Hush Little Baby…Please Go to Sleep!

No one truly appreciates the value of sleep until they have children.

Shush!

As I fondly look back at my pre-kid years of blissful slumber, I wonder how I’ve been managing to get through my parenting days with roughly 6 hours of sleep a night. Mind you, that is not always 6 consecutive hours of sleep. That would be manageable. No, my sleep stages are sometimes peppered with little interruptions from the Monkey. There are nights when he will sleep peacefully through the night. But then, as most parents experience, there are nights when it is a battle to get to the Delta zone.

We all hear from parents who claim that their children have slept through the night since they were 2 months old. Unless you CIO, Ferberize, or do some other form of sleep-training that involves crying-it-out, infants that sleep through the night are not typical. I had heard about CIO and Dr. Ferber way before I had a kid. I had been educated and trained in behavior modification, so this was nothing new to me. However, I had never actually attempted to personally modify the sleep behavior of an infant, especially my own infant. To say it was much more difficult than I anticipated would be a huge understatement. (continues…)