Sleeping Through the Night
Mothers have a tough go at proving they’re doing their job correctly. The pressures of raising children is daunting, with societal burdens telling us how and when our children should behave. But there is one question in particular that lays the ground work for failure: is your baby sleeping through the night?
I have caught myself asking this same question to other mothers with babies, as if it’s some pinnacle of achievement that we can all compare ourselves to. But the question itself is absurd—babies do not sleep through the night! They just don’t.
We have all heard numbers tossed around through articles, books and doctor’s visits; eight hours equals sleeping through the night—no 10! You can list me every number, one through one hundred, and I will still tell you, my baby does not sleep through the night. He wakes up. He’s hungry. It’s too hot. He’s teething. He has a cold. His sister is screaming in the adjacent room…I have a laundry list full of excuses as to why he is not. But instead of listing these, why don’t we all just admit that unless you are one of the lucky minorities, your baby does not sleep in huge amounts of time. And let’s say yours does—babies lives are phases, constantly changing and morphing into something new. Tonight he may sleep through the night, and tomorrow he may not.
A friend of mine had one of those rare babies. She slept through the night at three-months old. Her parents would simply lay her in her crib at 8pm, and she would sleep until 7am. Every. Single. Night. We discussed routine, room temperature, feeding schedules and every detail we could think of to try to figure out why her baby was sleeping and mine was not. But you know what? Babies are human. They are little, tiny beings with their own personalities and their own needs. Comparing them to a baseline number not only makes parents feel guilty, but it puts undue anxiety on a baby to perform. It may also be pertinent to add that these lucky parents of a now three-year-old, are up with their child most nights due to night terrors. It all may just even out in the end.
This is not to say not to keep trying, to keep hoping. But instead of holding ourselves and our babies up to some unrealistically high standard, why don’t we just admit the truth? Can we all breathe a collective sigh of relief and admit that our beautiful, perfect, little bundles of joy do not sleep like adults? And can we please, please, stop asking every mother if their baby does?
