The Sleep Process

The early sleep researcher, Dr. William Dement doubts “that a regular pattern of sleeping and being awake can ever be imposed on infants immediately after birth or that anyone should even try.  Their biological clocks seem to need to mature more before they can keep track of the time of day.  But the same kind of cues that  work for us should work on infants’ clocks as they are maturing.  Light in their rooms during the morning and dim light in the evening, as well as a feeding and activity schedule that is as regular as possible, should help put the biological clock in tune with the 24-hour day once it has matured enough to kick in.”

Once the biological clock is established and the parents can begin to think of ‘putting the baby to sleep’ there arises disagreement about how this should be accomplished.  There are essentially two schools of thought about this.  Elizabeth Pantley summarizes them like this:

• Cry it out
• Live with it.  Nurture the baby all day and all night.  Eventually, baby will sleep through the night.

As she says, the ‘cry it out’ method sounds simple but often is not.  Many parents will reject this method as cruel and virtual abandonment of parental responsibility.  Pantley describes a method for parents to help their baby learn to go to sleep willingly.   It’s based on results obtained from a large group of participating parents.   For parents who are having trouble  she recommends keeping a log of the baby’s naps, where and how he falls asleep and how long it takes.  Then review and choose a ’sleep solution’.  She has specific suggestions for breastfed, bottlefed, crib sleepers, co-sleepers and pacifier users.  Then do the sleep log after 10 days and review the progress.

It struck me after a while that this is pretty much applying the ’scientific method’ to each individual child to help in creating an individual program.  Her book is well worth reading.