of our child as a team for the first time. We agreed that our goal was for each of us to be able to sleep in solid blocks, uninterrupted, if there was any way we could do it.

This is impossible with one person, but with two it is very doable, though you’ll probably have to adjust your sleep schedules a bit. We took a common approach of caring for baby in “shifts”—I was on duty from bedtime until about 3 AM, at which point my wife would take over after going to bed herself around 7 PM if not earlier. Neither of us were working during this time, so this allowed us both to get a full night’s sleep uninterrupted with someone being there to tend to the baby around the clock.

While this might sound like a simple and elegant solution, it meant that I was in charge of our baby for many hours during the night when we would prefer that she be asleep. If she decided not to sleep during that time, it would therefore be my problem. While her sleeping habits had improved greatly in the short time that she’d been with us, I still had to figure out what to do if she decided to have a “bad” night. I quickly decided that trying to console her non-stop would not be viable in this case. We had tried that early on without much effect—sometimes we could get her to calm down a bit, but she would go right back to screaming if we tried to put her down, and at other times she just kept crying regardless. She also hadn’t responded well to my attempts at co-sleeping.

Of course, at some point many parents handle this by simply allowing their child to “cry it out,” commonly referred to as sleep training. My general instinct was to go in this direction, as it seems to me that your options with an infant are just so limited that there is very little choice. If you commit yourself to rush to the child and immediately pick them up as soon as they start making noise, you’ll never get any rest, and perhaps more importantly, the child will also learn that they can stay out of their crib and in your arms indefinitely by just making some noise. That was an association that I absolutely did not want to establish.

Our daughter was only a month old at this point, though. Even for me, that seemed too early to practice what is called “extinction” sleep training, in which you do literally let the child cry it out, no matter how long that takes, with no intervention whatsoever. I settled on a compromise of sorts—if she wanted to cry after I laid her down in her crib, I would let her cry for about twenty minutes, and then if she was still going, I would go in, pick her up, and walk around with her for 5-10 minutes (this seemed to be the activity that she found most comforting). But after that, she’d have to go back down in her crib. Rinse and repeat.

This way I am not abandoning my child to cry for hours on end, but I’m giving myself some breathing room as well. I felt that this was a very important balance to strike, as no one is going to be happy or doing well if one or both parents are exhausted and burnt out. I devised this set-up with the goal of it being something that I could just keep doing indefinitely, all night if I had to, until 3 AM, every night. I never got anywhere near needing to do it that often, but I wanted to come up with something that could handle the worst case scenario and keep me sane, and I think this would have worked in that case.

Once I came up with this, I stuck to it with conviction. I also had (still have, I guess) the belief that consistency would be very important for handling an issue like this. I wanted to establish complete predictability for my daughter. Really, with an infant, this was the only way I could communicate with her in a meaningful way. I wanted to send a very clear message that this is what happens during bedtime and that it doesn’t change. To go along with this goal, I avoided putting her in that room or in her crib at any other time during the day. I also added a white noise machine to the room for her. I am not sure whether this really made any difference, but given the results I think it certainly didn’t hurt, and we still use it.

Once we entered this phase of the sleep journey, baby’s sleep habits followed a very clear progression. She still had some “bad nights” during the first couple weeks of this, by which I mean, she might stay fussy for an hour or two after bedtime. Usually not more than an hour, but I do think we had a couple nights where she would cry intermittently for up to two hours after bedtime. I stuck to my routine with the idea that I might eventually change it if there was no improvement, but I wanted to give it some time to play out first.

However, the “bad nights” quickly disappeared. After the first couple of weeks she almost never stayed awake for more than thirty minutes after going down. As time went on, that decreased further and it became the case that she would usually not cry at all after going into her crib, or if she did, it was for less than ten minutes. By the time she was two months old, I could put her to bed between 7 and 8 PM and then generally have the rest of the night to myself. I have read some real horror stories online about parents trying to deal with baby sleep, and I can say that having this result by two months is absolutely worth the periods of crying that you might have to endure at first.

Of course, every baby is different. Despite only having the one, I’m well aware of that. If you get stuck with a “difficult” baby who refuses to sleep no matter what you do, well, I pity you. A true colic baby is no doubt a miserable experience to care for. But my view is that you should at least try to enforce a serious sleep routine for your child before you give up and let their crying dictate your nights. Sleep deprivation is also a miserable experience, obviously for us adults, and so probably for babies as well. Given how well my approach worked in my case, I would have been crazy to try it any other way.

Closing notes: At first my baby would often wake up for a midnight bottle sometime between bedtime and the 3 AM “shift change.” I definitely think that if your baby wakes up crying in the middle of the night, you should go ahead and give them a bottle and change their diaper (assuming it needs changing, which it usually will). This establishes that crying can get these needs cared for, but crying for no tangible reason will not result in immediate attention (at least after bedtime). As time has gone on baby has slowly phased out this nighttime feeding—eventually she would sleep 5-6 hours before wanting a bottle, now she usually lasts for at least 8. I always tried to give her a bottle right before bed so that if she did cry, it would not be because she was just hungry, and I’ve stayed in that habit.

I also do not think that you need to be extremely strict or rigid in exactly when the child goes to bed. Of course you want to aim for a general range that stays consistent, which for us is approximately 7-9 PM, with sometime between 7 and 8 being ideal. I do not expect baby to “get sleepy” before putting her down, although sometimes she does and that’s fine—but the point of bedtime is that she goes into the crib regardless of circumstance. The result of this has been that I can put her down during this time range and she will usually quiet down and sleep normally no matter what was going on beforehand. I’ve had days when she was asleep napping at this time and I woke her up for her bedtime bottle, then put her down; and other days when she’s been upset and crying when I put her down; and in both cases she went to sleep and did just fine.

I am also still willing to go in and pick her up and walk around with her if she is still crying 20-30 minutes after bedtime, but I believe I’ve only had to do this once in the past two months, and the one time that I did do it, she passed out immediately afterwards. I suppose my final thought regarding baby sleep, which probably applies to anything having to do with parenting, is: Be prepared. I knew this was going to be a challenge going in and I went into it expecting that there might be problems. I also went into it with the mindset that I would be willing to try different things and ultimately go with whatever worked. I think if you have that approach, you’re going to do far better than if you don’t know what to expect and get blindsided.