Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child

I didn't “read” this so much as blearily stare at it in a fog of fatigue at 3am. Ho ho ho.

Actually, I kid. I read some of it. I read the chapters that were most relevant to my life right now - and truly, I exist only in the HERE and NOW right now - and I read the “exhausted parent summaries” at the end of the other chapters, when I could find them (sometimes I was too tired to find them).

Generally, I am very much on Team Weissbluth, infamously known as Team Cry It Out. Allow me to vent: I mean, we let our kids cry - sometimes for quite a while - when we're doing other things to them that they don't like but we know is good for them: taking a bath, getting their diaper changed, changing out of their soiled clothes, going in the car, etc. So why should sleep be something that gets sacrificed just cuz the little one doth protest too much? The “attachment parenting” narrative posits that letting your baby cry for more than I-don't-know-how-many minutes could cause permanent, long-lasting psychological harm; so does attachment parenting say we should avoid baths, diaper changes, car rides, anything else they hate, etc? I guess it's because all these other crying-producing events have definite ends, and so the parent (at least) can grin and bear it. But howling at night, with no end in sight, feels unbearable.

Anyway, Weissbluth's writing is catty, opinionated, stern and compassionate: that is, he is the classic angry, jaded doctor. He's like Hawkeye Pierce. Except instead of the Korean War, he's trudging back from the Parenting War on “mama” message boards, and he's super pissed off. He's like that meme of George Clooney walking away from a burning car, with the headline “Paul Krugman has had it up to here with you people”. That is, he has been trying to fight the good fight - getting kids to sleep, creating healthy sleep patterns - since 1973 (when he started practicing pediatrics). He is a prof at Northwestern (fancy!) and has marshaled tons of rigorous research evidence (randomized-control trials!) that “sleep training”/”extinction”/”cry it out” does NOT break your baby, but rather makes everyone - baby, mom, other parents, family - better rested and happier and healthier, etc. And yet, he must still fight this fight. I think the best line in the book (and this appears also in Emily Oster's Cribsheet, in the chapter on sleep training) is that popular opinion on sleep training is very divided, but expert opinion (pediatricians, child dev psychologists) is not: sleep training works.

This leads to writing that, okay, I found highly amusing. His multi-page screed against Dr. Sears (the father of attachment parenting) is chef's kiss. There are italics and exclamation points. He has a wonderful line about us parents letting go of some “hypothetical dream baby” and accepting the baby we have here, now! For the love of God! I imagine him saying this while shaking us by the arms, maybe giving a slap or two across the face. He has a wonderfully indignant rant about how all that research that shows how maternal mental illness can negatively impact baby sleep patterns is probably just masking a bunch of deadbeat dads. Ohhh, don't get him started on deadbeat dads. I love it.

Anyway, the book is organized into sections:
- Why is sleep important (imagine him shaking you and giving you a hard slap while shouting EVERYONE NEEDS TO RESPECT EVERYONE'S SLEEP MORE)
- Sleep problems and solutions (early bedtimes, get dad involved, teach self-soothing as much as possible (i.e. put them down drowsy but awake), do the French “le Pause” thing - i.e. wait before consoling at night to see if they settle)
- Baby's first month (a compassionate section; it's chaos + all babies are super-noisy sleepers (snorting, snoring, grunting, squeaking, etc) + colic is a thing + colic is hell)
- Baby's second month (the peak of madness! and the ebb of madness; a light at the end of the tunnel; maybe try self-soothing more if you're baby is not super colicky?! where is deadbeat dad?!!)
- EVERY SINGLE MONTH AFTER THAT: teach self-soothing because bad sleep is worse than crying for even a few hours for a few nights (!)

So it's great. It's a reference book I basically sleep with, hugging it to my chest. He was bang on right about a lot of stuff I experienced: e.g. early bedtimes are key, respecting your kid's sleep schedule is socially limiting but emotionally liberating. The first two weeks of newborn life are often a total honeymoon/bait-and-switch - those babies are just exhausted from having been born. Wait until they wake up! Aaagh.