inquiring parent

A different style of post today.

Yesterday in a newsagent I picked up a parenting magazine and flicked through it. I read a short article about research that claims to have shown that children whose parents are with them as they fall asleep or who are taken into the parental bed if they wake in the night will more likely continue to have sleep problems as older children. 

Hmm, I wonder, could this be a bit like the research that showed babies who had a night light grew up to be short sighted? That research came out when LB was a year or so old, and I fretted about it long enough to switch her light off one night. She screamed, the light went back on, and some time later the researchers realised that they had overlooked one fairly vital piece of information – babies with night-lights tend to have parents who are short sighted! (And no, I’m not but my husband is.)

So am I now going to beat myself up over all those nights I picked LB up and took her through to our bed in the middle of the night? Am I going to assume that’s why she still occasionally has bad dreams? (The article suggested these children more often had bad dreams.) Or am I going to take a wild guess that these researchers may just have overlooked important information – for instance that children with high levels of anxiety or who get scared at night may well have parents who sit with them as they go to sleep and who soothe them when they wake in the night? It gets even more interesting – I looked up the magazine’s web-site and found a mass of information about children and sleep, including evidence that controlled crying creates stress chemicals in a child, whereas co-sleeping reduces them. So who do you believe?

This post is not a argument about whether you should take your baby to be with you or not – I think that what works for any family depends on so many factors unique to them that it is impossible to generalise. I can’t help feeling that instead of doing endless studies to prove one way of parenting is better then another, it would be more useful to encourage parents to trust their own intuition. 

Going back to LB – not long after Lolo was born (and while she was still in hospital so our lives were somewhat disrupted) a “sleep expert” asked me what I did when LB woke in the night. I told her it depended how LB was – if I hugged her and laid her down and she settled quickly I tucked her up in her own bed. If she was clearly distressed and unable to settle I took her into my bed. “You’re confusing her,” the expert said. “You must always be consistent, always leave her, or always take her into your bed.” Being consistent was apparently more important than trusting my instincts or responding to the needs of my child at any given moment. Probably that sleep expert did my a huge favour – her advice seemed so utterly crazy to me that it may have been when I began to listen to that small voice of wisdom inside of me, the voice that told me I knew my daughter better than any expert. 

We all have this wisdom, we all know instinctively how to look after our children and ourselves, and I sincerely hope that in some small way this blog can help others learn to trust that wisdom – others including well-meaning sleep experts!