The baby sleep solution
When it comes to conquering baby sleep, Lucy Wolfe has seen – and solved – it all. Her stay-and-support approach has helped thousands of people achieve the holy grail of parenthood – a full night’s sleep! But as every parent knows, even with the best sleep routine in place, things can go awry. In her new book, Lucy addresses the most common problems she encounters when working with families, offering quick solutions that help you address specific issues. Experiencing sleep challenges with your infant or child can have a debilitating effect on the entire family unit. Everybody’s situation and every child is different, and what tired parents crave is a quick answer and better understanding of what exactly the sleep issue they are facing is, and how to tackle these interruptions as they arise. By helping parents understand their child’s sleep science and common tendencies in the first three years, Lucy shows parents how to introduce and maintain a gentle approach that is
98% effective in addressing sleep issues. Here in this exclusive extract from her new book All About The Baby Sleep
Solution: Your Questions Answered, Lucy looks at barriers to sleep success and how to solve them.
The changes I will encourage parents to make are both evidence and practice based, formed through my work over the years and continually refined while assisting parents through their challenging and frustrating sleep issues. My aim in my book is to widen my one-to-one consultation work, but sometimes the only remedy is to work directly with a practitioner to receive a personalised individual plan with support and guidance to reach your goals. Don’t be afraid to reach out if you feel that the journey on your own is too overwhelming, because it can happen. But, that said, literally thousands of parents have mastered great sleep by applying my strategies and suggestions from The Baby
Sleep Solution.
A number of factors can reduce the chances of your sleeplearning plan working, and I want to outline them for you so that all your efforts will give a yield and help you to reach your goals – provided they are realistic in the first place.
I often hear of parents who have ‘tried everything’, whether from a book – mine or another’s – through forums, advice online, tips from friends and relatives, yet they really feel that their child ‘just won’t sleep’. Beyond six months, there are some main factors that, together or separately, can dilute your efforts:
1. Bedtime addressed too late or when the child is already overtired.
2. Nap imbalance or napdeprivation dynamic.
3. Reduced level of sleep ability. 4. Overnight not yet addressed consistently.
We’ll look at each of these points in detail here.
1. LATE BEDTIMES
Generally, an early onset of sleep helps your child go to sleep with greater ease and stay asleep for longer. Bedtime for young children, from about four months to six years-plus ranges between 6pm and 8pm. However, when your child is not routinely sleeping well, then nothing is early enough! Even 7.15pm or 7.30pm is too late when your child does not usually sleep well overnight and/ or by day too.
Perhaps your child’s night-time sleep is good but daytime sleep isn’t. When bedtime is slightly too late biologically, it can prevent daytime sleep happening with ease, so observing an earlier bedtime tends to support better sleep overall – both overnight and by day. To further help you, I have devised the bedtime number line to encourage you to practise an earlier bedtime when age appropriate and when hoping to achieve increased sleep by day and by night. This will help you stop attempting bedtime too late.
THE BEDTIME NUMBER LINE
1. 5pm – dinner
2. 5.45–6.15pm – fixed feed
3. 6.30pm – bedtime routine
4. 6.50pm – into cot/bed
Q
I’m worried that an earlier bedtime will mean that he will be awake even earlier!
A
When I mention early bedtimes in group settings, parents often have objections – ‘it seems too early’, ‘I’m worried about the wake time in the morning’, ‘I won’t see my child – I’m barely home from work then’ – and I understand those concerns. But if you really want to improve your child’s sleep and promote longer sleeping durations, then observing an early (in bed asleep by 7pm) bedtime is a necessary adjustment in most instances.
Once you have improved your child’s sleep then it may be possible to push bedtime back out again, or indeed, if despite starting early your child never achieves sleep until a certain later time, then there is scope to start later and not be under as much pressure.
However, for those of you whose children fall asleep very close to 7pm, that represents their natural bedtime. Moving it later may undermine your previous efforts and night waking and early rising may re-emerge unless the early bedtime is continually observed. This is about meeting a need – your child’s need to sleep by a certain time, resulting in a happier, more rested individual.
