For No-Cry Solutions for Common Parenting Challenges, Check with Elizabeth Pantley

I first encountered the gentle guidance of Elizabeth Pantley when I added The No-Cry Sleep Solution to the stack of books on baby sleep that grew beside my bed during Violet's infancy. As Violet grew, but the length of her sleep sessions did not, I thumbed desperately through its pages in search of a remedy to her restlessness. While in reading it I never discovered the silver bullet I'd hoped to find (I'm not sure there is such thing as a compassionate quick fix for sleep at those stages), what I did take away was what I really needed: reassurance that someday my baby would sleep longer than three quarters of an hour, without our resorting to strategies we weren't comfortable with.

Pantley's approach is the antithesis to perhaps better-known "baby-trainers" like Ferber and Weissbluth - worse yet, Ezzo - who are adamant that every baby is the same and should sleep on the same schedule. Instead, Pantley understands that babies are individuals, and should be respected and responded to as such, even at night. Since she also recognizes that prolonged sleep deprivation can be painful (putting it mildly) for parents, she proposes a plan for helping ease little ones into sleeping longer stretches in a way that the whole family can live with.

Fortunately for the child-centered set, Pantley has provided additional advice on tough topics in her other books: The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers; The No-Cry Potty Training Solution; The No-Cry Discipline Solution; and her latest - The No-Cry Nap Solution: Guaranteed Gentle Ways to Solve All Your Naptime Problems. Each of these volumes adds a much-needed AP perspective to conventional parenting literature; I look forward to adding several to my own bookshelf.

The Sleep Saga Goes On . . .

As I was dropping Violet off at daycare one morning last week, I responded to a fellow parent's innocent inquiry as to how I was doing with an honest "I'm tired." Violet, never a sound sleeper, has been even more restless the past few weeks, and it's taken a toll on Eric and me. After a year and half of living with a baby with high nighttime needs, we can withstand a significant sleep deprivation, but the holidays (and the four new teeth that came with them) seemed to amplify our issues. By the second week in January, we were back to the all-night nurse-a-thons we thought we'd left behind months ago.

Historically, Violet’s sleep patterns have been inconsistent enough to give us the occasional reprieve. A few nights of waking to nurse only once or twice could restore us sufficiently to withstand the less peaceful episodes that were sure to follow. But last week we realized we – more accurately I - wasn’t going to be able to ride this most recent regression out. Violet had appointed me her human pacifier, refusing to sleep without being latched on. Though I am more patient as a parent than I ever imagined I could be, I have my limits, and we had reached them.

So when this friendly father said "how are you?" I told him: I'm tired. The adorable, energetic toddler you just saw me waving goodbye to is up at least every hour these days. In my experience, such confessions are often met with a well-intentioned explanation of when and how the person I'm speaking with applied the cry-it-out technique with their own child, and how well they've been sleeping ever since. This conversation was no exception. But while I appreciate the suggestion, and I certainly envy the image of uninterrupted sleep, I'm still not comfortable with the concept of "cry it out."

Eric and I agreed we needed to do something differently, but weren’t willing to resort to letting Violet cry it out alone. Instead, we decided it was time for her to (partially) nightwean. At seventeen months, she no longer needs to nurse for nutrition overnight, and though we hated to remove that source of comfort, her increasing dependence on it was making the family bed unbearable. We were familiar with Dr. Jay Gordon’s gentle approach to nightweaning, and using it as a guide decided to designate the hours of 10 pm – 5 am as “time to sleep,” during which we would offer Violet comfort in any form except nursing.

For a few nights, I left the room when she woke, so as not to further frustrate her. Eric could soothe her in my absence by letting her lay on top of him, but we soon saw that while that was effective at settling her, ultimately we weren't making any progress at getting her to sleep unattached to one of us. Last night, we took the option of Dada's chest off the table, and the nightweaning began in earnest. Denied her two preferred sleep associations, Violet protested first angrily, and eventually with heartbreaking, hiccuping sobs. But as she struggled, we stayed beside her, rubbing her back, singing softly, whispering in her ear. Eventually she fell asleep, nestled between us.

We expect it to take Violet some time to adjust to this new nighttime routine, and we are committed to working through that with her. We also understand that nightweaning may not reduce her nightwaking (though certainly that is the hope). But even if she continues to wake frequently, nightweaning will allow us to identify other ways to soothe her back to sleep that will afford us more flexibility in our nighttime parenting. In the meantime, we'll accept any peacefully sleeping baby vibes sent our direction.

