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The Happy Sleeper
Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?
You feed or rock your baby until she’s fast asleep, lower her gently into her crib, and tiptoe out of the room. Two hours later, she’s awake and calling for you.
It’s past bedtime, but your toddler runs when you try to put pj’s on him, breaks down in tears over brushing teeth, and summons you back into the room repeatedly for more water, another song, and different stuffed animal configurations.
You have to lie down with your little one until he falls asleep, which can take up to 45 minutes and, sometimes, you doze off, too.
Your baby will only nap in the stroller, car, or with you carrying her.
Your child stays up too late and you suspect he’s not getting enough sleep, but you can’t figure out how to get him into bed earlier.
Your child calls out to you at night and needs you to sleep with her, or to join you in your bed.
You and your partner are so exhausted you can barely function, much less be present or happy with your baby during waking hours.
Sleep is a basic building block of your family’s health and happiness—just like good food and regular exercise. Sleep is about as natural as it comes; in fact, kids are literally built to do it. Their brains are programmed to develop good sleep from the time they’re babies.
Your child wants to sleep; and with the right patterns in place, her natural abilities will surprise you. Naptime, bedtime, and sleeping through the night—they don’t have to be a big struggle or a source of anxiety. As easy as it is to disrupt sleep and create unhealthy sleep habits, it’s achievable and often quick to get back on the right track. Consider this scene:
You help your baby wind down after her last feeding. You give her a bath and put on her pjs. After a few stories, a few cuddles, and a song, you kiss her good night, lower her into her crib, and leave the room. Your happy sleeper rolls over, grabs her lovey, moves into a comfortable sleep position, and drifts off until the next morning. You have time to yourself to eat dinner, read a book, or spend time with your partner before going to bed and getting a full night’s sleep.
If your baby is at least 5 months and you follow our approach consistently, you can go from one of the cumbersome patterns mentioned above, to this happy sleeper scene in roughly one to two weeks (if your baby is under 5 months, we’ll show you how to move in this direction). And if you read and adopt our fundamental concepts, your family will have a solid sleep foundation for years to come. It’s a myth that sleep is always a struggle and that changing sleep patterns is very hard. If you have a clear plan, your family’s sleep can improve quickly.
Good sleep not only makes life more peaceful and enjoyable, it’s a basic need that affects your child’s happiness, success, and health. Insufficient sleep is like having a big piece of your life’s foundation missing; it’s like walking around while your body starves for food or water.
Sleep is part of your foundation. When it’s off, the rest starts to crumble!
DID YOU KNOW . . .
Sleepy Nation: You Are Not Alone
Little kids are losing critical hours of sleep. It’s estimated that babies and young children get an average of 9½ hours of sleep per night, although experts agree that they need 11 to 12, and roughly one-third of kids have clinical sleep problems. A poll from the National Sleep Foundation found that half of infants and a third of toddlers get less sleep than their parents think they need. Seventy-five percent of parents with infants and 82 percent of parents with preschoolers say they would change something about their child’s sleep.
Caffeinated drinks are consumed by lots of sleepy adults and, if you can believe it, kids! The American Academy of Pediatrics notes that children ages 6 to 10 drink caffeinated beverages eight out of ten days. One study found that two-thirds of children ages 2 to 5 consumed drinks like soda and tea.
Why don’t kids sleep enough? There are lots of answers to this question, but here are two of the most common:
Kids don’t necessarily grow out of sleep issues either; in fact, research suggests that a significant percentage of young children with sleep disruptions still have them years later. On the other hand, when you develop healthy sleep habits early, they grow with your child. Imagine that your baby, who is a self-soother, turns into a happy preschooler who feels confident and knows what to do when the lights go out, a school-age child who can have a sleepover at a friend’s house, and eventually a well-rested and sharp teen who’s set up for success. It’s not an overstatement to say that the positive sleep foundation you establish for your young child will be the one he has throughout his life.
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How Much Sleep Do You Really Need? |
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Age |
Sleep Needs |
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Newborns (0–2 months) |
12 to 18 hours |
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Infants (3–11 months) |
14 to 15 hours |
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Toddlers (1–3 years) |
12 to 14 hours |
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Preschoolers (3–5 years) |
11 to 13 hours |
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School-age children (5–10 years) |
10 to 11 hours |
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Teens (10–17) |
8.5 to 9.25 hours |
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Adults |
7 to 9 hours |
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Source: National Sleep Foundation |
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Take a look at sleep recommendations for every member of your family, including yourself. Just as with adults, children vary in how much sleep they need to function at their best, which is why there’s a range instead of a magic number. But almost all children consistently need this amount of sleep in a 24-hour period. It’s a lot of sleep—roughly half your child’s life or more! A very small percentage of people are thought to be “short sleepers,” or those who require less sleep than the rest of us. If your child seems fine with less than the recommended amount of sleep, you might be surprised that she does even better with 30 to 60 minutes more. Think about the fact that your goal is not just a child who is functioning, but one who is optimally alert, creative, and balanced.
