How To Get Baby To Sleep At Night And Not During Day

FRESH AIR
 
In the early 1960s I myself was a baby and therefore frequently prambound. My parents were running a restaurant at the time and would leave me in my pram out on the street to be coochy-cooed at by old dears and jolly policemen. Only occasionally kidnapped and held for ransom, I continued to be thrust out on the pavement in all weathers, on the assumption that fresh air was intrinsically good for me, and would make me grow big or strong. Four decades later, I generally stay indoors as much as I can.
 

How To Get Baby To Sleep At Night And Not During Day

These days no babies are left out of doors unattended, but fresh air is still wonderfully good for baby, agree all the books and most grandmothers. Best of all is fresh air's fine record in getting recalcitrant babies to go to sleep. As they lie in their pram or pushchair, the waving of branches in the breeze first fascinates them, then hypnotises them, and eventually, if the gods of slumber are smiling upon you, anaesthetise them. A clear night sky can perform a similar function, which is why you so often see sad-eyed men propelling pushchairs around suburban streets at three in the morning. We have all been there. We have all been stopped by police officers wondering whether we were burglars. We have all been bundled into the backs of transit vans and beaten up by highly trained constables. lt's a rite of passage for every dad.

Remember, though, that however bad things are for you, for someone else nearby they could be even worse. The man pushing baby around at three in the morning sees a car drive past. Behind the wheel is another sleep-deprived father. In the car seat, a gurgling infant chuckles evilly at the bags under his daddy's eyes. Father may have to drive a couple of miles before baby fails asleep. Or many, many more miles than that.

JEROME: The sleepless nights were unbelievable. She was colicky, and for three months didn't really sleep at all. I remember going out with her at night ... what was I doing? I'd read somewhere that a good thing to do with babies if they didn't sleep was to take them out. I remember taking her out for a walk round Wandsworth Common at one o'clock in the morning. She was crying away. Of course she was: it was so fucking cold. It certainly didn't work. Nothing did. So much of what we did was based on what we'd read. I took it as gospel, that this is what we ought to do. It was all just bollocks, really.
 
TUNES 

Babies love music. Most of the books recommend classical music, usually out of snobbery. True, pumping dance rhythms are not ideal for putting babies to sleep, but a lot of pop music can do the trick. Babies form tastes with indecent speed. My daughter always liked Leonard Cohen and Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits - maybe it was their croaky old voices. My son jiggled happily to anything with loud guitars and turned his tiny nose up at anything orchestral. I know of a baby that would fall asleep to Miles Davis but never to John Coltrane. Only one thing is for certain: whatever they like now, in twelve years they will be telling you it's shit, and listening to something else.

THATCHER 

For years, she slept only four hours a night. Only now do you truly understand why she was as mad as a can of peas. To find out more, you can check out How To Get Baby To Sleep At Night And Not During Day.

Baby Sensitive To Noise When Sleeping

NIGHT AND DAY 

For the first six to ten weeks, baby cannot tell the difference. When tired, baby sleeps. When not tired, baby sits around gurgling or roars its lungs out. The fact that it's 330 in the morning and you have only been asleep since 1.15 makes no difference. And as soon becomes clear, there is no point trying to get a baby to sleep when it is full of beans. King Canute would have had more chance with the waves.
 

Baby Sensitive To Noise When Sleeping

The single identifiable advantage of all this is that baby will drop off under what to us would be entirely hostile conditions. Light, dark, in bright sunshine, under floodlights - it makes no difference if baby is tired. They are far more sensitive to variations in temperature. They really are unutterably strange.
 
NOISE 

Again, less of a problem than you would think. Baby likes to hear all the usual household noises - people clumping up and down the stairs, eating snack foods, calling each other bastards. There is no need to tiptoe around as infant is falling asleep. Indeed, it might actually be counter-productive, as by doing this you can unwittingly train your baby to need complete silence at bedtime.
 