2. NAP DEPRIVATION
Achieving enough daytime sleep for your child can have immediate positive implications for night-time sleep. There is a distinct relationship between the quality of the daytime sleep and the deepness of the night-time sleep. If your child does not get enough daytime sleep, then you may be exposed to unwanted night-time activity, as an overtired child will be more inclined to wake and require parental support to return to sleep.
Q
How much sleep should my child be getting at nine months?
A
I try not to have parents count the hours of sleep, as I believe that if we create the right dynamic the body will respond in kind.
Don’t forget, your child’s body is designed to sleep – mostly we just need to programme them correctly, and once we start to achieve sleep at the right time, then the body can stay asleep for as long as it needs to, thus eliminating the negative overtired cycle (with some adjustments, of course).
That said, there are general nap-amount recommendations, and if your child does not get enough day sleep or significantly less than proposed, then you are going to be more vulnerable to night-time activity.
Only use this as a guide, though, not to fill a quota per se.
Balancing Naps
My focus with naps is the balance between sleeps. The ageappropriate feeding and sleeping balances up to 18 months that I suggest describe the wakewindow timing within which to attempt to help your child to sleep. Once we observe a smaller wake period between waking in the morning and first and second naps, when applicable, then we are starting to create the correct balance for sleep, and your child will typically go to sleep easier and sleep longer, and achieve their optimum need for sleep. This is replaced with clock-based timings – all of the adjustments are to ensure vulnerabilities to sleep issues are reducing. NAP-GAP DYNAMIC
A number of nap tendencies can diminish your efforts for better sleep – one in particular is the wake period between the final nap end and being in bed asleep. My nap-gap dynamic honours the relationship between naps and bedtime and the science of sleep and in doing so helps to unlock your child’s sleep ability.
The nap-gap dynamic observes an age-relevant wake period between daytime and night-time sleep, without which we tend to see unnecessary waking overnight and a variety of other issues.
Some families may try to finish the naps later and still observe the suggested nap-gap dynamic together with a later bed timing, and this can sometimes work, but as it may challenge the internal body clock, it can prove less effective.
My general recommendation is to start on my timeline and adjust when the sleep has been improved and you have a ‘working model’.
Even with precise timing, if you do not adequately prepare your child for sleep, you often see a high level of objection come bedtime. This is where you can utilise the power of the bedtime routine. While we rely heavily on melatonin hormonal secretion and sleep pressure to help with bedtime, a pre-sleep ritual will further augment the message that it is time to sleep.
Q
My baby gets enough sleep as per their age range but I still don’t see better sleep overnight.
A
Another nap imbalance is when your child is getting enough sleep on paper, but if they are still on more than one nap we often see:
Naps power play: The first nap overpowers the day, resulting in a weaker second nap and, as a result, still being overtired at bedtime. Clipping the naps as outlined in my sleeping and feeding suggestions will ensure we are balancing naps for the day.
Naps over too early: When toddlers transition to one nap, I frequently see the nap happening too early in the day, and although bedtime is at the appropriate time, the wake-time gap far exceeds the four to five hours they can tolerate before becoming so overtired that they crash or battle at bedtime, leaving you further exposed to long wake periods and early rising.
3. SLEEP ABILITY
Sleep ability exists on a spectrum: Low sleep ability – requires parent to help them go entirely to sleep.
Incomplete sleep ability – requires a level of input, sometimes not obvious: possibly a feed too close to sleep time or a parent’s presence or input as they go asleep.
Complete sleep ability – can put themselves to sleep without a parent present or a feed too close to sleep time. So if you routinely feed or rock or lie with your child until they are asleep, or transfer them from arms to cot or bed to cot pretty much asleep, then you tick the low sleep ability box. And while many families do this and their child sleeps through the night, countless others find their child is waking too many times to mention, or their day sleep is compromised even if the night is manageable.
If after adjusting the timings and laying a foundation of night-time sleep it still feels unmanageable, then your child may need to learn how to be more sleep ‘able’ – to develop their own ability to fall asleep and cycle through at least
some of their sleep phases without parental input.
