The plague of parental sleep deprivation |
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The plague of parental sleep deprivation
How to cope when your kid won’t sleep.
As a baby, my second child was a terrible sleeper.
First he had day-night confusion, a common but exhausting condition in which the baby sleeps during daylight hours and is alert and hungry all night, like a vampire. Then he settled into a schedule of waking up four or five times per night, always happy and excited, as though eager to find out what the rest of us were doing without him.
I spent his first year in a heavy haze of sleep deprivation, frequently fantasizing about injecting caffeine directly into my eyeballs. But this, I knew, was normal — I just had to wait out those early months, and then the baby would start sleeping and I would recover, if not my full faculties, then at least the ability to keep my eyes open for the duration of a day.
My little kid is three-and-a-half now. He goes to preschool. He is learning to write his name. He still takes hours to fall asleep, frequently wakes up in the middle of the night, and is often up for good at 5 am.
His difficulties are relatively common — up to 30 percent of children between 2 and 5, and 15 percent of school-aged kids, regularly have difficulty falling asleep or sleeping through the night, according to data from the National Sleep Foundation. That means that millions of American parents are lurching through our days like zombies, some of us going years without an uninterrupted night of rest.
There is a whole cottage industry devoted to children’s sleep, but much of it is focused on babies — I cannot, sadly, strap my three-year-old into a Snoo. Moreover, I am constantly bombarded by reminders of the devastating health effects of sleep deprivation, and by expert advice for better sleep that fails to account for the person in my life who likes to wake me up with headbutts.
To the extent that I can formulate coherent thoughts in my sleep-deprived state, I’ve begun to wonder why my child, and so many other children in America, are like this. Have children always been such terrible sleepers? And what, short of waiting for adolescence, can save the millions of parents who are fighting to stay awake right now?
In my effort to answer these questions, I talked to experts who changed my perspective on my kid’s sleep troubles. And I talked to other parents who reminded me that, as lonely as the world can feel at 4 in the morning, I’m not really alone.
As Wendy Wisner, a writer and mom of two, put it, “you need to start with the premise that this happens and it’s normal.”
A brief history of sleep
As it turns out, children of past centuries were not magically great sleepers. “The default circadian rhythms of the human species change over the course of a life cycle,” said Benjamin Reiss, a professor at Emory University and the author of the book Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. Babies, for example, need more sleep than adults, but it tends to be more fragmented.
Before the 19th century, families often slept all together in a single room, Reiss said. If a child woke up at night, a parent or other family member could respond relatively quickly, and then everyone could get back to sleep. Parents also didn’t have to deal with the added hurdle of separation anxiety, which can complicate........