Fine if you are moving to the Outer Hebrides; otherwise a catastrophe in the making, especially now that Guy Fawkes Night is celebrated in most British towns and cities every night between 31 August and 5 January.
 
SMELL 

According to one book I read, you should avoid going into your newborn baby's room too often to check whether it is still alive, as your smell could wake it. Well, there's something else to worry about. Am I a bad parent, or is it just my feet?

QUIZ TIME 

If a baby wakes every two to six hours to be fed during the first six months of life, is that
(i) Unspeakable? 
(ii) Unreasonable? 
(iii) Perfectly normal? 
(iv) Someone else's problem? Answers: (i) Oh yes. (ii) Sadly not. (iii) Yes, I'm afraid. (iv) You will have to negotiate this one for yourself. (See all previous posts about breastfeeding vs. bottle-feeding.)  

STATISTICS 

According to one newspaper, a new father will lose, on average, 616 hours of sleep in the first three years. A new mother will lose 1,968 hours. These figures may or may not have been compiled by a new mother with a grievance. 

OTHER PARENTS' LIES
 
'Oh yes, our Ethan sleeps through the night every night. Did so at three months.' These people are lying bastards, and you should never speak to them again.

CATNAPS 

The only way I know to combat sleep deprivation. A parent who can put his/her head down for a 15-minute 'power nap' is a parent who might yet come out of this with sanity intact. I believe that all offices should be equipped with sofas for the use of sleep-deprived employees. Richer corporations should be prevailed upon to supply duvets and pillows. 15-minute alarm calls would also help. True, you always wake from a catnap with a vague sense of displacement and a tongue like old carpet, but after a cup of strong tea you will be as alert as a two-year-old.

For many fathers who spend the day loafing at so-called 'work', it should be relatively easy to arrange a schedule of health-restoring catnaps. But be careful that none of them exceeds 20 or 25 minutes, as then you go into a deeper sleep and can struggle to get over it. If you are unlucky enough to wake up after an hour, you will feel as though you are walking through treacle in a wetsuit and flippers carrying an oven in your rucksack. Slightly worse than usual, in other words. To find out more, you can check out Baby Sensitive To Noise When Sleeping.

Baby Sleeping Too Much 6 Weeks

If nothing else works, cuddle. Most babies love being cuddled. They can be so full of food they look as though they will burst. They can be amused and entertained to the point of coma. They can gurgle at brightly coloured pieces of plastic attached to their cot for only so long. But they can't be cuddled enough. They crave physical affection. Some fathers find it hard to give, maybe because they weren't given enough themselves when they were babies. That was the wisdom then; we know better now. Even if it is colic and the baby won't stop crying for three months, you will glean the benefit of all that cuddling when the colic does subside. 
 

Baby Sleeping Too Much 6 Weeks

One day the baby will look up at you and smile, and everything will be as it should be. And the baby will never know that on 63 separate occasions you wanted to throw it out of the window. (Unless you did throw it out of the window.) If you can learn to comfort your baby as well as your partner can - which usually only takes perseverance and the will to do it - you will be amazed by how satisfying it is. 

Some fathers discover, to their vain delight, that they are better at comforting their child than their partners. It helps to be as relaxed as possible as you rock them out of their misery and, with luck, into a long deep sleep. I find that half a bottle of red wine helps, but each to his own.

Sleep

A newborn baby knows no night, knows no day. For a while you will be in the same terrible state of flux. It's like infinite jetlag. New parents talk of little else. Newish parents start talking about something else, then give up and go back to sleep deprivation. They are too tired to think. Their feet drag, their shoulders slump. Their eyes are like pissholes in the snow. Their babies, needless to say, are full of life and energy. The babies are getting the sleep they need. It's the parents who are losing their minds, their youth, their grip on reality. 

You think you look rough now? Look again in a year's time. Your closest relatives won't know it's you - and not because you'll have had plastic surgery and fled the country to avoid your responsibilities. The shitty nappies may not get to you; the lack of sleep will.

