A GOOD NIGHT'S SLEEP
Reuben is now 6-months old. He's a delight. My partner & I emerge from sleep in the morning, blinking & yawning & shaking off dreams, ready for the worries of the day. Reuben opens his eyes, looks around at a world full of promise & then smiles. It's impossible to be cynical about that world, difficult even to be a little jaundiced in the face of such absolute certainty of discovery, challenge & wonder.
The only persistent problem is Reuben's nighttime sleep pattern. He sleeps for precisely 2 hours & then wakes up to be fed. This pattern has been absolutely consistent since birth & it means that I get a maximum of 5 hours sleep & my partner Emma significantly less because she is still breast feeding. We've tried a number of strategies - big supplementary bottle & solid feeds during the day, exhausting stimuli shortly before his last big feed, relaxing baths - but he still wakes up bang on cue after 2 hours. So Emma went to the local National Health Service child clinic & asked for help. She was given a cheery leaflet called 'A Good Night's Sleep' with a picture of a smiling, well-rested baby on the front. A glance through it indicated that it was packed with information so we sat down that evening & sought enlightenment.
It was horrific. The burden of the tale was simple: you let your baby cry &, eventually exhausted, s/he will fall back to sleep. Gradually s/he will come to learn from parental non-response that crying is fruitless & the sleep cycles will extend until s/he sleeps through the night. A 'sleep problem specialist' called Dr Richard Ferber is quoted. He tells us that if you use "Plan 1, i.e. waiting a short period before going in, then gradually increasing the waiting time, she will respond to this. Soon, she will learn it is no longer worth crying for 15 to 20 minutes just to have you come in briefly". Apparently it is not recommended to "threaten or spank your child" & that "if you persevere, things should be much better within one or two weeks at the most".
An interesting time scale, we thought. Just 2 weeks. In 2 weeks we would have a compliant baby who sleeps through the night & our lives would return to some semblance of normality. But at what price over the years? A 6-month old baby has no language. Reuben can't explain to us what he wants, why he wants it, what fears afflict him, what discomforts & pains cause him distress. All he can do is to cry. That's his language. Then we know that he's in distress. We know this because that's what the mechanism of crying is there for, at the beginning & forever. But a baby alone in the dark, away from parental presence, isn't expressing distress when s/he is still crying after 5, 10, 15 minutes. Then s/he's expressing anguish, desperation, panic. Until, eventually exhausted, s/he falls asleep.
We decided that we'd cope with interrupted sleep so that each morning we could see Reuben open his eyes & grin at a safe & secure world. God knows, beyond these 4 walls it's a wild & wayward place, run by pitifully inadequate men & women whose greed, anger & self-loathing have roots buried very deep.
6:34:55 PM 
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