Walking Through the Fire: What it feels like to lean into the sleep needs of your baby instead of resist them
A while ago I responded to a mom in an online forum who was feeling overwhelmed about the fatigue and sleep deprivation she was experiencing with her 9 month old. Nine months is a notoriously challenging time for parents, as babies experience a peak in night wakings and an increase in need for support in falling (and staying) asleep.
(Photo: my son, age 1 year)
Like most of the parents I work with, this mom was not interested in cry it out. And also like most of my clients, she was tired and not seeing an end in sight. She was considering gentle sleep training but still didn’t have her heart in it —she didn’t want to change things if this was a normal blip in an otherwise general shift towards more and more independent sleep.
Nor did she want to be left wondering if, in a few months, she’d still be in the same place as now: tired, grumpy, and uncertain if she was supposed to do something to “fix” sleep.
There are many parents who feel confident that moving forward with sleep training is the best course for them. But many others —the ones who reach out to me— lean heavily towards looking for alternatives.
However, with the culture of sleep training as a parenting rite of passage, they often feel conflicted, and uncertain. They want to honour natural sleep development while also not losing the fine balance they are trying to establish with their own sleep and ability to get through the day.
SUPPORTING PARENTS WITHOUT SLEEP TRAINING:
How you approach supporting your baby’s sleep is your choice.
I believe the evidence supports responsive conscious parenting as a choice that brings us to the same end goal we all have — a happy kiddo who has a good relationship with sleep; and a happy parent who feels good about how they are parenting through it — while also showing our babies that we respect their needs.
My goal is to help parents understand how baby sleep development unfolds, and to give support, validation, and strategies for those choosing to forge a non-sleep-training path.
I am so grateful to be able to help move parents towards better sleep without sleep training —to explore the stories we tell ourselves about sleep; to pay attention to our babies’ natural rhythms in order to establish routines; and to navigate through the challenges with grace, while not always pushing significant change in our babies.
In fact, the biggest change is often perception of the problem: I recall one lovely client of mine telling me that after she had worked with me she was still, but was feeling much happier and more confident despite the fatigue! Although I don’t wish sleepless nights on anyone, what a wonderful place to be as a parent! Her child will arrive at independent sleep all the same…and arriving there with a parent who feels better about the process is a win!
Of course, a good night’s sleep is important too: I remember how excruciatingly tired I was in the early days.
Often there are ways to get more sleep and make sleep easier without expecting babies to do things they are not neurologically or developmentally mature enough to do.
Sometimes babies are more ready for a shift than we think they are. It’s amazing what validation without judgment, and what reassurance rather than advice, can do to reframe the entire situation.
“BUT IF I’M NOT WORKING ON SLEEP TRAINING THE BABY, THEN I FEEL HELPLESS AND DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.”
All the challenges and resistance we experience with sleep remind me of Gordon Neufeld’s concept of futility, the pressure and frustration we feel when things do not work out the way we want. He talks about it in the context of children needing to feel futility to work through emotional maturation and resilience.
Futility also happens to parents:
As parents, we feel futility when we realize we cannot “control” our baby’s sleep (or hunger, or when they will roll, or when they say their first word). Sure, we can adjust, nudge, encourage, promote, invite, and set the stage. But the sooner we feel the futility of not necessarily being able to “make” sleep happen, the more our own resistance (and consequently the resistance of our baby!) melts away and makes room for some kind of subtle contentedness (tired nonetheless, but content). We can pass through the challenge instead of battle it. We can walk through the fire and out the other side.
“MAKING” SLEEP HAPPEN VERSUS ACCEPTING FUTILITY: DOES IT MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
Many parents who come to me are working so hard to make sleep skills emerge before their time. What they are doing feels more like going up a down elevator than making real progress. The relief parents can feel when they realize they can meet the need right as it is, without making it into something that it is not, is incredibly empowering and can be such a relief.
In contrast, so often, the harder we try to muscle our way through sleep challenges, the bigger they tend to become. Our children feel our resistance. They know we do not want to be there. They sense we are waiting to bolt out of the room. They pick up on our frustration, impatience, disappointment, and resentment. Their attachment radars are on high alert, and our own resistance becomes futile!
What if, instead, we stopped resisting the sleep challenge. It would look and feel a lot like when we wish our own babies wouldn’t resist sleep itself sometimes!
Like so many of my clients, this particular mother of a 9 month old that I mentioned at the beginning of this article wondered if it really does get better. Would her baby ever sleep through the night, every night, without help? And if so, how many more weeks, or months until then? (And did she really even want to know?).
Many of the parents on the message board suggested 2.5 years (as a rough average) for sleeping independently (falling asleep on their own, sleeping 5+ or all through the night, consistently enough to feel like a new plateau of sleep development has been reached).
This age seems excruciating long to those in the middle of a sleep challenge. I would not have wanted to know this when my 4 month old was waking frequently! (I didn’t want to think past next week!). And I looked forward to that magic age of 6 months, even though the magic shift never really materialized, and I found out later that there is nothing particularly magic or expectant about normal sleep development at 6 months, afterall! (It really is baby steps towards sleep….a long and pace-filled journey with lots of ups and downs.
