Natural Baby Sleep Solution, The: Use Your Child's Internal Sleep Rhythms for Better Nights and Naps - Softcover

Polly Moore, Ph.D., received her doctorate in neuroscience from UCLA, where she specialized in sleep research, and is now Director of Sleep Research at California Clinical Trials in San Diego.

 

A kinder, gentler sleep program for babies that really works—from a sleep scientist and a mother.

Based on the human rest and activity cycle that occurs every hour and a half, here’s a scientifically based program for parents to help babies get all the sleep they need, both through the night and during the day. The method is simple, foolproof, and yields long-lasting results: truly restful daytime naps (which also gives an infant a head start on cognitive development and emotional intelligence) and consistent nighttime sleep—as beneficial for parents as it is for the baby.

• For babies aged two weeks to one year
• Lessons in sleep independence and solutions to common problems, such as your baby waking up too early, getting a second wind before bedtime, confusing day and night, and more
• Includes a guided journal for recording your baby’s sleep signals and keeping track of naps and bedtimes

“Finally, a how-to-book on baby sleep from a scientist and a mother. Polly Moore understands the intricacies of infant sleep and is empathetic to the roller-coaster of parenthood.”—Sara C. Mednick, Ph.D., author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life
 

Introduction:
More Sleep, Less Stress
    All living creatures—including human beings, dogs, elephants, fish, insects, and even amoebas—are designed to  follow natural cycles of rest and activity. Until the widespread use of electric lighting in the late nineteenth century, most humans experienced their rest and activity cycles naturally, going to bed when darkness fell and waking with the sun. Babies and children were permitted to nap when they felt sleepy, and they were allowed to remain asleep as long as necessary.
    Today, however, technological advances and our packed daily agendas have led us to live out of phase with our natural rhythms. Sleep has become something we squeeze into the time that’s left after predawn commutes and late-night laundry. Over the last several decades, as we’ve pushed ourselves to work harder and play longer on less sleep, we’ve demanded that our babies, too, conform to artificial schedules. In the hustle and bustle of life, we’ve lost sight of two simple facts: how much sleep our babies need, and how to help our babies get it.
    Yet sleep is one of your baby’s most important jobs in the first year of life, and helping your baby sleep is one of your most important jobs as a parent. When you give your baby’s sleep needs top priority, you give him a head start on cognitive development and emotional intelligence. Good sleep will help your baby grow strong, with plenty of energy for conquering the world. Without sufficient sleep, our babies suffer, and we parents don’t function optimally either.
    Luckily, contemporary parents can take advantage of a growing body of knowledge about the internal clocks that govern sleep and waking. This book and its N.A.P.S. plan, which is for expectant parents and for parents of babies up to one year of age (and, to a lesser extent, for toddlers), will show you how to follow one of your baby’s natural body clocks. This clock is present from birth and goes strong through the first year, and it helps your baby become sleepy at predictable times. Once you know how to look for these sleep rhythms, you can let them guide your baby into sleeping deeply, soundly, and for longer periods of time, preparing him to master the lifelong art of good sleep. (Note: If your baby is nine months, ten months, or even closing in on his first birthday, you may wonder if this book is worth your time. It is. Within days or even hours after starting the program, you’ll see an improvement in your baby’s sleep. Better still, you will set the stage for better sleep habits in the toddler years just ahead.)

My Story
    I’ve written this book for you—whether you are a parent-to-be who’s heard the horror stories about sleep deprivation or a new parent wondering how you can improve your child’s sleep—because I’ve been there myself. When I was pregnant with my first child, I never expected that my baby would have trouble sleeping. That’s because sleep has been my lifelong interest and the focus of my career. In childhood, I was fascinated by dreams; in high school, I was curious about my bouts of insomnia (as I later learned, this problem was caused by predictable changes in an adolescent’s biological clock). In college and then while pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience, I studied in more detail the devastating results of sleep loss as well as sleep’s delicate interaction with psychiatric states and medical illnesses, including cancer. As a neuroscientist focusing on sleep research and disorders, I’ve spent years working in sleep clinics and academic institutions; nearly every day of my working life has been devoted to the premise that good sleep makes life better. I’ve seen how inadequate or interrupted sleep has consequences for almost every aspect of a person’s life.
    So as a scientist, a woman, and a mother-to-be, I was dedicated to good sleep habits. How could I, with my years of specialized training, have trouble getting my baby to sleep? In school I’d been taught that a baby’s sleep starts to organize itself after a few weeks and that most babies are sleeping six hours at a stretch by the time they are six weeks old. The textbooks say that by four months, most are sleeping all the way through the night. “It won’t be an easy few months,” I thought, “but I can handle it.” Besides, there were other worries, including breastfeeding and finding child care, competing for my attention as an expectant parent.
    Did I have a surprise coming! When my baby, Maddie, arrived, I found that my fancy training did not help me one bit. Sometimes Maddie seemed to want to nurse for astoundingly long and frequent periods; other times she seemed to want a pacifier; sometimes she wanted to be held for hours on end; sometimes she wailed inconsolably and I simply couldn’t figure out how to help her. I had steeled myself for disruption and crazy hours and crying, but I had hoped that at least I would be able to interpret my baby’s needs and meet them. Even as the months went on and Maddie moved from the newborn phase, I had difficulty telling when she might need to nap or fall asleep in the evening. At night, Maddie would sometimes sleep for eight hours at a stretch; other nights were much harder, and as a scientist it bothered me that I didn’t know why. Like many parents, I developed a set of superstitions about what helped my baby sleep. “The pom-pom worm soothes her to sleep,” I’d think, or, “she sleeps better with Mozart playing on the stereo.” Then I’d be disappointed when those strategies failed to work on subsequent days.
    I consulted with pediatricians, experienced parents, and infant-sleep books. “Newborn babies sleep at random,” the experts shrugged. Other parents counseled me not to worry about when or how much my baby slept. “Babies know how to get all the sleep they need,” they said. It struck me as odd that no one had anything more concrete to tell new parents.
    Because of this advice, I didn’t even think to look for a pattern in my baby’s sleep. I just kept on going, month after month, thrilled with my daughter but also struggling to make it through each long day and night. Then one morning, when Maddie was about three and a half months old, I noticed that she looked tired and ready for a nap. This surprised me because she’d awakened from a relatively long period of night sleep less than two hours earlier. I didn’t expect her to be ready for a nap yet. I remembered that Maddie had shown similar behavior before, and I began to think about this. I looked at the clock, recalled the time that Maddie had awakened in the morning (about 90 minutes earlier), and realized that Maddie’s fatigue corresponded with a well-known biological rhythm called the basic rest and activity cycle, or the BRAC. I’d studied the BRAC in graduate school but had never considered applying it to infant sleep.
    Had anyone else? I looked at the research. There are many high-quality studies on the BRAC as it relates to several human phenomena, and its foremost researcher had tracked it in his own infant’s cycles of wakefulness and sleep. The logical connections between the two were irresistibly strong. At the time, however, this information was  iterally academic to me. In the informal laboratory of Maddie’s nursery—the only lab that really mattered to me at the time—it became clear to me that my daughter showed a distinct and regular biological sleep rhythm....