Baby insomnia

“Whatever method you choose, the key is to be consistent.”

Such reads the sage advice in the so-called “sleep bible,” Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child. The author and child sleep researcher explains that whether you let your baby cry himself to sleep or soothe him at each cry, the key to the whole family getting some semblance of enough sleep is to “be consistent.” And being consistent is the one thing that Colin and I are consistently failing at.

But you can’t really blame us. Being a parent these days puts you squarely in the middle of a vociferous and highly polarized debate that leaves you dizzy with indecision.

To oversimplify, one side, made up mainly of mainstream medical practitioners and most of our parents, says that babies need to learn how to put themselves to sleep. This requires, to some degree or another, letting the little one cry herself to sleep. After a few tortuous days of this, babies get the idea and can miraculously put themselves to sleep without any intervention. This side makes the very compelling case that, as difficult as it is to hear your precious baby cry, in the end they learn a valuable life skill and, perhaps even more importantly, you regain enough sleep to stop being a zombie and start being a happier and more attentive parent during the day. They argue that a few days of persistence and perseverance will be rewarded with years of better sleep for everyone. And don’t worry, they say, our parents let us cry and we’re just fine.

The other side vehemently disagrees calling this practice cruel and unnatural. This “attachment parenting” camp, also generally advocates co-sleeping, long time breast feeding and wearing your baby is a sling close to your body. They take more of an anthropological view, drawing greatly on the wisdom of indigenous cultures as well as new research showing the benefits of many of these practices. They argue, quite convincingly, that babies are born expecting the world to look like it has for the past 10,000 years, not the modern world of individualism and personal space. They are hard wired to expect the continual attention they have received for millennia when they slept near their mother’s warm body and were worn on her back during the day with constant access to her milk. This camp notes that the reason it’s physically torturous to hear you little baby cry all night is because mothers are evolutionarily programmed to respond to these cries and babies to expect this response. Ignoring your little one for extended periods unduly stresses them. It may be taxing to respond to every cry, but in a few short years when your children have firmly established their independence and you are at least a bother and at most an embarrassment, you will look back nostalgically at the tender intimacy of these nighttime feedings.

I find either perspective more compelling depending on my level of sleep deprivation and frustration. And I have thus been reliably inconsistent in my response to poor little Caleb’s cries. But I had never totally ignored his cries, until a particularly desperate week, when Colin and I decided to go for broke and try the full “cry it out” method. This was, as expected, torture. I knew I couldn’t take hearing him cry, but – bowing to the sleep-researchers greater good argument – I resigned myself to endure it for a period of time. My mom friends all described 2-3 painful nights followed by the sweet relief of a baby who could not only put himself to sleep, but who slept through the night. Sounded pretty good!

Well, after 5 nights of hour and half crying bouts and only mild success, we, very despondently, gave up on this experiment. I was willing to ignore his cries (at times locking myself in the bathroom with the fan on to fight the compulsion to go to him) if there was some payoff. And he was at times able to cry himself to sleep in a tolerable amount of time (15 minutes or less) and could nod off with only a wimper after a feed. But it wasn’t consistent, and, in the end, the improvement wasn’t dramatic enough to warrant all that blasted crying.

So, that left us right where we started. I’ll reliably feed him after a long stretch of sleep, but if he wakes up just hours after we put him down or right before the sun comes up, Colin and I reliably look at each other frozen by the “let him cry or go to him” indecision. And then the voice wearing a lab coat tells me to let him cry and the voice in a dashiki tells me to go to him.
It goes something like this:

Lab coat: Look, you’re teaching him how to go to sleep. If you go to him you’re only depriving him of an opportunity to learn to soothe himself.

Dashiki: Don’t you hear your baby suffering? It’ll only take a few enjoyable minutes of nursing and cuddling to put him back to a sound sleep.

LC: But that’ll only encourage dependency and it’ll take that much longer to get you all sleeping through the night. Doesn’t a full 8 hours of sleep sound heavenly?

D: Listen to your baby, Kim. He’s simply expressing his needs as he knows how to and you are more than capable of fulfilling them. He sounds really sad.

Me: OK you two. I’ll just wait 15 minutes and if he’s still crying I’ll go in there.

LC: OK, but you’re just teaching him that if he cries for15 minutes, he’ll get fed.

D: Well, if you’re going to get him anyway and waiting just teaches him to cry longer, than you may as well get him now and spare both of you 15 minutes of anguish.

LC: Hey, he’s not in “anguish.” Our parents let us cry and there’s no evidence that crying leads to any long term damage, you hippie.

D: Then why are half the people we know in therapy!? Isn’t it entirely possible that this is doing some damage? Everyone knows what happens to kids at the extreme end of neglect. Like those babies from Romanian orphanages who become semi-psychotic solely due to their treatment in infancy despite the loving home they are adopted into. You - of all people - should appreciate what a delicate developmental stage this is.

LC: You’re stupid.

D: You’re cruel.

Me: Stop arguing!!

Caleb: Waaahhh!!!!!!!.

Me: Arghhhhh. Colin, what should I do?

Colin: Kim, I really don’t think you should go in there.

Me: OK. (pause) I’m going in….