I am writing this on a Wednesday morning. The last four nights I have had five hours, six hours, four and a half hours and five and a half hours' sleep respectively. My daughter is four and a half, and my son will soon be two. We should be past the worst of it by now. But we aren't. Sadly I had a bit to drink last night I am therefore a little hungover and rather bad-tempered. In the mirror this morning I looked older than my late grandfather. After lunch I shall go to the local public library, where there's an unusually comfortable armchair ...

This post will be split into handy gobbet-sized chunks for the convenience of sleep-deprived parents who may not be able to digest more than a single paragraph at a time.
 
THEY SLEEP AND THEY SLEEP AND THEY SLEEP 

It's true - newborn babies sleep an awful lot. On average, according to Desmond Morris, they snooze for 16 hours and 36 minutes every day. This figure starts to fall almost immediately, but even five-year-olds should put in twelve solid hours. And yet newborn baby sleep is a fragile thing. Between half and two-thirds of it is light sleep, from which they can wake depressingly easily. 

Even the way they go to sleep is different. As overworked adults, we can hit the pillow, pass out and be snoring like warthogs within eight to ten seconds. Babies, by contrast start with 20 minutes or so of light sleep before descending into big fat sleep, and it is only then that they truly settle. You may have to rock your little one and/or sing rude songs to ease the passage into deep sleep. Only when their eyes have stopped twitching is it safe to leave the room. Then you step on the creaky floorboard outside, and the whole process begins again. To find out more, you can check out Baby Sleeping Too Much 6 Weeks.

 

Understanding Your Crying Baby

This post continues from the previous post.

4. Grandparents. Remember, grandparents are not just for Christmas, they are for the whole year round. Unfortunately, many young people are so desperate to get away from their parents that when they come to have children themselves they find they have moved 400 miles or more from free babysitting.
 

Understanding Your Crying Baby

This is a waste of a valuable resource. Few grandparents have anything much to do, and quite a few have enough money to enable them not to do it. So they might as well be taking your baby off your hands for a few hours, and perhaps 'lending' you a tenner so you can go to the cinema. If they start droning on about your spoiling the baby or teaching it bad habits, threaten to put them in a home. (Your parents will always be much better with your children than they were with you. They will give them millions of treats, the same treats in fact that they used to deny you, just as your grandparents gave you the same treats they denied your parents. This pattern can never be broken.)
 
5. Dummy. The 'D' word. Vast hairy stigmas have attached themselves to this harmless implement. Just as people who know nothing about language are vaguely aware that a split infinitive is A Bad Thing, so everyone knows that dummies are the tool of the devil. Serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Dr Harold Shipman both sucked dummies well into their teenage years. Possibly because we have all seen them being shoved into toddlers' mouths by fishwives in supermarkets, we may associate dummies with a more primitive level of parenthood than that to which we aspire. 

It's pure snobbery. Most childcare experts cannot bring themselves to recommend their use without a string of caveats (such as 'Don't use them at all'). But dummies - or pacifiers as Americans call them, with their matchless gift for euphemism - have been around for centuries.

You can see fifteenth-century dummies in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Only around a third of babies find a use for dummies, and it may only be a brief phase before baby finds and starts sucking its thumb. For some babies, though, dummies do the trick, and that has to be better than endless crying. The main thing is not to sweeten the dummy with fruit juice or honey (unless you don't mind having fat children with no teeth). Also, according to many books, you should sterilize the dummy before every use. Oh yes, you've definitely going to do that.

6. The cranial osteopath. This is not something your GP would necessary recommend, especially if he or she is the type who would rather put you on a course of antibiotics than work out what's wrong with you. But cranial osteopathy helped our youngest with his colic, and may do the job for you. The bones of the skull are not completely fused, even in adults. A cranial osteopath, by placing hands on the patient's head, claims to be able to feel minute rhythmic pulsations of the cranial hones and membranes. And if you remember how compressed a baby's skull is during birth, it makes sense that a little rudimentary connection of the head bones could improve matters. 

