Infant Sleep
Sleep, or the lack of this precious commodity, is one of the most significant influences on a healthy life. Sleep is critically important during the first year because the human growth hormone is released during deep sleep. Equally important are the quality and quantity of an infant’s sleep, because they affect more than just the baby—they also impact the welfare of everyone in the household, making the difference between being a joyful, alert parent or a fatigued one.
PDF babies are characterized by contentment, healthy growth, and optimal alertness. These babies truly exude happiness—which after all, is tied back to being well-rested. In fact, healthy, full-term babies are born with the capacity to achieve 7-8 hours of continuous nighttime sleep between seven and ten weeks of age and 10 to 12 hours of sleep by twelve weeks of age. But these achievements require parental guidance and a basic understanding of how a baby’s routine impacts healthy outcomes.
Can it Really Happen?
Why some babies are able to sleep through the night early on and others are not, has long been the subject of debate and study. The theories range from simple to complex and from logical to bizarre. Well-meaning friends may have told the inexperienced first-time mom that every child is different. They go on to say that some babies are born sleepers, and others are not. New mothers hope they luck-out and get a sleeper.
Behavioral clinicians suggest that a child’s temperament is the determining influence on sleep. They tell parents that some children have an easier temperament and are more prone to sleep, while other children fight sleep. More extreme are the suggestions that some babies, classified as high-need, will wake up more often during the night and low-need babies sleep longer on their own. Although each statement contains a grain of truth, the statements themselves are outdated. Rest assured, you can and should expect your baby to acquire the skill of sleeping through the night, but rarely does it happen without parental training. Consider the four core “sleep facts.”
Sleep Fact One
Babies do not have the ability to organize their own days and nights into predictable rhythms, but they have the biological need to do so. That is why parents must take the lead and create structure and routine for their babies and for themselves.
An infant’s feeding routine benefits Mom as well. She is healthier, more rested, and less stressed. She has time and energy for other important relationships: her husband, parents, family, and friends. If there are siblings in the home, the baby’s routine provides time for planned activities with big brother or sister. As life with Baby becomes more predictable, Mom can confidently plan the day’s activities, knowing she is meeting her baby’s needs. Everyone wins with PDF.
To increase the likelihood of continuous nighttime sleep, a parent-guided “feed-wake-sleep” routine is essential. The key to nighttime sleep lies in the order of those three daytime activities. First comes feeding time, followed by waketime, and then naptime. The sequence of these three activities repeats itself throughout the day. The more consistent the routine, the more quickly a baby learns to adapt and organize his feed-wake-sleep rhythms. Established rhythms lead to continuous nighttime sleep.
Sleep Fact Two
The quality of each activity is as important as the order of each activity. To re-emphasize the principle of the ripple effect, the stone that creates the initial ripple is the quality of each feeding. That means Mom must work to make each feeding a full feeding. Babies (and especially newborns) are prone to doze off while feeding, thereby taking only a partial meal. When that happens, especially with breastfed babies, the child is not taking enough to satisfy his nutritional needs.
When Mom consistently works with her baby to take a full feeding, it eventually leads to productive waketimes. A good waketime impacts nap time and a good napper is a better feeder. As the quality of each activity deepens, it facilitates healthy nighttime sleep. In turn, optimal sleep in a 24-four hour cycle impacts optimal alertness, which improves cognitive function that increases brain growth, and encourages a host of other neurologic benefits. Where does it all begin? With the first stone, when baby receives a high-quality feeding.
Sleep Fact Three
From birth onward, infant hunger patterns will either organize into stable and regular periods or become erratic and unpredictable. When infants are fed on the PDF plan, their hunger patterns stabilize. There are two reasons for this. First, babies have an innate ability to organize their feeding times into a predictable rhythm and will do so if encouraged by Mom’s feeding philosophy. Second, the hunger mechanism (digestion and absorption) responds to routine feedings with a metabolic memory. Routine feedings encourage Baby’s hunger metabolism to organize into predictable cycles. Erratic feedings or “clusters of feeding” discourage this.
For example, if a Mom feeds her baby approximately every 3 hours—Let’s say 7:00 a.m., 10:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m., 7:00 p.m., and 10:00 p.m.—the baby’s hunger cycle begins to synchronize with those times. When that is established, daytime sleep cycles organize, and then nighttime sleep follows. The exact times above are not as important as the predictability they represent. There is nothing magical about those times. Parents can start at 6:00 a.m., if that works better for them. The principle here is consistency which leads to predictability.
In contrast, erratic feeding periods work against a child’s ability to organize good feeding rhythms, which creates confusion within the child’s metabolic memory. For example, the Mom who follows a cry-feeding philosophy may feed him at 8:00 a.m. and 30 minutes later when her baby cries, she feeds him again. An hour may pass and he feeds, followed by 3 hours before the next feeding, then 20 minutes. The next day, everything is different, including the length of each feeding cycle and the timing of each cycle.
When there is no consistency in the amount of time between feedings, and this pattern continues for weeks, it is very difficult for the feed-wake-sleep cycles to stabilize. As a result, these babies have difficulty establishing stable and uninterrupted nighttime sleep, waking as often as every 2 hours on a recurring basis. This pattern may continue for two years or more according to some studies.(1) Not surprisingly, formula-fed babies who are not on a routine usually end up with the same results.
Sleep Fact Four
It is not what goes in the mouth as much as when it goes in. Failure to establish nighttime sleep is not associated with the source of food, i.e. breastmilk or formula. Our sleep study of 520 infants demonstrated that PDF breastfed babies will sleep through the night on average at the same rates and in many cases slightly sooner than formula-fed babies. This statistical conclusion means one cannot rightly attribute nighttime sleep to a tummy full of formula. The statistics also demonstrate that neither the composition of breastmilk or formula, nor the speed at which the two are digested, have any bearing on a child’s ability to establish healthy nighttime sleep patterns.
What’s the Big Deal About Sleep?
Try to imagine what it would feel like to wake up two or more times every night for an entire week. The destructive impact of sleep deprivation on an adult’s central nervous system is well documented. Deficits include diminished motor skills, decreased ability to think, irritability, loss of focusing capacity, emotional instability, and cellular and tissue breakdown. That is just a partial list!
Now imagine a young child who does not sleep continuously for 8 hours in any of the 365 nights a year! Many of the learning disabilities common in children today are rooted in something as basic as a chronic lack of sleep? As the higher brain continues to develop during the first year of life, the absence of continuous nights of sleep is surely detrimental to the learning process. . .
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