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Why a wakeful baby isn't a problem

Night waking is a family problem, not a baby-behaviour problem. Here's how best to deal with it

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Originally published in Today's Parent February 2012

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If your little one wakes up at night, sleep experts call it a “problem.” And if you don’t address it, they predict all sorts of potential consequences, from childhood-long sleep issues all the way up to “compromised neurobehavioural functioning” and other unhappy endings.

Maybe it’s because I’m “just” a parent, and a night-waking veteran at that, but I see it differently. To me, night waking is the parents’ problem, not the baby’s problem. I’ve talked to dozens of sleep-seeking parents over the years.They don’t say, “My kid’s life is totally messed up by night waking.” They say, “My life is messed up.”

That meshes with the findings from some academic research I’m involved in: a study of mothers with babies and toddlers six to 24 months old, led by psychologist Lynn Loutzenhiser of the University of Regina. From the moms’ accounts, we found that 72 percent of their kids were not sleeping through the night, and 53 percent were waking two or more times most nights. According to the criteria researchers use, half of these night wakers had a “sleep problem.” Yet only one-quarter of the moms described their children’s sleep as a “problem.”

So there’s a disconnect between the experts’ and the moms’ views of what constitutes problem sleep, which is interesting. But I want to focus on the differences between those moms who did and those who didn’t rate their children’s night walking as troublesome. It partly had to do with the intensity of the night waking — how often and for how long the baby woke up, and how long it took him to fall asleep at bedtime. But two of the big factors related to how mom was doing — specifically, whether she felt she was getting enough sleep and could function during the daytime. Women who did were half as likely to call the night waking a problem than those who did not. No surprise there, except perhaps to those sleep experts who insist on seeing night waking as a baby-behaviour issue.

For us parents, I think the findings suggest two things. First, how night waking affects you is important — at least as important as your child’s sleep behaviour, if not more so. In most cases, the kids are fine in the end; babies generally get their sleep one way or another, and I defy anyone to look at a bunch of 10-year-olds and tell me which kids were good sleepers as babies and which weren’t. Sleep experts hint darkly at long-term risks connected to night waking, but none of the studies they cite makes a direct link between the two.
If night waking is having a significant impact on you, though, that in itself is a legitimate reason for getting help or doing whatever you feel you have to do (and that might include some form of sleep training) to ease that.

Second, if you can find a way to live with night waking, one that allows you to get enough rest and function during the day (napping, going to bed early, trading sleep-ins with your partner), that’s a legitimate solution, even if you don’t “fix” your baby’s “sleep behaviour.” Night waking ends eventually, almost no matter what parents do or don’t do.

Focusing on your own well-being may also help you banish the toxic mix of guilt and self-doubt that can be one of the biggest stressors parents of night wakers have to deal with. Once I stopped kicking myself over the night waking, it was a little easier to cope.
Night waking is a family problem, not a baby-behaviour problem.

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