The Natural Baby Sleep Solution: Use Your Child's Internal Sleep Rhythms for Better Nights and Naps
192
The Natural Baby Sleep Solution: Use Your Child's Internal Sleep Rhythms for Better Nights and Naps
192Paperback
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Overview
- For babies aged two weeks to one year
- Lessons in sleep independence and solutions to common problems, such as your baby waking up too early, getting a second wind before bedtime, confusing day and night, and more
- Includes a guided journal for recording your baby’s sleep signals and keeping track of naps and bedtimes
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780761187479 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Workman Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2016 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Sales rank: | 1,146,698 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction:More Sleep, Less Stress All living creatures—including human beings, dogs, elephants, fish, insects, and even amoebas—are designed to follow natural cycles of rest and activity. Until the widespread use of electric lighting in the late nineteenth century, most humans experienced their rest and activity cycles naturally, going to bed when darkness fell and waking with the sun. Babies and children were permitted to nap when they felt sleepy, and they were allowed to remain asleep as long as necessary. Today, however, technological advances and our packed daily agendas have led us to live out of phase with our natural rhythms. Sleep has become something we squeeze into the time that’s left after predawn commutes and late-night laundry. Over the last several decades, as we’ve pushed ourselves to work harder and play longer on less sleep, we’ve demanded that our babies, too, conform to artificial schedules. In the hustle and bustle of life, we’ve lost sight of two simple facts: how much sleep our babies need, and how to help our babies get it. Yet sleep is one of your baby’s most important jobs in the first year of life, and helping your baby sleep is one of your most important jobs as a parent. When you give your baby’s sleep needs top priority, you give him a head start on cognitive development and emotional intelligence. Good sleep will help your baby grow strong, with plenty of energy for conquering the world. Without sufficient sleep, our babies suffer, and we parents don’t function optimally either. Luckily, contemporary parents can take advantage of a growing body of knowledge about the internal clocks that govern sleep and waking. This book and its N.A.P.S. plan, which is for expectant parents and for parents of babies up to one year of age (and, to a lesser extent, for toddlers), will show you how to follow one of your baby’s natural body clocks. This clock is present from birth and goes strong through the first year, and it helps your baby become sleepy at predictable times. Once you know how to look for these sleep rhythms, you can let them guide your baby into sleeping deeply, soundly, and for longer periods of time, preparing him to master the lifelong art of good sleep. (Note: If your baby is nine months, ten months, or even closing in on his first birthday, you may wonder if this book is worth your time. It is. Within days or even hours after starting the program, you’ll see an improvement in your baby’s sleep. Better still, you will set the stage for better sleep habits in the toddler years just ahead.)My Story I’ve written this book for you—whether you are a parent-to-be who’s heard the horror stories about sleep deprivation or a new parent wondering how you can improve your child’s sleep—because I’ve been there myself. When I was pregnant with my first child, I never expected that my baby would have trouble sleeping. That’s because sleep has been my lifelong interest and the focus of my career. In childhood, I was fascinated by dreams; in high school, I was curious about my bouts of insomnia (as I later learned, this problem was caused by predictable changes in an adolescent’s biological clock). In college and then while pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience, I studied in more detail the devastating results of sleep loss as well as sleep’s delicate interaction with psychiatric states and medical illnesses, including cancer. As a neuroscientist focusing on sleep research and disorders, I’ve spent years working in sleep clinics and academic institutions; nearly every day of my working life has been devoted to the premise that good sleep makes life better. I’ve seen how inadequate or interrupted sleep has consequences for almost every aspect of a person’s life. So as a scientist, a woman, and a mother-to-be, I was dedicated to good sleep habits. How could I, with my years of specialized training, have trouble getting my baby to sleep's In school I’d been taught that a baby’s sleep starts to organize itself after a few weeks and that most babies are sleeping six hours at a stretch by the time they are six weeks old. The textbooks say that by four months, most are sleeping all the way through the night. “It won’t be an easy few months,” I thought, “but I can handle it.” Besides, there were other worries, including breastfeeding and finding child care, competing for my attention as an expectant parent. Did I have a surprise coming! When my baby, Maddie, arrived, I found that my fancy training did not help me one bit. Sometimes Maddie seemed to want to nurse for astoundingly long and frequent periods; other times she seemed to want a pacifier; sometimes she wanted to be held for hours on end; sometimes she wailed inconsolably and I simply couldn’t figure out how to help her. I had steeled myself for disruption and crazy hours and crying, but I had hoped that at least I would be able to interpret my baby’s needs and meet them. Even as the months went on and Maddie moved from the newborn phase, I had difficulty telling when she might need to nap or fall asleep in the evening. At night, Maddie would sometimes sleep for eight hours at a stretch; other nights were much harder, and as a scientist it bothered me that I didn’t know why. Like many parents, I developed a set of superstitions about what helped my baby sleep. “The pom-pom worm soothes her to sleep,” I’d think, or, “she sleeps better with Mozart playing on the stereo.” Then I’d be disappointed when those strategies failed to work on subsequent days. I consulted with pediatricians, experienced parents, and infant-sleep books. “Newborn babies sleep at random,” the experts shrugged. Other parents counseled me not to worry about when or how much my baby slept. “Babies know how to get all the sleep they need,” they said. It struck me as odd that no one had anything more concrete to tell new parents. Because of this advice, I