As one practitioner has put it, 'The natural tendency of the body is to heal itself. The cranial osteopath facilitates this process by helping to balance tissue tensions between his hands. The body then makes its own correction to a more tuned state.' I have watched one in action: they barely seem to do anything, and you begin to wonder whether you haven't been ripped off by the new age equivalent of a fairground charlatan. But babies love it. Cranial osteopathy did not cure our boy of his colic; it eased it. At the time, though, that was more than enough. To find out more, you can check out Understanding Your Crying Baby.

Soothe Your Crying Baby

Unfortunately you and I and everyone else who encounters colic must work on the assumption that it is a stomach ache because that is what it looks like and seems like. You would guess, as you watch your small person doubling up in pain, that he or she has eaten something appalling - a 20p piece, for instance, or the decayed remains of a small rodent. 
 

Soothe Your Crying Baby

But Junior is still on breast or bottle at this stage, so that can't be it. (It will be in a few months' time, when your baby starts experimenting with different foodstuffs - or 'foodstuffs', as the experts would probably call them.) There is simply no explanation for colic, and almost nothing you can do to relieve it. (Try laying your baby face down across your knees, support its little bawling head and gently massage its back. It might work, it might not.) 

Colic can drive you barmy. As the days stretch out to weeks and even months, you keep on wondering, what the bloody hell is wrong in there? You will never know. One day the colic will simply stop. A week later you will have forgotten your baby ever had it. Remarkably, colic seems to have no long-term effects on your baby's well-being or general good cheer. Indeed, soon after its disappearance is when many parents record their baby's first smile. It may be that colic is a rite of passage certain babies have to undergo. Their parents accompany them through it, endure it with them, celebrate when it's all over. As long as they haven't topped themselves in the meantime.
 
At least colic comes to an end. Teething, as one baby expert put it, 'starts at six months and goes on until the age of 20.' Unless your baby is one of those authoritarian political leaders born with a rogue tooth, you probably won't even have thought about dentition (another glorious technical term) until it happens.
 
Nonetheless, those teeth have been waiting under the gum since the womb, ready to strike. Their emergence provides a new and unexpected source of pain for baby, who will start frantically chewing on things to ease the discomfort. Teething babies also dribble a lot. They get bright red cheeks and can double as Belisha beacons. And they cry and cry and cry. You can put teething gel on their gums, give them something to chew other than your partner's nipple and wait for it to end. And then wait for it to begin again. Unlike colic, though, teething has an end-product: teeth.

You may miss the gummy look, and coo over old photographs of your little toothless one, but the teeth represent real, measurable progress. For instance, you can measure the indentation on your finger when baby bites you. Now it's someone else's turn to cry.

So how to soothe your crying baby? There are several well-tested methods. Billions of people have been testing them over thousands of years. Occasionally one of them works.
 
1. The supine position. Lie down on your back and lay your baby on your chest. They like the sound of the heartbeat, apparently. Rub your baby's back. Go to sleep. Snore like gurgling drain.

2. The tour of the house. Hold baby upright and lean him/her against your shoulder. (Make sure you have put a muslin there first to protect your clothes from dribble and rogue possets.) Wander around your home singing old pop songs badly. Blush when caught by partner.

3. Use a sling. For a tiny baby, get one that is made only of cloth. (The ones with aluminum exoskeletons are for babies of six months and older.) Strap in Junior and you can walk around, do the washing up, go to the pub, have sex with strangers in the park ... anything, really, as long as you keep moving, because that will loll Junior off to sleep. Babies love slings. Again, it's the contact, the beating heart, and Daddy's clothes smelling of sweat and drink. To find out more, you can check out Soothe Your Crying Baby.