My rod for my own back.

“You’re creating a rod for your own back.”

This is a statement that’s said to many new parents when they’re told that they are doing things wrong by responding to their baby. 

It’s a statement that’s designed to scare you about the “bad habits you’ll create”. To make you question following your own instincts. To make you feel guilty for responding to your child in a way that feels natural and right.

It’s normally said with regards to sleep. When new parents worry that their baby isn’t sleeping through the night. When they worry that their baby just wants to be close to them. When they worry that their baby can’t do the mysterious, holy grail of “self-soothing” that all the sleep programmes worship.

Once I read an article which said that if you don’t teach your baby to self-soothe, then you’re disrespecting their need for sleep. This same article was also trying to sell the reader a very expensive sleep training programme which was designed to “fix” your supposedly broken baby.

 

We dabbled with sleep training at the beginning, because we thought that it’s what you had to do. Because no one around us said that it’s totally normal and okay for your baby (and toddler!) to need your help going to sleep. Everyone just said we were creating bad habits by letting our newborn nap on us because she wouldn’t nap in the bassinet. Another "bad habit" we had was either walking or rocking her to sleep. She had silent reflux and that these were the only ways we could provide some sort of relief to her, but from the outside it was only seen that we were creating a rod for our own back by trying to minimize her hysterical screaming.

I’m not going to go into depth about my thoughts on cry-it-out, because I just want to talk about our experience here rather than get into a very polarizing and emotional topic.

Anyway, the sleep training didn’t last long and we never ended up leaving her to cry-it-out for hours anyway like we were “supposed” to. We’d let her grizzle for a bit but if she started crying up we would comfort her. We just didn't feel comfortable letting her get to screaming level and then shutting the door for as long as it takes.

And so the rod for our own back, the rocking or cuddling her to sleep, is still going strong almost 16 months later. Over this time, I've become a bit more confident with our decision to help her fall asleep for as long as she needs our help, even though I often question and have my doubts about whether it's the right thing to do. I’m also still working on being open about this, just because the topic of sleep is so controversial, particularly with the older generation.

I think sleep is such a heated debate because as humans, it’s one of our primal needs that we’re suddenly deprived of when we become parents. It would be like if you were permanently hungry or thirsty or cold - you’d feel pretty strongly and emotional about it. I’ve been told that I’ll reach a point where I just can’t take it anymore and I’ll be forced to leave her to cry-it-out for hours, but I don't know. How do I know that I haven't already reached that point and I've just continued with the status quo or am I being warned that the worst is still to come?

I’ve been there during those gazillion half an hour wake ups. I’ve cried because I’m so exhausted. I’ve stopped driving in the past because it wasn’t safe. I haven’t been the parent I’ve wanted to be because I’ve been so desperate and shattered. 

I don't know if sleep training is right or wrong. I don't know if what we're doing is right or wrong. I don't think that this is a black and white issue. All I know is that I physically can't let my toddler scream for as long as it takes while she's coughing and inconsolable. Maybe things would be different if she wasn't the fiery, determined soul that she is. Maybe if she would just grizzle for 10 minutes, then things would be different. I really don't know. I think I'm just trying to survive the chaos of these first few years with a whole bucketload of hesitation.

So if you're wondering what not sleep training looks like, I can tell you a little about it.

Most of the time it's totally okay.

Nothing bad has happened (as far as I'm aware, except sometimes my arms get sore). Our daughter isn’t ruined. She is loving and securely attached. She knows that we will come to her and help her when she needs us. I’m trying to feel confident in this decision and to believe that there isn’t anything wrong with that.

She slept through the night from nine weeks to about 10 months old. Every night, without fail. There was no disastrous consequences for our choice of choosing to respond to her, again and again. She started waking in the night from about 10 months old and since then, occasionally she’s slept through, but most nights have been pretty wakeful. Some mornings I’ll spot a new tooth or she’ll start practicing a new skill or she’ll have a runny nose. Then it all makes sense. Some nights it seems that she just wants a few more cuddles.

When I feel frustrated that I can't just put her down in bed and shut the door, I've found it helpful to think about sleep as a developmental skill, just like learning to crawl or walk. It doesn’t need to be forced or rushed. From reading other parent's experiences who are in the same boat as us, I've found that children learn how to put themselves to sleep when their ready, some earlier and some later just like everything else. There are no training programmes for eating solids or learning to walk, so sleep doesn’t need to be any different. Instead of training, I reckon parents just need support to survive this tricky time.

Sometimes our toddler puts herself to sleep now. Most of the time we still rock her to sleep though. We are trying to trust that with time, she will feel confident and safe to put herself to sleep every night. From my research, it’ll probably be around 2 or so that she does it more regularly. As my pregnant belly grows, physically it’s getting harder to rock her, but we have some ways that we can adapt to work around this. Either my husband will do my share of the rocking-to-sleep or we can switch our toddler to a floor bed and lay with her while she falls asleep. We will rise to these changes that lay ahead.

As for our next baby, I don't know if we will do anything differently. Maybe they’ll feed to sleep. Maybe they’ll go to sleep with rocking or cuddling or bum patting. Or maybe they’ll be a unicorn baby and happily put themselves to sleep. Whichever way it ends up being, I'm trying to not feel ashamed of our choices in this Western, sleep-training dominated culture. It's nice to have an alternative I guess.