Of babies, no sleep and love

theSun, Tue, 08 Apr 2008

All childcare and parenting books advise a bedtime routine that calms and soothes the child to help him/her ease into sleep better. It normally includes a bath, some massage, a darkened room, soft music or bedtime story.

When my daughter was two, we had a frustrating time coping with her sleep problem.
The routine in getting her to bed was pretty much in place and she went to sleep without much fuss. The problem was that she could not stay asleep throughout the night.

She would wake at around 2am every night and refuse to go back to sleep, staying up for as long as three hours and demanding our attention.
According to a recent article from the NZ Herald, New Zealand babies are among the best behaved in the world.

"An international survey has found Kiwi infants sleep better and go to bed earlier than any in the English-speaking world, and wake less during the night ....
"The survey said New Zealand babies woke less than average during the night, were less likely to sleep in their parents’ bedroom and more likely to have the same bedtime routine."

The article also quoted an expert saying "parents who were worried about their children’s sleep patterns needed to focus on routine. Establishing a routine is the essence to getting babies to sleep better.

"For infants up to six or nine months old, parents should try to establish a routine of half an hour quiet time before baby is bathed, massaged and put to bed."
I thought I did that, so why didn’t it work for me?
We suffered from lack of sleep and its accompanying after-effects for many months, dragging ourselves out of bed every morning and struggling to stay awake at work throughout the day.

I noted that the article also mentioned that "despite the findings, nearly a third of New Zealand parents believed their babies had sleep problems".
While establishing a sleep-time routine is a ‘best-practice’, I guess a small percentage of babies still defy the laws of Slumberland. Mine was one of them. We were at our wits’ end figuring out how to break that habit. It tried our patience. It was only after I took a week-long break that my daughter kicked the habit. Somehow within that week, she slept through the night and continued to do so after I returned to work.

I wonder if her waking and staying awake in the middle of the night was because she wanted to spend more time with us. For a two-year-old who had limited communication skills, maybe that’s what she was trying to tell us.

We spend long hours at work, and especially on weekdays, there’s hardly time to lavish enough attention and playtime on our little ones when we get home.
We go through the routine of our chores and tending to their basic needs of being fed, cleaned and put to bed. Maybe that’s not enough to meet our child’s need to bond with us.

I am not an expert in childcare, parenting or child psychology but one thing I know for sure is that babies need lots of bonding and protection from their parents.
If you observe nature, even baby animals need that. Little chimps cling on to their mother’s chest or back, a tiny lamb follows its mum everywhere she goes, little ducklings swim alongside their mama in the pond, and chicks seek shelter under mother hen’s wings.