Bringing Up Bebe

ithinkitsaninja

hello!
I am reading Bringing Up Bebe and would love to try out the pause sleeping method (if you would call it that) but I am not sure when you should start. Anyone read the book or have thoughts on the pause? 

KellyT22

My thoughts are "lol". Some babies sleep, some babies do not. My kids didn't consistently sleep through the night until 18 months and 16 months respectively. 

That being sad, I don't believe in "cry it out" sleep methods, which is what "the pause" is. Yes, you can let baby fuss a little bit if he/she is just a noisy sleeper and not actually awake, but if your baby is awake, you should probably attend to it. 

That being sad, I wouldn't consider any kind of sleep training until baby is over 6 months old. They need the calories and comfort at night up until that point. 

BabyBoyH92016

Sleep training is a personal choice. There’s nothing wrong with giving baby a few minutes to see if he/she will resettle themselves if that’s what you want to do. With that said, i see a lot of people throwing out arbitrary numbers on when it’s ok to sleep train. There really isn’t a magic number. It depends on the baby and also the parents readiness to follow through. I think the biggest misconception is that people think sleep training and night weaning is the same thing. It’s not. The purpose is so baby learns to self soothe and learns to go to sleep independently. Naturally you will see a decrease in night wakings because if baby isn’t hungry, they will resettle themselves on their own.  We sleep trained at 4 months and it was fast and effective, but I continued to get up and nurse 1-2 times a night and let my kiddo naturally wean himself, which he did completely by 8 months. Should you deceide to wean your child, that’s a conversation to have with your pediatrician since they are the only person who can determine if your baby still needs the calories or not. 

KellyT22

@babyboyh92016 I'm not sure if your comments were directed towards me or not, but my information came from AAP literature given to me by our pediatrician in 2017. I don't consider it arbitrary. 

BabyBoyH92016

I can see that being true especially with respect to night feedings, but I always see the argument that x amount of months is too early because babies still need to eat. Many people will say 6 months is too early, and some are just totally against it. I just wanted to clarify because it’s the biggest misconception I see about sleep training. Sleep training does is not night weaning. That’s a whole different issue. 

Our pediatrician told us 4 months was a good time to try and have baby learn to self soothe since the older babies get the the harder it is to break sleep associations. Again...totally a personal preference if you decide to do it that early or not. For us, my baby was taking an extremely long time to get to sleep. Rocking and everything else we had been doing had become completely ineffective, and it was taking longer and longer to get him to fall asleep.  Ultimately he would just cry and cry because he became so overtired. When we sleep trained we actually ended up experiencing fewer tears then when we tried to soothe him to sleep ourselves. We were lucky. He took to it very well, and everyone was much happier. For us it was the right decision to do it early on. I can definitely imagine a scenario where we didn’t have to sleep train early, or maybe even at all. The AAP supports sleep training and to back their statement up they have frequently cited to a large study where the sample size was babies in the 6/7 month age. I don’t take that to mean it can’t be done earlier and there isn’t anything in the conclusion about age. It simply was the age of the children in the study. There have been many studies  showing there isn’t a “right” age, so i do feel like it’s a personal preference on when to do it, or if you want to do it at all. 

I didn’t mean to start a debate on this, because sleep training is a hot topic, and the debates can go on forever. The comment on baby needs calories until at least 6 months prompted me to post about the misconception of sleep training and night weaning. 

lifesabeach85

@ithinkitsaninja my younger sister read this book when she was pregnant with her son, so I skimmed it and tbh I thought it sounded like a lot of stuff that makes logical sense to FTMs but STMs sorta roll their eyes at. In short, it imparts adult logic/behavior/understanding onto babies and toddlers that frankly just don't have that sort of brain development. Take the food thing, for example. I believe it says that French kids are great, adventurous eaters because their parents just always give them varied foods and don't feed them special kid meals so they have more developed pallets and don't expect to be made kid foods. This is a variation on something you'll hear a lot from people without kids "just only feed them healthy foods and they won't even want junk food!" or "just give them one option and they can eat it or starve." The thing with babies/toddlers is that they a)would rather starve b)don't believe you'll let them starve and so will keep complaining that they're hungry but not hungry for vegetables until the end of time. How picky or adventurous an eater you have may just be luck of the draw or change over time.

