Getting a good night’s sleep – another perspective

Dr Sarah J Buckley

As a GP [family physician], writer and current full-time mother of four, I have many concerns about the standard advice that mothers are being given about young children and sleep in such sources as Queensland Health’s article “How Does Your Child Sleep?”(Playtimes, Oct 2001 and Richard Ferber’s book Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems.

Part of Ferber’s controversial methods, sometimes called “Ferberizing,” include leaving children alone to cry for increasing periods (so-called “controlled crying”). Such sources suggest shutting crying children in their bedrooms for prolonged periods so that they learn to go to sleep alone.

Advising parents to ignore the cries of a distressed child, for however long, does not produce a loving and trustful parent-child relationship. I wonder how many of us would want our partners or friends to treat us this way, if we were alone at night and feeling upset and frightened.

But it is not only the hard-heartedness of these suggestions that concerns me. All of the scientific and anthropological research that I have read supports my instincts and experience. Our babies need constant care and attention because of their extreme immaturity. Unlike other mammals, they cannot keep themselves warm, move about or feed themselves until relatively late in life, which makes the mother-infant relationship crucial to our offspring’s survival (McKenna 1996). Therefore, our children have developed behaviours and expectations to ensure that they get the special care they need in babyhood and beyond.

For example, for a baby, the safest place is in the mother’s arms—and this is still true today, with SIDS being the leading cause of death in young babies. This applies equally at night, when sleeping with the mother, also called co-sleeping, gives the baby protection, temperature regulation, emotional reassurance and breast milk. It’s a perfect system, and what babies are born to expect.
The mother also receives rewards—nature always supplies rewards to encourage us. Co-sleeping gives us less disturbed sleep because we both get into the same cycles, and our babies will wake to feed when we are both in light sleep. We can do more breastfeeding for less effort and therefore maximise the contraceptive effect.

We will also benefit from the extra doses of two breastfeeding hormones. Oxytocin—the hormone of love—is stimulated by both breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact, and keeps mother and baby soft and loving with each other. Endorphins are the hormones of pleasure, making mother and baby relaxed and sleepy—just right for night feeding. No wonder co-sleeping mothers and babies wake up with a smile. Worldwide research confirms the safety of co-sleeping, as long as parents are not smokers, very over weight, or under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and attention is given to avoiding the suffocation hazards that go with our soft Western bedding.

Another major concern I have about these standard approaches to sleep is that they follow our society’s belief that children will not become independent unless we force them. In fact, research shows that the exact opposite is true. According to Paul Klein, “Research… confirms that indulgence of early dependency needs leads to independence” and “A mother’s reliability and receptivity promote trust and emotional stability in her child” (1995). In other words, when we treat our children with love and respect for their needs, we plant the seeds for a lifetime of happiness—and relaxed sleep.

For me, the benefits of co-sleeping do not end with babyhood. My older children are equally sweet and cuddly at night, and sharing sleep into the pre-school years has its own rewards. For example, sleep becomes a time to share intimacy and loving feelings, especially when the day has been grueling or conflict has arisen. There is nothing so sweet as lying next to my child as he or she drops into dreams (and often we do this at the same time). We have never had the bedtime battles or night terrors that are considered normal in our culture—and remember that our culture is totally abnormal, in global terms, in not sharing sleep between family members.

There are many different possibilities.

For example, some families have invited an older child back into their bedroom and found that a “dose” of co-sleeping, or even sleeping on the floor (in what Emma calls a “nest”) is all that is needed.

In many families, as in ours, one parent lies down with a child or children until they fall asleep, giving reassurance at the time when it is most needed. Sitting quietly or meditating also work well at this time, and I am less likely to fall asleep myself.

When one of our children wake in the dark hours, we have often gone into the child’s bed—double beds work best for obvious reasons—and fallen asleep until morning. Currently, this is my partner Nicholas’s specialty: We have a casual division of nighttime labour with Maia being my responsibility, and the others his.

When a child is sick or needs extra care, having him or her in our bed, only an arm’s length away, feels good. Needing an extra dose of Mummy or Daddy is a good enough reason most of the time, and I notice that sleeping together promotes harmony in a subtle and beautiful way.
As parents, we are in it for the long haul. “Ferberizing,” “controlled crying” and the like are short-term solutions that I see as detrimental in the long-term.

Our children will outgrow their dependency needs—including the need for company at sleep time—in their own time, and our job is to provide the love, reassurance and guidance that maximises growth and happiness in the short and long terms.

As one !Kung mother from the African desert responded upon hearing that Dr. Spock advocated ignoring our children’s cries,

Doesn’t he understand that he’s only a baby and that’s why he cries? You pick him up and comfort him. When he’s older, he will have sense and he won’t cry any more.”

I hope that we as a culture can come to our senses and treat our children lovingly day and night.

References
Dolton,  Irene. How Does Your Child Sleep? Endorsed by Queensland Health.Playtimes Oct 2001
Klein, Paul. (Spring 1995). “The needs of children.” Mothering magazine (U.S.) (74): 39-45.
McKenna, James. (1996). “Babies need their mothers beside them.” World Health, the journal of the World Health Organization (March-April).
Konner, Melanie. (1991). Childhood. Boston: Little Brown & Co.

Recommended Reading:
Our Babies, Ourselves – How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent (Doubleday 1998) by Meredith E. Small
The Family Bed: An Age-Old Concept in Child Rearing (Avery 1986) by Tine Thevenin
Three in a Bed: the benefits of sharing your bed with your baby (Bloomsbury 1999) by Debra Jackson
Night Time Parenting (La Leche League Intl. 1999) by William Sears
This article was reprinted with the kind permission of Dr Sarah J Buckley.
This paper was first published in Playtimes, the magazine of the Playgroup Association of Queensland, May 2002, also published in Natural Parenting  no 2, autumn 2003 .

An expanded version (twice as long) with more about controlled crying, and gentle approaches to sleep, is published in Sarah’s upcoming book, Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering: The wisdom and science of gentle choices in pregnancy, birth, and parenting