I had a text from a young mom a few days ago, asking me about some
health issues. We agreed to meet in town the next day for a face-to-face. Her
chief complaint was what she called mood swings, suddenly flying off the handle
with her kids. We talked about thyroid and candida, my two pet peeves, and I
found myself zeroing in on the latter. I had her fill out a questionnaire, the
results of which certainly seemed to indicate that she has a problem with
overgrowth of this opportunistic yeast/fungus; so we talked about a strategy to
begin to tackle this issue.
But underneath it all seemed to lie a more foundational problem: this
poor mother was terribly sleep-deprived. Her youngest child is just seven
months old. He has got into a routine where he naps off and on, all day long;
then at 1:00 a.m., he wakes up to be taken into his parents’ bed to nurse. After
that he’s wide awake for the next four hours—and so are the parents.
I hesitated to express any opinions or advice, as I am trying to learn
to not answer questions that I haven’t even been asked. But I certainly went
home thinking about it. I recollected the time when Ben, my first baby, was
seven months old and Greg and I drove out to my parents’ place in B.C. to
celebrate Christmas with them. Ben and I were still on the schedule we’d been
on ever since he was born: awake at 1:00 a.m. to nurse, fuss, burp, and sooth,
to finally settle him once more shortly before he awoke again at 4:00 a.m. to start
the process all over again. My father, a doctor, was concerned about how little
sleep I was getting, and he talked to my husband about it. Greg didn’t say
anything to me until after we had returned to Wetaskiwin.
“I didn’t say this to Nancy,” Dad had apparently told Greg, “because I
don’t think she would hear it from me, but I tell all my moms by this age to
make their babies sleep through the night.”
Greg thought we should try it. I was dubious, but I was also, as “a good
Christian wife,” of the conviction that I should follow my husband’s lead, and that
God would see to it that Greg was given the necessary wisdom if I honoured
God’s chain of authority.
The plan was that when Ben woke in the night, we would let him cry
himself back to sleep. It was kind of brutal, that first night. Mother-instinct
had me yearning to comfort my unhappy baby. But I stuck to the plan, with my
husband’s sleepy encouragement. The crying went on and on—for an hour. And then
suddenly, all was amazingly quiet. He didn’t wake up again that night.
The second night was almost as bad; Baby cried nearly as long. And then
the third night, he slept through. We never looked back. As our other children
came along, we were much firmer in our direction with things like this. We saw
that I could do a much better job of mothering all day long if I didn’t mother
all night as well. I don’t recall exactly when we began to give Baby Lindsay
the “opportunity” to learn to sleep through the night; probably at around six
months. Melissa began to sleep through the night of her own volition when she
was only ten days old! Rachel was more typical, like Ben and Lindsay, but she
had to fall into line here too, even though in every other way she was not a
fall-in-line kind of girl.
As I pondered the young mom I had just been talking to, I wondered if my
experience and advice would be helpful to her or if my methods would be
considered out of date. That would be a pity though. One hates to see every
generation trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. Wisdom, gleaned from
God’s truths, has no expiry date. There is no new thing under the sun. God says
the older women are to teach the younger, among other things, how to love their
children.
I sent a text to my daughter-in-law Margaret. “Hey, what would you
suggest to the mother of a seven-month-old, who’s not getting any sleep because
Baby naps off and on all day and then comes to bed to nurse in the middle of
the night and then is wide awake and keeps them awake for four hours at a
stretch?”
She answered: “Brian started doing this when he was a baby, so I kept
him up as long as I could during the day, even when he was grumpy and tired. I
shortened his naps during the day as well. When it was bedtime I fed him a lot!
And he slept longer; then he also would wake up once a night and go right back
to sleep.”
Then I consulted with Google as well, searching “self-soothing
techniques baby.” I gleaned here that between four and six months of age is a
good time to begin allowing Baby to learn this important skill. If he is eating
some solids by this point, it will help carry him through the night. I know
this was the case with Baby Ben.
Some schools of thought are dead-set against any kind of self-soothing.
“My baby needs me. He will be more secure, more confident that we will always
be there for him, if we pick him up every time he cries.” The mother has needs,
too, that are fulfilled in the short term by this philosophy. She feels powerfully
affirmed as a mother when her baby needs her and when she can and does meet
that need. But if she is up all night trying to assuage the immediate whims of
her baby, what is the trade-off, the price to be paid during the day, when she
is so exhausted that she flips into a rage with the baby and the other children,
or slides into a depression, just because life becomes so overwhelming?
Also, if she gives in and caters to every whimper, assuring him
subliminally that she will always be there for him, she is teaching him other
things that don’t work well in the years to come. This is what he is learning:
“The world revolves around me. Every need I have should be fulfilled, right
now. Mom and Dad will always make sure that life is not too hard for me.” (Some
of us spend most of our lives trying to unlearn these things.)
Most parents would be quick to agree that they don’t want their child
entering adulthood still swaddled in this kind of immaturity; the question is,
when should the harsh truth be allowed to come upon them? Well, it begins when
Baby is expelled from the womb, and from there the journey of independence
begins, however slowly.
Baby must learn, along with the rest of us: The world does not revolve
around me. Not every need I have is going to be met when I think it should.
Life is hard, and nobody can shield me from that raw fact.
It will be up to the individual parents to decide as a couple what their
philosophy is, but perhaps it helps to realize that no matter when you begin
this separation process, it’s going to be painful, to the child, and to the
parents—most especially to the mother. Her
emotions will shape her philosophy as long as she allows them to do so.
It helps tremendously for her to learn to look to her husband for
guidance here, to offer him the respect of taking to heart what he says, and to
pray for him—and believe—that God will impart the wisdom he needs. By all
means, she should pray for wisdom for herself as well, but there is another
dynamic, a force to be reckoned with, when she learns to fit herself into God’s
design in the wife-husband relationship.
