| > "oh, if I cry I will get to eat right away." This kinda matches what I’ve read recently in a parenting book. I’m currently reading Bringing Up Bébé, a book written by an American journalist who lived (maybe still lives?) in Paris and had her kids there. She wrote it after she started observing that French parents don’t seem to have the myriad of exhausting issues American parents have, or at least not with the same intensity and for the same duration. When it comes to sleep, she writes that most French babies sleep through the night by the time they’re 6 months old. According to her, what a lot of American parents (and from my experience as an expat, parents from several other countries too) do wrong is to immediately tend to the baby the moment they make any noise at night, in the first months few of their lives (this apparently doesn’t apply to the very first month though). That trains the baby to do exactly what you wrote, to get what they want as soon as they wake up in the middle of the night. According to the author, French parents typically wait a few minutes whenever the baby wakes up at night. Most of the time the baby goes back to sleep. The explanation she offers is that babies’ brains don’t know how to link one sleep cycle to the next, so they wake up between cycles and typically cry or fuss for a bit. By leaving them alone for a few minutes instead of instantly reacting, parents can help their brains learn to connect sleep cycles more efficiently. If they’re immediately picked up though, they’re actually being trained to do the exact opposite and to stay awake instead. I really like your post btw, going to look up what you wrote about as it sounds invaluable in case the French method doesn’t work :) |