Kevin Baldeosingh
?The best-selling baby book made it sound so easy: "If your baby wakes up at night, pick him up from the crib and rock him gently till he falls back asleep and then put him back in the crib," it said.
Here's what happens with people who actually have children. My daughter Jinaki, at one month, would mostly only fall asleep with me playing music and dancing with her cradled in my arms. And, no matter how deep her sleep, if I tried to put her down, she would immediately wake up and start to bawl. So I ended up spending several weeks watching DVD television series in the wee hours of the morning, which is why I can now boast about having seen every episode of Seinfeld, Frasier, Coupling, Voyager and others. (Thanks again, Stephen.)
When it came to sleep training, we got the same advice from nearly everybody. "Doh get she accustom to hand, because then you wouldn' be able to put she down," they said. The trick, we were told, was to let her cry herself weary and fall asleep on her own. So, after we reached a point of exhaustion due to continually interrupted sleep, me and my wife Afi finally decided to try this advice.
We started gradually, leaving Jinaki in the bassinet to cry for 10 minutes, then 20, then half-hour. She cried continuously and never fell asleep. Finally, one night, we decided to go with the deep-end approach: I put her in the second bedroom and set my alarm for one hour. I left her crying and went to bed and fell asleep. When my alarm went off 60 minutes later, I awoke and heard her still crying and rushed into the next room. When I unzipped the net of the bassinet and picked her up, she was trembling and her heart was beating like a trip-hammer. At that moment I cussed close relatives I had never had a bad thought about in my entire life.
"We not doing that again," I told Afi when I went back with Jinaki to the master bedroom.
From that night, we started co-sleeping–ie Jinaki slept on the bed with us. We used a SnuggleNest until she outgrew it and now, at two years of age, she still sleeps with us. Only after we had made this decision did we find out that the research says that co-sleeping is the best way. This idea of babies sleeping by themselves in another room is very much a Western, especially American, idea–and most of our baby books are written by Americans.
Most importantly, co-sleeping reduces the odds of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), mainly because babies who are at risk match their breathing rhythms to their mother's (or any other adult they sleep with). It also reduces the child's stress, since babies and toddlers habitually wake at night and peep to see if someone is near them. Many parents worry that co-sleeping is dangerous, since they might roll over on the baby in their sleep and suffocate them. But that is a risk only if you're drunk, on drugs, or obese.
Otherwise, your baby is at greater risk sleeping by themselves. And, contrary to popular belief, several studies suggest children who co-sleep are more, not less, independent later on.