Sandy Jones - Crying Baby, Sleepless Nights: Why Your Baby is Crying and What You Can Do About It

The Harvard Common Press
535 Albany Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02118

Copyright 1992 by Sandy Jones

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jones, Sandy.
Crying baby, sleepless nights : why your baby is crying and what you can do about it / by Sandy Jones.Rev. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-55832-046-6 (cloth)
ISBN 1-55832-045-8 (paper)
1. Infants (Newborn)Care. 2. Crying in infants.
I. Title.
RJ253.J66 1992
649.122dc20 92-10441

Cover design by Joyce Weston

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Several years ago a West Coast diaper service surveyed its customers on their feelings about parenting. What did they feel was the hardest thing about being a new parent? Lack of sleep, was one of the most common replies. Adjusting to parenthood can be doubly difficult when you are tired all the time. Yet most infants will wake up at night and go through some fussy periods. So whats a parent to do?

In the news lately have been a lot of experts who offer systemized approaches to solving the problem of fussy, wakeful babies. Their methods usually come down to letting the baby cry it out until he stops from exhaustion or gives up in despair that anyone listening to him really cares.

I remember meeting a young couple who had used this technique quite successfully. Their eleven-month-old daughter had been sleeping through the night for months. But their problem was the uproar she caused when they tried to get her ready for bed. She fought them tooth and nail to keep from being put down. How lucky you are, I told the couple, to have a daughter so persistent in fighting for her needs. Shes not given up trying to tell you how much she needs to be near you at night. Letting a baby cry it out is a short-term solution whose long-term ramifications are not in the best interest of either baby or parents.

When a popular newspaper columnist was asked how to handle a ten-month-olds night waking her advice was similar. The parent should go to the baby and check that everything is all right, then gently pat him on the back, say I love you, and firmly walk out the door. Cant you just see the wife of that baby, thirty years from now, seeking help for her marriage because, while her husband professes to love her, hes never around when she really needs him!

The advice was similar when my own children were small. We were told that if your baby stopped crying when you picked him up then you knew he just wanted to be held, so you could put him back down with a clear conscience. This perspective totally ignored a babys need to be with its mother, reassured by her presencea need that serves as a survival mechanism.

Some babies need physical closeness more than others. Philip, the youngest of our seven children, is a good example. He literally lived on my body for the first three months of his life. He would awaken immediately if he was put down to sleep. So I got hold of a Mexican rebozo, a long rectangular piece of woven cloth. The rebozo went across my shoulders and around Philip, holding him close to my body while leaving my arms free. I was amused eighteen years later, when Philip returned from three weeks in the Rocky Mountains on an Outward Bound survival expedition, to learn that his favorite part of that challenging experience was the solo, the three days he spent alone in the wilderness.

Raising a baby, it seems to me, involves trust and unconditional love as much as the specifics of care and feeding. In fact, all these things go together. The intensity of our full-time involvement during the period babies are so dependent gives us an unequaled opportunity to stretch and grow. Caring for a baby can be likened to the total-immersion techniques used to teach languages and other skills. And, like foreign-language students, we learn most effectively when we have a skilled and sensitive facilitator.

In Crying Baby, Sleepless Nights, Sandy Jones has set out to be that facilitatorto provide direction and understanding to parents. If I were to add anything to this most comprehensive book it would be a bit more emphasis on taking advantage of help from family and friends and groups like La Leche League, and a clear appreciation of how much our attitudes can help us to handle stress.

When our daughter Melanie had unexpected twins after her first pregnancy, the whole family shifted gears to be available. Sometimes the calmer heartbeat of a helper, we found, could make all the difference in settling a fussy baby down. It was often my husband, Tom, with his deep, resonant voice, who was most successful at getting a baby to sleep while doing his grand parent dance. As the twins got older their father found that playing the harmonica with a baby on his shoulder was another successful sleep inducer.

Accepting that we might not get a full nights sleep for a while is in itself a stress reliever. It was clear that our daughter Laurel had unconsciously made things easy on herself when she excitedly announced that her son, Austin, was already sleeping through the night at three months. Yes, it was really true, she went on to explain: Austin, who sleeps with his parents, gets up to nurse two or three times a night, goes right back to sleep, and deeps all night long!"

Way back when I was born, babies were fed on four-hour schedules, and mothers were told not to pick up their babies in between. Many of my mothers friends have told me of standing by their babys bedsidethe baby crying, the mother cryingwatching the clock for permission to pick the baby up. But my maternal grandmother, after whom I was named, gave me a priceless gift when she spoke up, insisting to my parents that it was wrong to leave a baby alone to cry. And so, being a colicky breastfed baby, I was held constantly and even slept with my parents for the first year of my life.

Crying, Dr. Lee Salk said many times, is as good for the lungs as bleeding is for the veins. Deciphering and answering a babys cries can teach us a lot about the babys uniqueness and can bring out the best in ourselves. And isnt that all part of what parenting is about?

M ARIAN T OMPSON
Cofounder and President Emeritus La Leche League International

A S A VETERAN PARENT , I understand how stressful and exhausting caring for a baby can be. Ive journeyed all the way through adolescence with my daughter, Marcie, who never slept more than three hours at a time in her first two years. I can still remember sitting in the bathroom doorway, feeling worn out and unsupported as I tried to let Marcie cry it out. I feel sad for myself now, when I remember how lonely and isolated I felt then. In part, Crying Baby, Sleepless Nights was born of my wish that other parents never have to feel as alone as I did when they are faced with a babys fussy wakefulness.

I have learned a lot since the first edition of Crying Baby, Sleepless Nights was published in 1983. Besides carefully reviewing over a thousand medical, psychiatric, and psychological studies of infants, I have traveled nationwide to talk with hundreds of parents of fussy babies. Ive shared their frustrations, their worries, their loneliness, their despair.

For a year and a half, I worked with a group of low-income, innercity teenage mothers and their babies. I learned a lot about how to help mothers with the challenges of parenting. I learned to recognize the difference between good and poor mother-baby relationships, and I learned that a mothers perception of her baby as bad can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.