The entire idea of Scout and sleeping makes me nervous. I will admit that I feel much more comforted in this with Michael and I deciding on co-sleeping, feeling confident this will give us all more closeness and rest, but still I worry that I don’t really know just how Scout will sleep and what that entire thing will look like. Enter Dr. Sears, who I have mentioned before on vaccinations and Attachment parenting, with an excellent article on the topic of infant sleep.
I especially liked this comment of Dr. Sears: “An important fact for you to remember is that your baby’s sleep habits are more a reflection of your baby’s temperament rather than your style of nighttime parenting. And keep in mind that other parents usually exaggerate how long their baby sleeps, as if this were a badge of good parenting, which it isn’t. It’s not your fault baby wakes up. ”
Here are some tid-bits I really appreciated, mainly because I used to feel nervous that my baby would not “sleep through the night” like other parents I heard, but now I have learned that this should never be a goal of new parents for lots of reasons, including the safety and health of your baby:
“Babies don’t sleep as deeply as you do. Not only do babies take longer to go to sleep and have more frequent vulnerable periods for nightwaking; they have twice as much active, or lighter, sleep as adults.”
“Nightwaking has survival benefits. In the first few months, babies’ needs are the highest, but their ability to communicate their needs is the lowest. Suppose a baby slept deeply most of the night. Some basic needs would go unfulfilled. Tiny babies have tiny tummies, and mother’s milk is digested very rapidly.”
Nightwaking has developmental benefits. Sleep researchers believe that babies sleep “smarter” than adults do. They theorize that light sleep helps the brain develop because the brain doesn’t rest during REM sleep….During the light sleep stage, the higher centers of the brain keep operating, yet during deep sleep these higher brain centers shut off and the baby functions on her lower brain centers. It is possible that during this stage of rapid brain growth (babies’ brains grow to nearly seventy percent of adult volume during the first two years) the brain needs to continue functioning during sleep in order to develop”
“Babies still wake up. When babies mature into these adult-like sleep patterns varies among babies. Yet, even though babies achieve this sleep maturity some time during the last half of the first year, many still wake up. The reason? Painful stimuli, such as colds and teething pain, become more frequent. Major developmental milestones, such as sitting, crawling, and walking, drive babies to “practice” their new developmental skills in their sleep. Then between one and two years of age, when baby begins to sleep through the above-mentioned wake-up stimuli, other causes of nightwaking occur, such as separation anxiety and nightmares. “
