Even before my baby was born, I’d done plenty of research on babies and I was confident I knew all there was to know about sleep. Don’t co sleep all the books said, because it will spoil your baby. So I didn’t. My baby had his own crib in his own room. Don’t comfort a baby when he cries they said. Wait it out. Let him learn to self soothe. So that’s what I did starting at about 6 months of age. And as they all said my baby cried for an hour the first night. I stood there fingers stuffed in my ears, tears running down my cheeks repeating to myself ‘Sleep training is important! He HAS to learn!’. I wish I’d stopped to ask myself why a 6 month old needs to learn how to soothe himself when his mom is right outside.
A few nights into the process the crying stopped and I was hopeful that my ‘training’ had worked. It did. For a few weeks. Then my baby fell ill. And all the training went down the drain. I couldn’t let a sick baby cry so I rocked him and sang to him and spent several nights lying down to sleep next to him. I remember thinking ‘this feels nice.’ But I was also worried that this would undo all the progress we’d made with sleep. It did. My baby had once again realized the comfort of his mother’s arms and when we tried to sleep train again once he got better, he wasn’t having any of it. He would scream harder and louder and my heart, which I’d hardened last time, began to crack. Was this really necessary? And would I have to do this every time he fell ill? Because the one thing everyone knows about babies is that they fall ill all the time. Add to that teething and sleep regressions and that leaves a tiny number of days when the sleep training could even work. And each time you’d have to do it over and over again. I was so confused.
Two things happened around this time that finally made me give up sleep training. First I joined a group of supportive moms on Facebook and their babies weren’t sleeping all night either. They helped me realize that our expectations are way too high when it comes to sleep and that it is developmentally normal for babies to wake up every few hours and to need to be nursed or rocked or patted to sleep. It made me wish I’d met them earlier when I was brainwashing myself to believe that my baby needed to sleep independently at the ridiculously young age of 6 months. Secondly, my baby started saying a few words and when I’d leave him to cry he would call me by screaming ‘Amma’ or ‘Maa’. All the books had told me he was crying to release tension before going to sleep, that he wasn’t really distressed but just complaining. False. My baby wanted ME and he knew it. I could no longer ignore his cries. I stopped trying to sleep train him and just decided to go with the flow.
And half a year later I’m happy to say that we are doing okay even though my baby doesn’t put himself to sleep and even though I don’t sleep 8-10 hours every night. There are days when all I need to do is rock him for a couple of minutes and he dozes off. And there are nights when we’re up for hours trying to make sure we get some sort of rest or sleep and failing. It is often frustrating but that’s how life with a baby is. I can’t restrict my love and comfort only to his waking hours. I parent round the clock and that includes night time. I only wish I’d learned this lesson sooner.
So for those of you want to sleep train, my only advice is ‘don’t do it!’ It doesn’t work and is needlessly cruel to both mother and baby. Forget everything you’ve read or been told and go rock your baby to sleep. Trust me, youwon’tbedoingitforever.
Aparajita Karthik
We would like to thank Aparajita for sharing such a sensitive story on our blog. You can follow her blog here and her youtube channel here. Parenting is always a work in progress and we should never forget to learn lessons from our past mistakes. Read our blog on normal sleep development here.
The Yearling House 