How to Tell If Your Child Is Getting Enough Sleep
It can be tricky to tell whether your child is well rested, because kids rarely communicate this clearly. Insufficient sleep in children is hard to spot for two reasons:
Overt sleepiness is especially hard to detect when little ones are on the move; sometimes it’s only obvious when they finally sit still—for example, riding in a car or sitting on the couch reading a book. This is when you’ll see signals of drowsiness, like your child rubbing his eyes or staring into space.
Here’s how you can tell whether you have a well-rested or sleepy child on your hands. Check the ones that apply to your child.
SIGNS OF A SLEEP-DEPRIVED CHILD
❏ Needs to be woken up in the morning
❏ Hyperactive, inattentive, moody, impulsive, or aggressive
❏ Falls asleep before scheduled naps if taken on a walk or car ride
❏ Sleeps in on the weekends
❏ Falls asleep in school
❏ Becomes clumsy, irritable, easily frustrated
SIGNS OF A WELL-RESTED CHILD
❏ Wakes up naturally
❏ Alert most of the day or until naptime
❏ Doesn’t fall asleep in the stroller or car during the day (in between naptimes)
❏ Has more or less the same sleep schedule on weekdays and weekends
❏ Has the same nap habits at home and day care or preschool
What if your child does get enough sleep overall, but it happens in a way that isn’t working for the family—for example, your baby needs to be rocked and bounced for 30 minutes, or your toddler’s bedtime is a dragged-out affair of requests for extra water, bonus potty trips, and “just one more story.” Maybe your baby will fall asleep only with you in the bed, or will only nap in the stroller. In this case, your child might get enough hours of sleep total, but the manner in which he does it is disruptive or challenging, and it involves you overhelping, so he isn’t accessing his self-soothing abilities. These are important issues to address; good sleep isn’t just about hitting the numbers, it’s about setting up habits and routines in your house that feel good for everyone.
Throughout this book we’ll not only help you achieve long and consistent sleep for your baby or child, we’ll also walk you through how to make healthy sleep easy and pleasant (yes, you heard that right) for the whole family.
Good Sleep = Successful, Happy, Healthy
Watch your child sleep—eyes fluttering, arms limp, legs tucked up. It’s a beautiful and peaceful thing. We tend to think of falling asleep as shutting down (and feel incredible relief as parents when our kids finally do) but, actually, sleep is not your child’s “off mode.” Transitioning to sleep turns on a whole host of vital activities in your child’s brain and body. For example, when your child enters deep sleep, growth hormones are secreted that allow cells to divide and tissues to repair and regenerate. During sleep, memories are consolidated and your child processes information learned during the day.
Sleep is like nutrition for your child’s brain.
Even if you think you know the value of good sleep, you’ll probably be surprised to find out just how much sleep affects different areas of your child’s mental and physical health.
Learning and Academic Success
It’s a simple fact at any age—newborn, preschool, or teenager—good sleep makes for a higher-achieving child.
In one well-known experiment, researchers restricted or extended the sleep of school-age kids by 30 minutes and found that it had a significant impact on their reaction time, attention, and memory. In fact, the difference of 1 hour between the two groups made an impact that was equivalent to two years of academic level.
One of the best predictors of a child’s success in school is her level of “executive function,” or the ability to manage emotions, behaviors, and thinking—and this skill set is very sensitive to sleep loss. Many studies have shown that even after a modest decrease in sleep, the brain’s prefrontal cortex (the hub of executive function) becomes less active. Sleepy kids can still do the basics—talk, eat, run around, play—but sophisticated thinking, impulse control, and creativity go steadily downhill.
When your child sleeps, certain connections between brain cells are strengthened while others are “pruned” or lost (this is an important part of development because the brain is refining its circuits and prioritizing what it needs the most). This essentially remodels the brain and consolidates the information learned while awake. Babies have an intense need for sleep, which is probably because they have so much to learn. Infants learn language better after a nap, and preschool children’s spatial learning is boosted by a midday nap. From the ages of 2½ to 6 years, short sleep (fewer than 10 hours per night) has been linked to lower vocabulary and nonverbal intellectual skills, and this is true even of kids who later catch up to their peers in sleep duration. In other words, missing sleep early in life may have a lasting effect.
