Hush now, baby, go to sleep ... please

IT’S NOT A CASE OF LUCK WHEN IT COMES TO HAVING A BABY WHO SLEEPS WELL BECAUSE ALL BABIES CAN BE TAUGHT, WRITES MERCEDES MAGUIRE

IS there anything sweeter than a newborn baby peacefully sleeping and for a new parent, is there anything more precious than getting some sleep yourself?

It’s no secret getting an adequate amount of sleep in the first three to six months of a baby’s life is one of the biggest challenges new parents face.

Baby sleep experts believe there are some practical steps you can take that will give you a bonus hour or two each night.

As many as 84 per cent of Australian mums with children under three claim to have suffered sleep deprivation, with 80 per cent putting it in the range of exhaustion, according to a survey by online program Dream Start Baby.

Further, the report found the average Aussie mum gets less than 4½ hours sleep a night and one in four get three hours or less a night.

Dr Harvey Karp, a world renowned baby sleep expert, says new mothers need more support than ever before to deflect the destructive impact of sleep deprivation.

“We know so much more about the incredible undermining and destructive impact of sleep deprivation today than when I started in paediatrics more than 25 years ago,” he said on a visit to Sydney from his home in Los Angeles. “The incredible burden on new parents is there even more now than ever before in the sense that new mothers are supposed to be babied as much as the new baby is babied, but they’re not.

“You’re supposed to have your mother and your sister and your aunt all there taking care of you so you can feed and care for the baby. But mothers today are completely bereft of that support, and what is worse, they think they don’t deserve it.

“They think that a good mother doesn’t need any help, doesn’t need any support, is happily waking up every two hours all night long, smiling and never complaining. And they think that is normal, but it turns out that couldn’t be more abnormal. Studies now show that if you get less than six hours sleep at night, you’re the equivalent of drunk. New parents on average get six hours, but it isn’t even six continuous hours, it’s broken into little tiny pieces so it’s very inefficient sleep and that’s why it feels like torture.

“And it’s the reason why it’s the number one trigger for post natal depression, breast feeding failure, marital stress, car accidents, over medication of babies and even obesity.”

A 2016 study found the chance of depression in women with poor sleep quality was more than three times higher than those with good sleep quality.

So desperate are new parents for a little sleep, a whole industry has risen around getting a newborn to sleep. Dr Karp worked for five years on the Snoo, a cot that mimics the environment in the womb cocooning a baby safely in a swaddle-like manner while providing white noise and a swaying motion. Celebrities including Beyonce, Chrissy Teigen, Mila Kunis and Khloe Kardashian are fans.

Another product, Glow Dreaming, is a night light that produces red LED, the same technology NASA uses at its space station to induce the sleep hormone, melatonin. And the Baby Shusher, said to be used by Kim Kardashian and Princess Kate, uses loud,

rhythmical shushing noises to soothe a baby.

“One of the biggest myths that surround babies and sleep is that you can’t teach a baby to be a good sleeper,” Dr Karp says. “So here’s this really weird thing we do: you have this baby in the womb where they’re held, rocked and surrounded by sound that is louder than a vacuum cleaner. And once they’re born, we do the worst thing for babies — we take them out of that environment, that symphony of sensations, and we put them on a flat bed, on their backs, we take away the sound, we take away the motion, we leave then unenveloped so the world is too big for them and then we go ‘Why is my baby not sleeping better?’.

“We have to ask ourselves, ‘What are the things that improve sleep in babies?’. The answer is swaddling, white noise, rocking and swaying.”