WORN-OUT MOMS SHOULDN’T STRESS OVER BABIES’ SLEEP
Study suggests it’s all right if infant doesn’t sleep through the night by six to 12 months
When mothers give birth for the first time, they often base their expectations on what other mothers told them or what they discovered from online research.
When mothers give birth a second or third time, they tend to set expectation based on those earlier children.
When it comes to how babies should sleep, it can get very confusing.
A few years ago, when the Toronto Raptors suffered a bad loss, the media asked the coach how he slept after the game.
He answered, “I slept like a baby last night — awake all night and crying.”
Not getting enough sleep is no laughing matter to many tired moms and there is no shortage of “sleep whisperers” and books to offer advice.
In an upcoming publication in Pediatrics (December 2018), Canadian researchers are adding some reassurance. Researchers analyzed data from obstetric clinics in Montreal and Hamilton to see how many babies sleep through the night at six months and at one year.
The bottom line is 38 per cent of babies at six months were not yet sleeping a minimum of six consecutive hours at night and 57 per cent were not sleeping eight hours at night.
At 12 months old, 28 per cent of infants weren’t sleeping six hours straight and 43 per cent weren’t staying asleep for eight hours. The study suggests parents should not worry if their infant does not sleep through the night by six to 12 months of age.
In addition, babies who woke up during the night had a significantly higher rate of breastfeeding.
Clearly, an argument against breastfeeding will never be a good idea, but, once again, expectations must be appropriate. Moms who breastfeed need to be told what to expect; they need to know the digestion of breast milk is very efficient and that breastfed babies are less likely to sleep for longer periods.
Many mothers have asked me if there is something wrong neurologically with their baby who is not sleeping through the night or at least for six to eight hours uninterrupted. The Canadian study reassuringly taught us that infants who woke up at night were not more likely to have problems with cognitive, language or motor development later. (Usually if the latter issues are present, there will be more symptoms and findings than just sleep concerns alone.)
Unfortunately, there is a tendency among moms to compare their children’s habit with one another or, even worse, with other mothers’ experiences. As a holistic health coach, I learned valuable wisdom from a Theodore Roosevelt quote: “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
I often use that expression to remind families that the normal development of a child’s sleep patterns has a wide variability.
I have also found that many mothers harbour guilt about their own skills to put babies to sleep. These tired, well-meaning parents need to know self-compassion is a better alternative.
The study mentioned above was called the Maternal Adversity, Vulnerability and Neurodevelopment longitudinal cohort study. Becoming a mother is indeed a test of how humans handle challenges and vulnerabilities.
My hope is that primary care doctors, public health nurses and parenting coaches will read the upcoming paper in Pediatrics carefully and incorporate the new data in their practice. For too long, maternal expectations have been shaped by “gold standards” that were not very gold at all.
To my knowledge, there are no studies specifically done on mothers of babies who did not sleep through the night in terms of using mindfulness to help them cope with fatigue and missed expectations.
However, research on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction by Jon Kabat Zinn of Boston clearly showed the benefits of meditation and mindfulness training in general. For mothers who are stressed out by babies who do not sleep through the night, mindfulness training may be a realistic option.
Many of my patients have found the Meditation Studio App a useful start in developing a tool to cope with sleep deprivation. One frustrating question regarding breastfeeding will never be answered even by the smartest scientists on the planet: Why do men have nipples? (Fathers can help tired moms in other ways, though.)
For more information on sleep patterns for babies, visit healthychildren.org