Behavior and Emotions
As an adult, how do you feel and act when you’re tired? You probably think and move slowly. You want to curl up, power down, and recharge. Your bed calls to you.
Sleepy kids don’t respond this way to being tired, or necessarily even know that they’re tired. Instead, they become stressed, wind up, and get a second wind.
Psychologists continue to find connections between sleep and ADHD. Children with sleep issues have a higher prevalence of hyperactivity and attention problems (and vice versa, kids with ADHD-like symptoms are at higher risk for sleep problems). Kids with ADHD also tend to be sleepier during the day, which might explain why stimulant medications seem to help. In fact, studies also suggest that treating sleep problems may be enough to eliminate hyperactivity and attention issues for some children. This benefit applies to kids without any diagnosed attention or behavior problems, too. One experiment showed that adding just 30 minutes more sleep per night made a significant improvement (for kids without any history of behavioral issues) in how restless, impulsive, and moody children were. Reducing sleep by 50 minutes had the opposite effect.
Health
Too little sleep is linked to weight gain in both kids and adults, and children who have short sleep durations are at higher risk for obesity when they grow up. Sleep loss disrupts chemicals in the body that regulate appetite and metabolism. Insufficient sleep also raises the risk of hypertension and can affect the immune system, which may make kids more likely to get sick.
Parents’ Life
Parents lose about 350 hours of nighttime sleep in the first year of their baby’s life. In a National Sleep Foundation poll, almost two-thirds of parents (even those with toddlers and preschoolers) reported getting less sleep than they need.
To some extent, this is just how it goes—a baby naturally turns your sleep schedule upside-down for a few months. Thankfully, parents can adapt; we seem to be biologically capable of flexing around a newborn’s every-2-hour waking pattern, being alert enough to tend to our babies at night, and still managing to go about our daily lives.
HERE’S HOW PARENTS DESCRIBE SLEEP DEPRIVATION
The problem is that for some parents, the initial sleep loss in the first few months becomes the new normal in the months and years that follow. These parents end up carrying a significant “sleep debt” because they accumulate missed hours of sleep over time without ever getting the chance to fully pay it back. People with children of all ages are roughly twice as likely as those without kids to say that they’re not sleeping enough and that they’re unable to do activities like exercise because they’re too sleepy. Subpar sleep also makes parents irritable, impatient, and less productive. It can make small tasks seem insurmountable and, even worse, keep us from enjoying and connecting with our kids.
10-MONTH-OLD EVAN AND HIS EXHAUSTED PARENTS
Joanna: When Evan was 10 months old, his sleep regressed dramatically and I found myself nursing him to sleep each night (even though we had cut this out of our routine 5 months prior). This put him to sleep for an initial 5-hour stretch, but after that, he was waking up hourly! My husband and I felt like we were in a dark cloud of exhaustion. The hardest part was that we started to feel resentment toward him and were enjoying him less. Once we carried out our sleep plan, the whole family started sleeping well and we went back to enjoying and finding so much pleasure in each other’s company.
Think about it this way: working on your child’s sleep is important for you and, in turn, your healthy sleep is important to your child, so you can feel available, patient, and energetic.
If that’s not enough, consider that poor sleep also poses a serious safety risk to your family. People with children in the house are significantly more likely to drive drowsy than those without kids. Drowsy driving is a major safety hazard: incredibly, 37 percent of adults say they’ve fallen asleep at the wheel (and 13 percent of those say they do so approximately once each month). It’s conservatively estimated that 100,000 police-reported crashes every year are a direct result of driver fatigue—resulting in 1,550 deaths and 71,000 injuries.
The Happy Sleeper
HERE’S WHAT MAKES A GOOD SLEEPER
Whether you’re coming to us in a blurry, sleep-deprived crisis, or you’re simply trying to optimize your baby’s sleep, with this book you’ll have all of these in place. Using our techniques, you’ll be able to fix immediate sleep issues and set up habits that support optimal sleep as your child grows.
If you’re conflicted about imposing a structured and harsh program to improve your child’s sleep, you can stop worrying. Warm, supportive parenting and a full night of independent sleep are not mutually exclusive—we’re going to show you how they work together naturally and seamlessly.
So now that we know the urgency of good sleep and elements you need to get it, let’s look at the Happy Sleeper approach to getting there!