Preparing for Baby

For increased sleep (for both you and baby) and increased mental health (for both you and baby) comfort, not crying it out, is the way to go.

Though more and more people seem up-to-date with the current research that letting your little one “cry it out” can in fact be damaging to their little brains (the increase in cortisol can be toxic, check out this interesting article), every once in a while the debate on the appropriateness of “sleep training” pops up again. New research out of Penn State has been conducted by Dr. Douglas Teti, a professor of human development and psychology, who says that his work,

adds to a growing skepticism toward sleep training – not only that it may not work, but that it may, in turn, affect the parent-child relationship itself.

“An emotionally available parent would probably not let their baby cry it out,” says Dr. Teti, who included babies aged one month to 24 months in his study. “Quite frankly, there aren’t too many researchers that advocate that any more. I don’t want to diss sleep-training programs per se, but the way we construed emotional availability is that an emotionally available parent is not a parent who is going to abandon a child at night and let the child cry it out.”

excerpt from The Globe and Mail

Here is the full press release from Penn State regarding this latest research.

For Infant Sleep, Receptiveness More Important Than Routine

Parents understand the challenge of getting infants to sleep through the night, and now Penn State researchers show that being emotionally receptive can reduce sleep disruptions and help infants and toddlers sleep better.

“Bed time can be a very emotional time. It heralds the longest separation of the day for most infants,” said Douglas Teti, professor of human development and family studies. “It struck me that going to sleep, and sleeping well, is much easier for some young children than others, and I wanted to assess what factored into this, and what parents and children contribute to sleep patterns.”

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If you have a little one, want to have a little one, or provide health care to people with little ones, you really ought start following the wise words of Wisconsin pediatrician and International Board Certified Lactation Consultant Dr. Jennifer Thomas. An easy way to do so is via the facebook page of Dr. Thomas and her partner, fellow pediatrician and IBCLC Stephanie Behnke. Dr. Thomas is a welcome voice of reason and sensibility in a world where all too often the advice that mamas get from their postpartum doulas, labor and delivery nurses, midwives, ob-gyns, and lactation consultants requires a diagram to sort out. So many parents feel very grounded in the advice they receive from their chosen birth team (often a combo of doula and midwife in my work) and then feel completely undone when they go their first pediatrician appointment and are told to let their babies cry it out and to start a sleep training schedule. To many mamas, this feels instinctively wrong–and these instincts are incredibly important. The instincts that we have about how to best care for our babies have been in place since life began, and are what allowed the species to propagate. Dr. Jen (as she goes by) shares some deep and needed wisdom about babies and sleep that will help you understand why your instincts are the way they are, and why you should heed them:

If Your Baby Sleeping Through The Night

written by Jenny Thomas, MD, IBCLC, FAAP, FABM

The answer is almost always “no” but when we give that answer, we feel like bad parents, and we start to believe that something is wrong with our child. As if normal babies were never meant to be held all the time and were meant to sleep all by themselves.

We spend so much time dreaming of what our children will be and very little time realizing what they are. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that human evolution is like a football field. Human beings as a genus start at the far end of the field, and we as a species show up at about the opposite 10 yard line. At about the one inch line (and that’s generous) we as an industrial society show up. Why am I rambling about this? Because we have to understand that the way we do things is a new idea…but the babies we bring into this world don’t know about the way we do things. They are programmed to do things that normal, vulnerable human babies have been doing for thousands of years.

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