didn’t even think to look for a pattern in my baby’s sleep. I just kept on going, month after month, thrilled with my daughter but also struggling to make it through each long day and night. Then one morning, when Maddie was about three and a half months old, I noticed that she looked tired and ready for a nap. This surprised me because she’d awakened from a relatively long period of night sleep less than two hours earlier. I didn’t expect her to be ready for a nap yet. I remembered that Maddie had shown similar behavior before, and I began to think about this. I looked at the clock, recalled the time that Maddie had awakened in the morning (about 90 minutes earlier), and realized that Maddie’s fatigue corresponded with a well-known biological rhythm called the basic rest and activity cycle, or the BRAC. I’d studied the BRAC in graduate school but had never considered applying it to infant sleep. Had anyone else? I looked at the research. There are many high-quality studies on the BRAC as it relates to several human phenomena, and its foremost researcher had tracked it in his own infant’s cycles of wakefulness and sleep. The logical connections between the two were irresistibly strong. At the time, however, this information was iterally academic to me. In the informal laboratory of Maddie’s nursery—the only lab that really mattered to me at the time—it became clear to me that my daughter showed a distinct and regular biological sleep rhythm. She was not, as I’d been told, sleepy at random times. She became fatigued on a highly predictable basis. Knowing when my baby was going to be sleepy made other aspects of my life more manageable. When I used my new knowledge of Maddie’s sleep rhythms to identify the times that she was ready for sleep, I found that nap times and bedtimes were more predictable and less stressful for both of us. Because Maddie was getting more of the sleep she needed, when she needed it, the mysterious, inconsolable fussiness vanished almost overnight. Her naps were longer, and her nights were greatly improved, with fewer wakings. Although there remained times when Maddie cried (after all, she was still a baby), she was much happier—and I felt that I understood her cries and her needs more clearly. Other people were able to spot the rhythm in my baby as well. This was true of my brother-in-law, Kevin, who had always felt that babies somehow didn’t like him. It seemed to him that every time he tried to hold a baby, the baby started to cry. He would then sheepishly return the child to her parents. When Maddie came along, Kevin wanted to help me out, but he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to take good care of her. If you’re expecting your first child, you may have similar worries about your lack of experience. But when I taught Kevin about Maddie’s sleep rhythm, he felt for the first time that he had a useful guide to infant behavior. He appreciated knowing when she was going to become sleepy, how to interpret the signs of fatigue correctly, and how to take action when those signs appeared. He was no longer afraid or mystified when she cried. Suddenly, Uncle Kevin loved being a babysitter! It was Kevin and other relatives who insisted that I share my knowledge with other parents. I was skeptical that my services were needed. After all, I wasn’t the person who discovered the BRAC, and I wasn’t the first to notice its presence in babies. Surely other sleep experts were making this information available to parents already. I nevertheless called a local hospital and asked about participating in their popular lecture series. The director begged me to send a proposal right away. “Sleep is the number one problem for new parents, and many pediatricians don’t feel comfortable talking about it.” In fact, she explained, pediatricians had stopped giving talks there because the vast majority of questions from parents were about sleep problems in babies, and the doctors felt they didn’t have the answers. It turns out that most pediatricians receive very little training in infant sleep problems. When I gave my first talk, I discovered that other parents were just as hungry as I had been for practical information that would help their babies sleep. Parents also appreciated learning some simple facts about the benefits of sleep, how the sleeping brain regulates itself, and how knowledge of sleep states offers solutions to common problems, such as a sleeping baby’s inability to transition from your arms to his crib without waking. Since then, I’ve developed the N.A.P.S. plan, a program that’s easy for sleep-deprived parents to follow, and I’ve continued to talk and lecture throughout California and around the United States. The response has been incredible. When I took an informal survey of parents who’ve attended my classes, 85 percent of those responding reported that their babies began to sleep more hours and more regularly when they followed my advice. A significant number were distressed mothers whose babies had been sleeping no more than an hour or two at a time, day and night—an all-too-common phenomenon. A week or so after starting my program, their babies started to nap well and sleep through the night. These parents found the N.A.P.S. plan to be gentle, effective, and easy to implement. As a mother, I understand that no sleep program will work if it asks you to act against your instincts. My plan can be tailored to your parenting style and to your baby’s personality. You can use it and co-sleep if you choose, or you can have your baby sleep in a bassinet or crib. If you want your baby to learn to fall asleep independently at an appropriate age, the N.A.P.S. plan can help you there too. It can also correct a variety of sleep problems in infants up to one year of age. These include: ● Resistance to falling asleep ● Frequent night wakings ● Day/night confusion ● Short naps ● Unpredictable naps ● Difficulty sleeping anywhere other than in a car seat, swing, stroller, or your arms When you follow your baby’s natural rhythms, your child will sleep more and fuss less. When awake, he’ll be more content, alert, and playful. You can be confident in knowing that your baby’s sleep needs are being met. If you’re a first-time parent, that confidence can mark a turning point, as you go from feeling overwhelmed and maybe a little frantic to discovering that you’re calmer and more comfortable in your new role. And as you’ll learn in the coming chapters, sleep—and plenty of it—is important for the development of a baby’s body and brain. The N.A.P.S. plan will not only make you and your baby happier, it will allow your baby to get the deep slumber necessary for a lifetime of good health. It’s easier than you might think to help your baby get restorative and more predictable sleep. Let’s get started.