Of babies and nighttime

For the most part I've found parenting Conor to be very similar to parenting Taryn and Ashlin, but there are a couple of exceptions. One of them is night - the girls slept through the night, even 8 hours at a time, fairly early on. Not so Conor. It's not unusual for him to be waking up 4 times a night even now that he's one year old. I find the way for me to get sleep is sometimes to just keep him in bed with me all night. Once I put him back in his crib, he soon wakes up. Rob often sleeps on an air mattress in the living room so that he can be free from crowding and crying and be in a better place to parent the kids the next day.

Not ideal. I'm sure many people would tell me to let him cry himself to sleep, and I'd be lying if I said I've never done that - generally only after I've tried to nurse him and nothing consoles him. But as a general rule I'm not comfortable with not comforting a baby who wants comfort. I started out as an attachment parent and for the most part I like the way that it energizes my parenting. Since I've been learning more about child development at work I've become more convinced of this. How we respond to our babies actually affects how their brains develop. Research is finding that babies who grow up particularly stressed have different stress reactions later on. We all get certain chemicals that flood our system when stressed, the flight or fight response. Kids who were nurtured have these chemical levels return to normal fairly quickly. The levels do not go down quickly for those kids who grew up stressed. This impairs the functioning of other parts of the body, such as the immune system, and makes concentrating on other things difficult.

Now the type of stress that the researchers refer to is much greater than what Conor would experience even if I let him cry it out often. But the principle stands. How we respond to babies affects not only that situation but affects their development, which will impact their lives.

(I'm going somewhere with this, by the way)

So I turned towards the experts who I knew wouldn't tell me to let him cry it out - Sears and Sears. They wrote that many parents ask their doctors about this and many doctors say the parents should just let the baby cry. They go on to say that doctors should not be giving advice in matters they have not been trained in, and I nodded inwardly. But they also wrote something that gave me a start - that parents should not be asking doctors about matters that are about parenting. They challenged parents to trust their inner instincts and what this tells them about babies' needs.

No, I'd never ask a doctor about my baby's crying. But I felt more comfortable consulting a book than listening to myself. My angst about the nighttime situation was mainly that I felt like my kid wasn't normal, and I needed to make him normal. But who is telling me what is normal for MY kid's sleep patterns? Ferber? Ezzo? Other parents? Maybe I need to listen more to my kid and my own gut.

Is there something wrong with Conor? Not necessarily. The book did reassure me that about 10% of babies don't sleep through the night for the first two years. He seems healthy and happy generally, so I think he's okay. He just has a different sleep pattern. It's not necessarily something I have to do something about.

And we found a solution where we all get sleep. Conor in bed with me, Rob in the LR if need be. I didn't like our solution, not because it doesn't work for us (it does!) but because I felt like that would be considered unacceptable - a husband and wife not sleeping together? GASP! But it's not about our relationship, it's about sleep, and we're getting it this way, which improves our relationship.

Trusting myself, my instincts, trusting my kids to develop at their own pace. Hard for me.