Free Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman

they also realize that some things about them are just biological. Before we assume that our own children sleep like no others, we should probably think about science.
    Armed with my revelation
about the The Pause, I decide to look at some of the scientific literature on babies and sleep. What I find shocks me: American parents may be fighting the “baby sleep wars,” but American sleep researchers aren’t. The researchers mostly agree about the best way to get kids to sleep. And their recommendations sound remarkably French.
    Sleep researchers, like French parents, believe that beginning very early on parents should play an active role in teaching their babies to sleep well. They say it’s possible tobegin teaching a healthy baby to sleep through the night when he’s just a few weeks old, without the baby ever “crying it out.”
    A meta-study of dozens of peer-reviewed sleep papers
    1 concludes that what’s critical is something called “Parent education/prevention.” This involves teaching pregnant women and parents of newborns about the science of sleep and giving them a few basic sleep rules. Parents are supposed to start following these rules from birth or when their babies are just a few weeks old.
    What are these rules? The authors of the meta-study point to a paper that tracked pregnant women who planned to breast-feed. 2 Researchers gave some of the women a two-page handout with instructions. One rule on the handout was that parents should not hold, rock, or nurse a baby to sleep in the evenings, in order to help him learn the difference between day and night. Another instruction for week-old babies was that if they cried between midnight and five A.M. , parents should reswaddle, pat, rediaper, or walk the baby around, but that the mother should offer the breast only if the baby continued crying after that.
    An additional instruction was that, from the child’s birth, the mothers should distinguish between when their babies were crying and when they were just whimpering in their sleep. In other words, before picking up a noisy baby, the mother should pause to make sure he’s awake.
    The researchers explained the scientific basis for these instructions. A “control group” of breastfeeding mothers had gotten no instructions. The results were remarkable: from birth to three weeks old, babies in the treatment and control groups had nearly identical sleep patterns. But at four weeks old, 38 percent of the treatment-group babies were sleeping through the night, versus 7 percent of the control-group babies. At eight weeks, all of the treatment babies were sleeping through the night, compared with 23 percent of the control babies. The authors’ conclusion is resounding: “The results of this study show that breast-feeding need not be associated with night waking.”
    The Pause isn’t just some French folk wisdom. Neither is the belief that sleeping well, early on, is better for everyone. “In general, night wakings fall within the diagnostic category of behavioral insomnia of childhood,” the meta-study explains.
    The study says there’s growing evidence that young children who don’t sleep enough, or who have disturbed sleep, can suffer from irritability, aggressiveness, hyperactivity, and poor impulse control, and can have trouble learning and remembering things. They are more prone to accidents, their metabolic and immune functions are weakened, and their overall quality of life diminishes. And sleep problems that begin in infancy can persist for many years. In the study of breast-feeding mothers, the treatment-group infants were afterward rated more secure, more predictable, and less fussy.
    The studies I read point out that when children sleep badly there’s spillover to the rest of the family, including maternal depression and lower overall family functioning. Conversely, when babies slept better, their parents reported that their marriages improved and that they became better and less-stressed