Episode 13: Sleep School
IN THIS EPISODE
paula’s story
Sleep training, potty training, just the word training, never really sat right with me. In my opinion, you train a dog, not an infant. Maya, my first, “slept” in her bassinet for about six weeks, and I lightly use the word sleep. She wanted to be on me most of the time. Sleeping became more of a family affair until she was six months old because she slept in our bed, and I would switch her from side to side at the all-you-can-drink Paula Milk Buffet. At this point, we had introduced solid foods, and I was told that she no longer needed to be fed at night for nutrition purposes and that if sleep training were something we were considering, now would be the time to do it. Of course, the first thing I did was consult my friends who had done it before me. Most of them swore by it and told me that it’s almost a necessary chapter in the story of motherhood. However, there was one, and there always is one, that never did it and had her reasons, which she explained and made total sense to me. Of course, being human, the person who didn’t think it was a good idea was the one that stuck with me. She had told me that it was selfish, more for the parents than for the child, and that letting your child cry when they need their parents at such a young age was inhumane. I felt torn and conflicted; obviously, I didn’t want to scar my infant for the rest of her life by letting her cry until she fell asleep! It turns out I REALLY knew nothing about it all.
We finally decided that we were going to “sleep train” Maya, and although I know many mothers who have courageously taken it upon themselves, I reached out for support. I didn’t want to do all the reading and research, not because I wasn’t interested in learning about it but because I didn’t have the patience. Or maybe it was because I didn’t trust myself in doing this as a first-time mother with the information I had gathered from the internet. I knew some specialists do this as a profession, and if I was going to put Maya through that, it was better to do it the right way with a guarantee that she would indeed sleep independently. That was my thought process. My husband Matt spoke to some of his colleagues who had older children who were successfully “sleep trained,” so we were referred to specialists with whom we continue to have a very close relationship.
What did I learn? That “sleep training” isn’t training at all. It’s teaching my girls the skill to sleep independently, like a muscle that must be developed to work efficiently when sleep cycles terminate. Something we all do on a nightly basis.
Katherine’s story
I had asked Katherine if the notion of sleep training was something that she knew before having children, and she hadn’t. It’s one of those things you discover when it’s “time” and get out of the “newborn stage.” She explains that once that time came, she felt she needed to teach her baby to sleep independently from her. It’s not something she had planned beforehand, but given her situation, she felt like it was a no-brainer. As Katherine tells us, the newborn days, for her, were a mixture of troubleshooting and crisis management. Between nursing and sleeping, she experienced challenges on both fronts and needed to smoothen the cycle to get some much-needed sleep. Katherine goes into more depth on when she began to “sleep train” her girls and explains that her second needed to be taught as early as four months as it was an emergency for her mental health and also the well-being of the household.
Interestingly, Katherine believes that teaching independent sleep is an investment. It is a tool that we give our kids when they are around six months old to prepare them for the future and help them transition from basinet to crib or from our room to their room.
“once they are sleeping their nights, you get your life back…”
Teaching sleep, Katherine mentions, is a constant transition, a constant evolution as our kids grow. By no means is it a one-time thing you do when they are six months old, and you’re done for life. However, since she started, she has felt more confident about the future by building this foundation for her kids and also for herself. Nevertheless, it was not a walk in the park, especially for her second at only four months, as Katherine felt she was still so young and the guilt of needing to “sleep train” her was still very much present.
“How am i doing this to her?…”
After consulting her pediatrician, Katherine got peace of mind and the go-ahead to start “sleep training” from a medical standpoint. Her baby, waking up every forty-five minutes to one hour, needed to be taught to connect her sleep cycles because waking up that often was no longer sustainable. Of course, they would not make her do a marathon, as she describes it, and put her to sleep and expect twelve-hour nights, but connecting four to five hours at her age seemed acceptable.
Throughout our conversation, Katherine repeated something that I myself repeated to myself many times: teaching sleep is not something we are doing to our children but skills we are teaching for our children. Had I known this when I had Maya, I would have spared myself a lot of that guilt I felt in the process.