Is sleep deprivation worthy of an SOS? It can certainly feel that way, particularly if you’ve been without a decent night’s sleep for many days and nights. Here’s why.
You Never Know When Your Sleep Is Going to Be Disrupted Next
Sleep deprivation is bad enough. Falling asleep and not knowing when your sleep is going to be disrupted again is even worse, according to Stanford University biology professor Robert Sapolsky, who is quoted in Katherine Ellison’s book The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter.
Many mothers find that it’s hard to relax and enjoy a restful sleep knowing that they could be roused from sleep again at a moment’snotice. That’s the downside to having a powerful “mother radar” that allows you to be highly responsive to your baby’s needs around the clock.
It’s the randomness and unpredictability of sleep disruption that really starts to wear you down over time. “When our reluctant napper does finally go down for a nap, I never know how long I will have: 10 minutes or two hours,” says Jennifer, 30, the mother of 12- month-old Amanda.
“Falling asleep and having to get up five min- utes later is much worse than not napping at all.
” So just how often can you expect your sleep to be interrupted at night during the baby, toddler, and preschool years? According to the National Sleep Foundation’s 2004 Sleep in America Poll, 80 percent of parents of infants, 70 percent of parents of toddlers, and 64 percent of parents of preschoolers are awakened in the night at least once a week by their child.
According to the sleep experts, you’d lose even more sleep if it weren’t for the filtering work that your brain does while you’re slumbering away. The frontal lobe of your brain processes sound information and then activates your body’s “emergency-response system,” letting you know whether the sound that you just heard warrants a four-alarm hop-out-of-bed response on your part or whether you can merrily happily doze on: “I still don’t wake up from thunderstorms, or our cats running and playing, like other people tend to do,” says Sabrina, 27, mother of one. “But I hear any peep that my child makes.” Note: If your built-in “baby surveillance system” forces you to be on hyper-alert 24 hours a day, you could be suffering from postpartum anxiety or one of the other postpartum mood disorders. Talk to your doctor or another trusted person about how difficult it is for you to relax and unwind.
You Get Conflicting Advice from the Experts
The experts have always liked to duke it out over child-rearing issues, but rarely have their views been as polarized as they are right now. As Susan Cheever notes in her motherhood memoir As Good as I Could Be: “In every generation, the pendulum swings wildly back and forth between child-raising experts who advocate discipline and structure, and the experts who tell us to listen to our instincts. Currently both methods of raising children ... are being aggres- sively promoted.”
Ah, the experts. A worried mother’s best friend and worst enemy all at once. “First-time mothers—particularly of my own 30s generation—have such a strong tendency to search for the one true answer to motherhood in books and periodicals that we tend to trip all over ourselves on the way to the local bookstore. We are so education-driven, we have such a strong need to be ‘in control’ at all times, and we have not been taught as women to trust ourselves and our intuition, that the inherent instability and craziness of infant rearing feels unnatural and wrong to us,” says Nathalie, a 34-year-old mother of two.
“It frightens many. And, unfortunately, the books out there tend to do one of two things: They either give us conflicting information on any imaginable topic (one says schedule, the other tells us to be totally child-driven) or they are written so matter-of-factly that they make the millions of choices one needs to make seem as if they should be as easy as opening a can.” “There were extremes in approaches that I found unhealthy and disturbing,” adds Kristi, a 27-year-old mother of one. “In the end, I decided to listen to my newfound motherly instincts and to go with what felt right for me and my daughter.”
And a Lot of Unsolicited Advice, Period
As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, the fact that you’re a mother with a young child makes you an advice magnet. Even random strangers on the street feel compelled to pass along child-rearing tips and—naturally—to ask you how well your child is sleeping.