For inspiration:

We Can Do This In Our Sleep! Being Present All Through the Night

Nightime has confronted us with some of the most challenging parenting moments we’ve faced so far, but being present for our now 14 month old daughter at three in the morning is just as important as it is at any more reasonable hour. Though it isn’t always as easy, or as pleasant, as engaging her in a silly song, or reading Counting Kisses again, she doesn’t stop needing us when the sun goes down.

Our nighttime parenting has evolved in response to our daughter’s needs – and our fumbling attempts to meet them.The day she was born, she never left our arms until after midnight, when we laid her carefully in the plastic bassinet the hospital provided before turning in ourselves. As we gazed down at our brand new baby girl, she spit up a little, and we froze at the terrifying idea that she could choke while we slept. Without further ado, I scooped her up and climbed into the bed, where she slept in my arms, nursing on and off the rest of the night.

When we brought her home the next day, we carefully attached an Arm’s Reach Cosleeper to our bed, eager for her to sleep close to us. We were aware of the benefits of co-sleeping– including decreased risk of SIDS – and the Cosleeper made us feel more comfortable about sleeping next to a newborn. But the first time we lowered our sleeping infant onto its thin mattress she awoke immediately, howling in protest. We tried again, gently easing her from our bodies to this space where we had intended for her to sleep, but she made it clear she had other ideas.

And so the Cosleeper was relegated to serving as a makeshift nightstand until its eventual relocation to storage in the basement, and we began the process of trying to determine how to help our baby sleep. As a newborn, she slept best semi-upright on our chests, so for several weeks (or maybe it was months? it all runs together now) we took turns sleeping with her in the overstuffed recliner I’d grudgingly come to love during the last months of my pregnancy. When she was five weeks old, we discovered she was suffering from acid reflux, which explained her profound discomfort at lying flat on her back. But even after she outgrew the reflux at about four months, we still couldn’t seem to coax her to sleep for any significant length of time.

We made sure she wore comfortable pjs, was clean and dry, and had a belly full of breastmilk before bedtime each night. We tried putting her down in her crib and in her swing, with white noise and without, swaddled and unswaddled, on her back and on her side, with the nightlight on and off. And each time, about an hour after she succumbed to sleep, she’d wake, and we would go try again.

We also tried co-sleeping, hopeful that being close to us would provide her some comfort, but found that such proximity only stimulated her to fight sleep in order to nurse frantically all night - I awoke more than once to a find a puddle of my milk pooled under her head. So we’d try variations of other arrangements again, which would allow her to sleep more peacefully, if not for long.

We didn’t expect her to sleep through the night at six weeks, or even six months, understanding that nightwaking is normal. We were more than willing to attend to her in the wee hours, and I was happy to nurse her more than once overnight. But months of hourly (and occasionally more frequent) waking was wearing us down. Frustrated and exhausted, we stumbled through our days and nights, and desperately searched books on baby sleep for a solution. The mainstream consensus was clear: our baby should be sleeping through the night by now, and if she wasn’t, we should ‘help’ her by leaving her to cry it out.

We considered that advice, but as I wrote in this post, quickly concluded that cry-it-out wasn’t compatible with the attachment parenting approach in which we believed. At some point, we accepted that there probably wasn’t a silver bullet for our sleep struggles. The answer to the question of what to do for our daughter, a restless sleeper with high nocturnal needs, was simple, and one we’d known all along: when she cried, we would respond. Every time. Sometimes I nursed her as soon as she stirred, sometimes her Dada snuggled with her or patted her bum softly until she drifted back into slumber. We continued to bring her into our bed, and finally, one night when she was almost eleven months old, she finished nursing, rolled over, and went to sleep. It was the first night she’d actually slept next to me without nursing for a few hours, and she hasn’t been back in her crib since.

Co-sleeping feels right for us. Though she still stirs often throughout the night, just being beside us seems to lengthen each stretch of snooze - finally we can comfort her without waking ourselves! And when she does arouse, if she isn’t easily soothed back to sleep, she nestles next to me and nurses, and we doze off together again. Of course there are nights when we find ourselves exasperated at the fact that we haven’t enjoyed a night of unbroken sleep for over a year, but we are committed to giving her our presence even when it isn’t easy to do so. And when the sun comes up on her sweet face between my husband and me, I wouldn’t want any of us to be anywhere else.

Originally posted at API Speaks October 14, 2008.