Sleep Advice to a New Parent

Someone at work asked for advice about sleep training their 8 week old.

I started typing this response, and realized that it does not fit into a slack response.

Congratulations on the new addition to your family!

Back when I was a bachelor, I'd picked up the impression that a baby is basically just a little bag of noise. You put sustenance in one end, clean up the other, and that's about it for the first 18 months.

I didn't have any idea that I'd be dealing with a real person, right from the beginning.






There is so much pressure about sleep training, and so much judgment about making it happen, and so much investment because it has so much impact on your personal life.

Here's the basic truth: your baby's going to do what your baby's going to do.

And you will both be fine. (Believe it or not, you will eventually mostly recover from the chronic sleep deprivation...and it's worth it).

Sleep training runs a gamut between "always be there" and "cry it out."

The scientific studies are mixed about which approaches might have long-term harm and side-effects.

With our older kid, Laura made D cry it out. She sat outside the door and cried about it until D cried to sleep.

At the time, she knew it was wrong. But she was wrapped up in the culture that tells us this is just the way it has to be, for your kid's own good.

When our younger one was born, all the science pointed toward cortisol studies that showed this approach does irreparable brain damage.

Those have mostly been debunked, at least sort-of. But letting your baby cry it out will probably damage your relationship. And you're just starting to build the foundation for that with the new addition to your family. The kid's tired, lonely, cold, and scared. They need your support and comfort.

Mal didn't fit into anything like a "normal" sleep pattern. He still doesn't.

We obsessed about this for months. We bought every sleep training product we could find. We weren't willing to let him cry it out, but we tried every other approach we could come up with.

None of them worked.

When he was 4 or 5 months old, I finally managed to take a vacation. We took the opportunity to observe and re-assess.

Mal finally got a chance to sleep on his terms, instead of when we (and all the "experts") wanted/expected/needed.

Laura decided that she could work with the sleep schedule that his body needed.

We've been taking that approach ever since. It still has his challenges (5-ish years later, I was up until 1 am this morning, waiting to brush his teeth), but I believe it was the right one for both us and him.

Mal didn't ask to join our family. We chose to add him, even though we didn't know who we'd get.

Finding out who he is, and who he's growing to become, is an incredible joy.

Pounding him into submission to suit our needs and expectations would change who he is in fundamental ways that wouldn't be fair to him.

There is a part of me that wishes we forced him into a 9 pm bed-time, the way my parents did with me. But even they must have realized that was a mistake, because they didn't bother with Khrys.

There's another part that wishes we could just unplug at 10:00. Tell Mal that we're done for the evening, wind down, and call it a night. That just isn't realistic.

Most nights, that's when he decides he's ready for supper.

And, really, I mostly like the fact that he's an opinionated, strong-willed person who tells us what he wants.