It's a strange thing in our culture that success as a parent is often defined, for babies anyway, as getting your kid to sleep through the night - 12 hrs without a peep from your bub is the goal. In their own bed too.
The pressure is real - one of the questions I get asked regularly is "how is he sleeping?" and "are you getting much rest?". Most of these are asked with good intentions, but it can be hard to always be answering in the negative. You only have to look at the baby section of any bookstore to see the proliferation of experts guaranteeing their methods for training babies to sleep.
 |
| Oscar and Mike enjoying a nap |
Lack of sleep is hard at the best of times, and I certainly don't blame anyone for chasing a decent night's rest. However I wonder if one of the implications of our cultural setup - where a mum is left alone with the kids for long periods of time during the day - means that sleep becomes more important than it would otherwise be. After all, looking after littlies all day on your own is exhausting - who wouldn't be craving uninterrupted sleep to cope with it all? Perhaps sleep has become a bit of a holy grail of motherhood as we are left literally holding the baby during the day!
We have such a drive to present as 'coping' as well - and this gets hard to maintain without solid rest. Therefore it can be easy to push for more sleep - trying to teach your baby that they don't need you there to fall asleep, they don't need cuddles in the middle of the night, and that they need to develop a little bit of independence - right when they are at their most dependent!
It's crazy. And easily leads to frustration, resentment and stress.
It really goes against the grain of what's natural for lots of babies. Mine certainly need me overnight! Michael sleeps on his own for the first half of the night, then in with me for the remainder. He usually feeds 2 or 3 times. And that's ok. Yes, I'm zonked. But he's only a little bub - it won't be like this forever and for now I'm content with letting him know I'm there for him when the sun goes down. I'll often feed him to sleep, which is breaking all sorts of rules if I want him to sleep more independently. But you know what? It works! It gets him to sleep. And I don't have a problem with that for now.
I think we need to redefine success as a mother - am I responding to my baby's needs? Am I taking steps to make sure we get as much rest as we can, without it being a painful process? Am I teaching my baby that I will be there for them whenever they need me?
I think it's ok to help your baby learn how to fall asleep. It doesn't come naturally to them all and there are great benefits from getting extra zzzz's. Let's not force it though - far better to get less sleep, but teach our babies gently. And to count success in other ways!
(Incidentally, another big measure of 'success' in our culture is breastfeeding (rather than formula). Full night's rest and breastfeeding don't often actually go together - breastfed babies routinely need night feeds anywhere up to a year, if not longer for some. So can formula fed babies for that matter. So it's a bit silly, and hard for mothers, to put the pressure on to get babies to sleep through the night, when other cultural standards don't match up.)
