Eyes Wide Shut

Last week my friend Laura showed up at my front door, pushing her three-month-old son in his stroller. "I'm really...whatchamacallit," she said. "Tired?" I asked her. "The baby's not...you know." "Sleeping?" I asked. Laura's eyes had that familiar pinwheeling quality I remembered from my own first months of motherhood--that hallucinatory period when a mother's heart is opened wide, even as her eyelids flutter shut. No matter what the poets say about the ethereal joys of parenthood, any exhausted parent knows it is hard to concentrate on anything--sex, eating, finally changing out of your sweatpants--if you've become a sleep junkie, jonesing for some REMs. The key for parents' getting some sleep is first getting the baby to sleep--an eternal problem that has spawned all manner of programs, products and mother-in-law's parenting tips.

Modern baby-sleep methodologies fall into two mutually exclusive camps: the Ferber-izers and the Sears-ites. Dr. Richard Ferber is a pediatric sleep specialist and author of Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems, which uses scientific-looking charts and graphs to prove that parents should let their babies cry themselves to sleep. In the other corner of the nursery are William and Martha Sears, authors of The Baby Book. The Searses are proponents of holding, swaddling, nursing and co-sleeping in the family bed. Both sides offer plenty of advice, and both are quite dogmatic. It's my feeling that sleepless parents should do whatever works, borrowing as necessary from both camps.

The tone parents set when Baby is six to 12 months old will probably dictate a child's sleep patterns well into childhood. Parents who sleep with their babies in the connubial bed will enjoy a rare period of closeness and ease during the first few months of life. (This ended for me the night my baby decided to pluck out my eyelashes.) If parents or baby don't sleep well in a shared bed, they shouldn't share it.

No matter how long the co-sleeping period lasts, there will come a time when it must end. Parents should take the long view: unless they want to be sharing their bed with a thrashing two-year-old or negotiating with a recalcitrant four-year-old, they should move Baby to a crib by about age five months.

Ferber's cry-it-out method asks parents to listen to their baby cry for longer and longer intervals of time, starting at five minutes, before going into the room. The idea is that babies need to learn how to fall asleep on their own--without parental intervention in the form of rocking or nursing. For every parent who has told me that this seems hardhearted, another has sheepishly said it worked like a charm after a few nights.

Whatever parents choose to do, they should provide a calm, warm and consistent bedtime ritual that is easy to adhere to, remembering that a baby who is well rested with daytime naps is usually a better sleeper at night. They should steel themselves to hear some crying as Baby settles in, but be ready to respond if their baby sounds truly distressed. Parents can use the literature as a guide but must always trust their instincts above any expert's (including this one). No one knows your own baby better than you do, awake or--one hopes--asleep.

You can e-mail Amy at timefamily@aol.com