Blanket solutions: kids & sleep
Tips from the pros on getting your kids, and yourself, a peaceful night's rest
It’s practically all you think about. You read books on how to make it happen or how to improve the little you’re getting. You use soft lighting, sweet music, specially scented baths — anything that might help. Sadly, getting enough seems like a dream to a lot of new parents whose children shun shut-eye. Sleep: Who knew it could be so elusive?
But elusive doesn’t mean impossible. There are ways to get your children to sleep better, making for more restful nights for the whole family. We asked the experts to shed some light on kids’ most common sleep problems — falling asleep, staying asleep and sleeping in their own beds. Here are their varying views that you can take, leave or modify to suit your family.
Falling Asleep
Babies
If there’s one thing the pros agree on it’s this: Newborn babies will sleep whenever, wherever and for as long as they like. And there’s nothing parents can do about it. “Newborns have no sense of day and night,” says Cathryn Tobin, a Toronto paediatrician and author of The Lull-a-Baby Sleep Plan: The Soothing, Superfast Way to Help Your Newborn Sleep Through the Night. “They have no circadian rhythm until around six weeks.”
What happens after this, though, is a matter of some debate. “Once babies are around six to eight weeks and are interactive with their parents,” says Tobin, “that’s the time to start establishing good sleep habits.”
Those habits include starting a nighttime routine where you put a full, comfortable baby into his own crib — awake but drowsy. If he fusses, Tobin suggests talking softly to him, rubbing his back and, if necessary, picking him up, comforting him before putting him back, awake, in his crib and trying again. “I’m not implying that you’re leaving your baby to cry it out,” she says. “Far from it. It’s a learning opportunity. Babies know how to sleep, but they don’t know how to fall asleep. This is a process. They’re going to learn bit by bit. It’s going to take more than a few days, but they’ll get there.”
Bonny Reichert, author of In Search of Sleep: Straight Talk About Babies, Toddlers and Night Waking, agrees that children do eventually learn to fall asleep on their own, but disagrees that they need to learn so young. “Sure, maybe they can physically do it, but there’s more to it than that,” she says. “There’s temperament, the type of household they’re in, the parents’ wants — all kinds of factors.” Reichert also points out that keeping a sleepy baby awake at the breast is nearly impossible. “I was certainly never able to do it,” says the mother of three. “And why would you deny yourself the lovely experience of your young baby sleeping in your arms?”
But for older babies? “Once they get into the six- to nine-month range, they’re more aware, they stay up longer, they may fight sleep,” says Reichert. “But most parents sort of muddle through. They find something that works — like rubbing their baby’s back until he settles down. There are people out there for whom sleep training works and works early. And to them I say, ‘Great! You’re lucky!’ But it’s not for everyone.”
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What do you think?