As for the pause, the idea of "give them a minute" to see if they self soothe/settle at bed time/naptime/MOTN or just when fussing while awake is a pretty common piece of advice from seasoned moms of every culture. How long you wait (10 sec, 30 sec, a min, 5/10/20 min) is up to you and will probably depend on how upset the baby is and what you are doing at that moment. How easily and at what age the baby is able to self soothe is really dependent on the baby, unfortunately. I don't think there's anything wrong with waiting a few seconds or minutes at any age, I mean, it could take that long to get a bottle ready or get out of bed and pee before nursing! There are a lot of different sleep training methods out there, but most of them rely on some sort of "wait a bit" or "graduated extinction" component.

KellyT22

@lifesabeach85 Well said on the FTM vs STM point. So much of what you read before babies seems black and white, very simple. Then they're here and you realize that you don't have much control over what they do. I swore my car would never be trashed 

ithinkitsaninja

Thanks for all the responses! I am definitely a FTM I just wanted to ask about it to see if anyone else had read the book or tried anything from it. Thanks for all the great advice!! 

booksandcoffee

KellyT22 said:

My thoughts are "lol". Some babies sleep, some babies do not. My kids didn't consistently sleep through the night until 18 months and 16 months respectively. 

That being sad, I don't believe in "cry it out" sleep methods, which is what "the pause" is. Yes, you can let baby fuss a little bit if he/she is just a noisy sleeper and not actually awake, but if your baby is awake, you should probably attend to it. 

That being sad, I wouldn't consider any kind of sleep training until baby is over 6 months old. They need the calories and comfort at night up until that point. 

This exactly. 

booksandcoffee

KellyT22 said:

@babyboyh92016 I'm not sure if your comments were directed towards me or not, but my information came from AAP literature given to me by our pediatrician in 2017. I don't consider it arbitrary. 

KellyT22 said:

@babyboyh92016 I'm not sure if your comments were directed towards me or not, but my information came from AAP literature given to me by our pediatrician in 2017. I don't consider it arbitrary. 

Pediatricians get very little training on normal sleep patterns for infants so it drives me nuts when they recommend sleep training at young ages (child psych here who devours child development research nonstop and is strongly anti-CIO.) Im thankful my pediatrician always says “ all babies will eventually sleep through the night when they’re ready” and leaves her sleep advice at that! 

booksandcoffee

KellyT22 said:

@lifesabeach85 Well said on the FTM vs STM point. So much of what you read before babies seems black and white, very simple. Then they're here and you realize that you don't have much control over what they do. I swore my car would never be trashed 

I always say “ I was the perfect mother before I had children.”

BabyBoyH92016

booksandcoffee said:

KellyT22 said:

@babyboyh92016 I'm not sure if your comments were directed towards me or not, but my information came from AAP literature given to me by our pediatrician in 2017. I don't consider it arbitrary. 

KellyT22 said:

@babyboyh92016 I'm not sure if your comments were directed towards me or not, but my information came from AAP literature given to me by our pediatrician in 2017. I don't consider it arbitrary. 

Pediatricians get very little training on normal sleep patterns for infants so it drives me nuts when they recommend sleep training at young ages (child psych here who devours child development research nonstop and is strongly anti-CIO.) Im thankful my pediatrician always says “ all babies will eventually sleep through the night when they’re ready” and leaves her sleep advice at that! 

I would love to see some of the research you are talking about. I know the study that the AAP cites follows sleep trained children for 5 years and determined there was nothing damaging. Harvard did its own study which was published in the Journal of Pediatrics which is peer reviewed. The problem with the internet is that you can find anything to support a position and that’s where things get confusing and overwhelming. I would be interested in peer reviewed studies, since there is way too much on both sides.