AND YET SWEET SLEEP COMES ONE WAY OR ANOTHER….
And yet all three of my boys, regardless of how restless or peacefully they slept as infants, reached a new milestone of peaceful sleep by 2.5 years where they welcomed their predictable bedtime routines, with little resistance, and where our support dropped away to a much more minor role. (It continued to shift, of course, but if any of you reading this are rock climbers, the shift at 2.5 years was like clipping in half way up the side of the mountain….no matter how far down we could fall, we’d never fall past that point…ignoring illnesses or highly unusual nights, we’d never have wake ups as frequent or long as we experienced in the younger days.)
And so, I wanted to both support this mom and shine a light on what good things were to come if she continued to respond to her baby’s needs over the coming months and years. So when will things get better? This was my answer:
In the crux of an intense age for sleep, it can be hard to see the light.
And it can make 2 years seem like a really really really long time. It is not a straight trajectory. And because of its ups and downs, any decisions my husband and I made in the early days to sleep train didn’t last long, before we decided we would continue to lean in and go with the flow. This has allowed my partner and I to meet the need, and connect in unexpected ways: to team up, to tag team, to smile and make eye contact with the joy that comes on the nights when they fall asleep easily, to be creative about spending time together and enjoying moments that may look different than we expected but that are, none the less, meaningful connections.
There is no doubt that the first two years are intense. But they are not as intense as the present moment you are experiencing right now with this particularly challenging period of time. Things ebb and flow, and we ebb and flow with them.
There are sweet spots ahead, but like knowing our children will be living with us for the next 18 years, it's not the end point that we focus on and that needs to be in sight; it’s the gratitude for what each day brings (a bit more sleep? An easier nap? A smile, a giggle, a diaper that doesn't leak! Tea with a friend, getting through a movie without having to run upstairs for a wee one who wakes up sooner than expected....). We can’t control when these things will happen, but we can celebrate them when they do.
Small joys, small steps, all with the purpose of growing them up to be caring, empathetic, and confident adults --all in good time.
Now there are times (plenty of them) when more intervention and support for your baby is needed. I talk often with parents about “pushing the boulders off the path to independent sleep”. These boulders are things that we can change that get in the way of sleep development.
Some of these boulders include:
figuring out inconsistent cues
addressing sensory issues
identifying and responding to temperament factors, especially related to children who tend to be anxious or who are considered “high needs”, “spirited”, or highly sensitive
colic
food sensitivities
reflux
appreciating wake windows, sleep pressure, and natural rhythm to shape our day to optimize sleep
etc.
And some boulders that I work to help parents remove have nothing to do with baby:
doubt (in our parenting, in what we should do, in whether it will all work out)
lack of confidence
pressure from family to sleep train, even though mom doesn’t want to
a lack of support
sleep deprivation
uncertainty
wanting to understand sleep development better
contradictory information about baby sleep
the way we were raised and supported in sleep ourselves as infants
and the stories we tell ourselves about sleep
lack of consistent messages around sleep in the media and from health care providers
feeling uncertain how to be an “alpha” parent (a parent who still responds with an open heart and conscious parenting, but who feels confident in the boundaries they have established over time)
a plethora of options that makes it hard to decide on a course of action
family circumstances that need exploring to improve family function
set up of the sleep environment that ends up making sleep more difficult
feeling stuck with “the way things are”, rather than feeling ok with how things are right now, and what we have control over in helping things shift over time
So, in the end, what does this mean for you, tired, and sleep deprived, wondering what tonight will bring? Or next week?
IS IT REALLY THAT LONG BEFORE MY BABY CAN FALL ASLEEP ON THEIR OWN?
Whether your baby is sleeping in a developmentally typical way or not, sleep in the first two years can be tough (punctuated with blissfully easy nights that leave you wondering what magic steps you can take again to get a repeat performance!). Whether there are many things that we can change to improve sleep, or whether there are shifts in perception or expectation depends on your own family’s circumstances, and approach to sleep.
But one thing is certain. Regardless of the cause for reaching out, parents who get support, validation, non-judgmental perspectives, insights, and knowledge can get through the challenge with more grace than those who feel they must be martyrs to be good, responsive, attachment-based parents.
We really weren’t ever meant to do this alone.
*Postscript: This was a challenging article to write! I seem to pick doozies lately. It comes at a time when I can see the isolation of COVID-19 having an impact on the usual “go to” supports that can make challenging sleep tolerable, and when pressure is high and demands are high too. Ultimately, I hope that wherever you are in your sleep journey, and however you choose to reach out for support, you can choose with confidence, and welcome support to help you through, in whatever form that takes.
To read another perspective on natural sleep development, you can take a peak at a short article and link to an interview I did for a nature summit here.
To talk about what sleep support from me looks like, go here or email me back.
With warmth and best wishes,
Heather