“The first question everyone asked during the first six months was how my daughter was sleeping,” adds Kimberly, 31, mother of 12-month-old Nora. You may not mind answering that question when things are going well on the sleep front, but it’s not quite so fun to deal with people’s reactions when your baby’s getting up a lot in the night. Maggie, a 30-year-old mother of one, explains: “At eight weeks old, Ewan started sleeping eight hours straight and I was getting sleep, and it was wonderful. But what was even more wonderful was when people would ask me how he was sleeping and I could say, ‘Great, he sleeps through the night.
People would give me these wonderful looks of approval. Then when he started sleeping horribly at five months and he was getting up every hour to two hours and people asked how he was sleeping, the looks quickly changed. I thought for sure I would get looks of pity, but I got the ‘Oh, you’re a terrible parent’ look. The ‘What are you doing wrong’ look.” Of course, parents sometimes get competitive about how much sleep they’re not getting, adds Elisabeth, 38, who is currently pregnant with her second child:
“I think there’s some sense for some parents that being sleep deprived is expected, necessary, and almost a badge of honor.” Aside from the pressure to have a baby who sleeps, the sleep advice can be laced with scary predictions about what will happen if you don’t get on top of your child’s sleep problems pronto.
“What I really hated were the dire warnings people would give,” recalls Jennifer, the 28-year-old mother of one. “Like, ‘If you don’t have the baby sleeping through the night by six months of age, the baby will never sleep through the night.’” And as for the advice that comes your way from family mem- bers, however well meaning, that can prove to be a source of frustration, too.
“You would think our own mothers would be able to offer some guidance, considering their experience, but they can’t,” says Patricia, a 31-year-old mother of one. “Mothering was so much different back then.” Marla, a 36-year-old mother of one, agrees: “If you ask my mother and my aunts and their friends, all of whom are in their sixties, ‘sleeping through the night’ means the baby goes in the crib at 7:30 and you leave her there until 8 the next morning, no matter what. Their memories are frustratingly revisionist.
Perhaps the most maddening thing of all about the sleep-related advice that tends to come your way is the fact that it tends to be heavy on the criticism, but sorely lacking in practical solutions. “I felt like everyone was dishing out advice on how much Mikaela should be sleeping, but no one was giving us the formula to get it done,” says Michele, a 30-year-old mother of two. Leanne, a 35-year-old mother of two, agrees: “Everyone seems to know exactly what we’re doing ‘wrong,’ but no one can tell us how to fix the problem.”
Your Child’s Sleep Problems Can Take a Toll on Your Parenting Self-Esteem
In her book Mothering from the Heart: Lessons on Listening to Our Children and Ourselves, Bonnie Ohye notes that society continues to value independence in even very young children: “In spite of revisionist ideas and research, the image of the independent child as the child esteemed above all others remains a cornerstone of our understanding of children and of ourselves as mothers. It is the gold standard, the litmus test of whether a child is a good and admirable child, and whether a mother is a good mother.” It’s hardly surprising then that mothers of older babies and toddlers who still aren’t sleeping through the night can feel like they’ve somehow failed as mothers. Krysta, a 28-year-old mother of one, remembers feeling this way while her daughter Gianna was repeatedly waking in the night: “I often felt that I just be doing something wrong as a mother if I couldn’t get my daughter to sleep through. I’d think, ‘I have a master’s degree, but I can’t get a one-year-old to stay asleep for more than four hours at a stretch.’”
Lorraine, a 37-year-old mother of one, thinks that the standards that society sets for mothers—and that mothers set for themselves— are often impossibly high: “Our society places so much stress on mothers. It’s kind of like the beauty myth—that ideal body type presented by the media that genetically occurs in maybe 1 percent of the general population. All these girls and women striving to meet the impossible ideal are left feeling inadequate, depressed, unworthy. I think the same applies to parenting today.” Naomi Stadlen, author of What Mothers Do: Especially When It Looks Like Nothing, thinks it’s time that we turned the stereotype of the sleep-deprived-mother-as-failure on its head: “If a mother says she is short of sleep, this could be a sign not of her failure, but of how well she may be mothering.”
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