My stay-and-support approach enables you to transition from low to complete sleep ability without the need to allow your child to cry unattended. Although there may well be crying, it is parentattended and child led, and bolstered by all the foundations that support emotional wellbeing together with better sleep.
Q I feel that I do everything you suggest, yet I’m not making the progress I anticipated.
A In my private practice, one of the most diluting factors I find is the incomplete sleep ability, or what I have previously described as a partial dependency – one that is not obvious – where parents report that their child is independent or ‘sleep able’ at bedtime, but the sleep issues overnight remain. An incomplete sleep ability happens normally when the final feed – although separate to bedtime or not the last thing that you do – is still too close to sleep time. I find that, unless there is a definite 45 minutes between the end of the feed and the time you are aiming for your child to be asleep, it is still potentially too close. That final act of sucking on the breast, bottle or cup is enabling a sleepy state, making going asleep easy but disabling the ability to maintain sleep overnight as a result. To remedy this, I have introduced my fixed-feed concept, which you can align with all the other suggestions. It may also be that you are still present as they go to sleep, barely doing anything, but without your being there, they may not go to sleep with such ease, leaving you more exposed to unnecessary night-time activity.
THE FIXED FEED
From six months onwards, I encourage the concept of the fixed feed, which means that the final milk feed is finished at least 45 minutes to one hour before bedtime. Although The Baby
Sleep Solution has helped many families, I still meet parents who either misinterpret this message or do not see its relevance or importance. It is a very important adjustment and can make all the difference to your progress.
Q My child refuses to drink the fixed feed. A
I often hear that a child won’t drink their bottle unless they’re in the bedroom, or they will only breastfeed without distractions in a dark room. And, of course, I hear that parents are worried about hunger and that having a feed directly before bedtime is supposed to keep children asleep – whereas I can honestly say the opposite is true. Although sucking is relaxing and breast milk has the right properties to induce sleep, if sucking close to sleep time is your child’s association with achieving sleep, then this may need to be repeated potentially many times through the night because sleep has its own designs. This is addressed with my bedtime number line and by routinely removing the final feed, whether it’s finished or not, by 6.15pm.
4. OVERNIGHT NOT ADDRESSED CONSISTENTLY
and bedtime changes but you have not yet completely addressed the night- time waking. In the following chapters, you will see that sleep exists in segments and each segment requires intervention to adequately address your challenges.
This means you will require a plan to help diminish the expectation of the approaches you have historically taken overnight. For some of you, this will include night weaning or regulating night feeds and erasing a cycle of waking to be fed, bed-sharing, starting the day too soon or any other strategy that you invoke to get your child back to sleep – iPads, phones, TV, water, feeds: the list is endless.
The Baby Sleep Solution
Many of you will apply the plan overnight and still report no improvement. This generally indicates that something by day and possibly at bedtime is not adequately aligned or has been misinterpreted. Some of you will just have to work on the overnight and sleep segments, acknowledging that this often takes the longest to address and is, to be fair, the hardest, as this is when we ourselves would like to be in bed sleeping.
These are the main diluting factors. Hopefully, we are gaining understanding and confidence in making changes that will allow some great things to start to happen!
‘I bought your book out of sheer desperation and what a difference it has made. It has been a week now and there have been zero feeds at night. Two naps during the day and up to bed at 7pm and sleeping until 7.15am. Granted he wakes once or so just for a bit of a cuddle and back down again – I mean, literally two minutes and he falls back asleep when I put him in. With stay-and-support there are still tears but it’s to be expected! I followed everything except the last feed before bedtime a few weeks back and it didn’t work… as soon as I gave the last feed 45 minutes before bed it changed everything, so thank you a thousand times over. You are a life saver.’ – Aide, mum to seven-month-old Gem.
n This is an edited extract from Chapter 2: Barriers to Sleep Success from All About The Baby Sleep Solution: Your Questions Answered by Lucy Wolfe, published by Gill Books, €16.99 and available now in bookshops and online.