Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child Page 0,2

it requires that they start early, paying attention to their baby's evolving natural sleep rhythms and to synchronize their soothing-to-sleep behavior with the time when the sleep process first begins. Perfect timing produces no crying. This book is designed to educate parents as to how they can accomplish perfect timing and prevent sleep problems in their child. But to achieve perfect timing requires practice, so it is possible, especially if this is your first child, that there may be a little crying when your baby becomes overtired.

Treatment of sleep problems is more difficult than prevention for the simple reason that both the child and the parents are stressed from being overtired. Overtired children are fatigued, and the body's natural response is to fight the fatigue by producing a stimulating chemical. This response was important for survival, as primitive man had to flee, fight, or continue hunting even when overtired. This “second wind” of stimulating energy causes a hyperalert or hypervigilant state, which prevents easy entry into sleep or sleeping for long periods. That's why overtired children appear “wired,” unable to fall asleep easily or stay asleep. But why the crying?

First, severe fatigue itself can be painful. Second, changing established habits is very disturbing. After the first few months of life children can protest changes in routine by crying; they would rather play with their parents than sleep.

No parent wants her child to cry. The truth is that encouraging healthy sleep habits will prevent a lot of crying in the long run. It is possible that the treatment of unhealthy sleep habits may initially increase crying around sleep times, but subsequently it will eliminate crying altogether. Some treatments will involve no crying.

How is a parent able to trust what they read in books, magazines, or on the Internet? When you compare advice on sleeping and crying from different writers, ask yourself on what are they basing their advice. Besides practicing general pediatrics since 1973, conducting and publishing original research, and lecturing on crying and sleeping problems in children since 1981,1 have helped my wife raise our four sons.

These experiences have led me to the conclusion that sleeping patterns, temperament, and infant fussing or crying are all connected. And in young babies, these features are mostly biologically determined. Other studies have confirmed these observations, so I am reasonably confident that children are born with a package of interrelated initial predispositions or tendencies.

In the same way that we know how much calcium your baby needs for his bones to grow stronger, we know how important healthy sleep is for the growing brain. Calcium deficiency in childhood harms bone development, but the problems of osteoporosis may not show up until much later in adult life. So if your child eats a calcium deficient diet, the problem is “hidden” because there are no immediately apparent ill effects. Likewise, sleep deficiency in childhood may harm neurological development; the problems remain “hidden,” not showing up until later. I think it is possible that unhealthy sleep habits contribute to school-related problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and learning disabilities. I also suspect chronically tired children become chronically tired adults who suffer in ways we can't measure: less resiliency, less ability to cope with life's stress, less curiosity, less empathy, less playfulness. The message here is simple: Sleep is a powerful modifier of mood, behavior, performance, and personality.

WARNING

If your child does not learn to sleep well, he may become an incurable adult insomniac, chronically disabled from sleepiness and dependent on sleeping pills.

One of the world's foremost researchers in sleep, William C. Dement, taught me at Stanford University Medical School in 1967 that we exist in three distinctly different biological domains: awake, REM sleep, and non-REM sleep. Although all three domains interact with one another, there are specific problems that can occur within each domain.

According to Dr. Dement, traditional medical science focused on only the first domain, wakefulness. His major point was that we are fundamentally different when we are asleep than when we are awake. The body's clock knows when we should be asleep and adjusts our brain, our temperature, and our hormone levels to the sleep mode. In sleep mode, we do not respond, think, or feel as we do when awake. If you do not believe this, ask any mother of a six-week-old infant how she is when she is up at night soothing her baby!

There has been much misunderstanding about “insecurity” and “crying to sleep” because of a failure to make the distinction between