A few days ago I told you about the nights with the babies and explained that it is normal for them to wake up several times at night, daring to advise parents to come as soon as possible if the child cries.
Well, a researcher who has participated in a recent study suggests that the ideal is to do the opposite, do not get up immediately so that the child learns to calm down by himself. The problem is that more than a conclusion from the data found in the investigation it seems a solution of the researchers, who, seeing that many children do not sleep all night, suggest letting them cry as a solution.
The study was carried out at Temple University (USA) and aimed to know the sleep patterns of babies 6 to 36 months old.
To carry it out, they had the help of 1,200 children of those ages and their parents, who were the ones who recorded the data. In the light of the results, the researchers decided to classify babies into two large groups: sleeping babies and the transient sleeping babies.
The sleeping babies would be those who every hour and a half or two hours, which would become a cycle of sleep, wake up, going back to sleep alone. The transient sleepers they would be the ones who also wake up every hour and a half or two hours, but they do crying or screaming, considering that they don't sleep all night.
To have all the data, the parents of the children were asked to write down the number of awakenings of their children at 6, 15, 24 and 36 months. They concluded that at six months of age 66% of the babies did not wake up or woke up once a week, changing little as they grew. The other 34% woke up seven nights a week at six months, two nights at 15 months and one night a week at 24 months.
When looking for the characteristics of transient sleeping babies, that is, those who woke up crying and screaming, they observed that most were children, who had a more difficult temperament, who drank breast milk from six to fifteen months and who had mothers with more symptoms of depression at six months.
According to Marsha Weinraub, author of the study:
The results suggest a couple of things. One is that genetic factors such as difficult temperament are involved in early sleep problems ... If mothers get up with these night wakings and / or if the baby has a habit of falling asleep while breastfeeding, the child does not learn how to calm down alone, something that is essential to regulate sleep.
And the same author decided to give recommendations for the parents of transient sleeping babies:
Parents should look for routines to help babies calm down. The best advice is to put babies to bed at the same time every night, let them fall asleep alone and resist the temptation to respond to crying immediately.
And now my conclusions
Surely you will have reached the same conclusions as me when reading this data, but just in case it is not so, or if you have gone further than me, I leave mine.
The first thing to keep in mind is that when babies wake up but don't complain they don't tell it, that is, since they don't cry or scream, they are considered to sleep through the night. Evidently, this is not real. We can have on the one hand a baby who cries and screams every time he wakes up but who falls asleep right away if his parents attend him and on the other side a baby who does not say or mú when he wakes up to spend several times looking at the ceiling and the first will sleep more night than the second, but they consider the second to sleep better.
We must also bear in mind that those who wake up most took the breast. I have already said it on more than one occasion and today I take this opportunity to repeat it: what most breastfed babies do is normal, the weird thing is what the rest do. If the human spice has reached these days it is thanks to, among other things, breast milk and evolution. If breastfed babies, who are the ones who take a food that has been millennia of improvement, often wake up every night of the week, it is because it is normal and logical for babies to do that.
When a baby drinks something that his body does not expect (artificial formula) and this causes his life rhythms and sleep patterns to vary, even if it is to sleep more hours in a row, it is that they are not doing what they get by age. Consequences of this? No idea, but I think it is logical to explain that it is not a problem to be solved if a breastfed child wakes up at night more than the others, because it is what most babies of that age have done throughout the history.
And as a last point to consider, we talk about transient sleeping babies as about babies with a harder temper, or what is the same, babies who are clear about what they want, who know how to get it and who do not give in to their parents' attempts to accustom them to being alone. If we think about the things we exalt from an adult, these are usually the ideal characteristics: “You already know it, it is the envy of all, it is clear what you want, it knows how to achieve it, it does not give in easily when you try to do something that It makes no sense and he loves being with the people he loves. ”
In other words, sleeping babies have less temperament and end up giving in if the parents "pass" them. That's why they wake up at night and don't complain.
Then, in the end, the researcher says that because they fall asleep to the chest and how the parents attend to them right away they cannot learn to regulate the dream, something that contradicts the data they obtained, since transient sleeping babies ended up sleeping more or less overnight at two years.
He also adds in his recommendations that “Parents should look for routines to help babies calm down”, adding that they should "Put babies to bed at the same time every night, let them fall asleep alone and resist the temptation to respond to crying immediately".
I agree with the first sentence, but not with the second, because it contradicts the first. If the ideal is that we help some children with a difficult temper to calm down, I don't see how it can help them to leave them alone to fall asleep, if they want to be with us, and I don't see how well it can make them respond to their crying immediately, if with his temper they will go from crying to screaming and from screaming to despair in a few minutes.
Moreover, if they are breastfed babies, you will tell me how to breastfeed a baby if you have to wait a while for him to fall asleep again ... does he put his nipple in his mouth once he has already gone back to sleep? How many minutes to wait? And we will not wake you up if once asleep we try to put a tit in your mouth? Because of course, we talk about children six months and older, children who still have to breastfeed at night (To continue receiving milk, since during the day they suck less because they eat more, and to help their mothers not to do a mastitis due to breast congestion that can occur if a child does not breastfeed all night).
