The No Cry Nap Solution (11 page)

and know the facts so that you can minimize their effects on you.

As an example, some people will try to tell you that letting

your baby cry it out will solve all your sleep problems. Not only

is this dangerous advice when applied to a newborn, it is rarely

a simple one-time solution. Even with older babies, crying it out

must be done over and over again, often at the expense of baby’s

and parents’ emotions.

58 Newborn Babies

Nap When Your Baby Naps

You’ve likely heard this advice already, and for very good reasons.

New parents can fi nd that taking care of a baby in addition to

other responsibilities takes a toll on their mood, their health, and

even their marriage. New mothers are more likely to suffer from

the baby blues and postpartum depression if they don’t take care

of their own sleep needs. Taking your own daily nap can help you

combat fatigue, and it can help you to be a better parent. Even

a twenty-minute nap can rejuvenate you and help to offset your

disturbed nighttime sleep, so defi nitely give it a try.

Create a Prenap Routine

Newborn babies don’t require much of a bedtime routine, as they

sleep and wake all through the day and night. However, after

the fi rst few months, your baby will fi nd it easier to fall asleep if

you help him “wind down” for twenty or thirty minutes before

naptime. If you go from a bright, noisy room—playing with your

baby with television noise in the background, for example—and

Professional-Speak

“New parents sometimes try to put their baby on what they

view as a reasonable schedule. From the baby’s point of view,

that’s not reasonable at all. The best solution is a compromise,

letting the baby call the shots while providing a stable, pre-

dictable home environment. A baby given this freedom likely

will eat and sleep better, and cry less than if you try to make

the baby conform to your schedule from the start.”

—Michael Smolensky, Ph.D., and Lynne Lamberg,

The Body Clock Guide to Better Health

Nap Tips for Newborns
59

then expect him to go directly to sleep, it’s likely that he’ll be too

revved up to relax.

In the time before a nap, avoid noisy situations, bright lights,

and active stimulation. Create a short but peaceful prenap rou-

tine, including a quiet diaper change and soft sounds (such as lul-

labies), and perhaps a bit of baby massage. This will help your baby

transition easily from awake to asleep and begin to build the cues

that will be invaluable as your baby gets a bit older.

Relax and Be Flexible

It is a fact that your newborn
will
be waking you up at night and

will
be napping on an unpredictable, ever-changing schedule, so

you may as well be fl exible about sleep issues right now. Being

frustrated about your newborn’s sleep patterns won’t change a

thing. It won’t help your baby’s biology mature any faster, and it

will distract you from your most important and wonderful job

right now—getting to know your new baby and letting your new

baby get to know you. Gradually, your newborn will consolidate

her sleeping and begin to sleep longer spells during the night and

combine short daytime sleeps into actual naps.

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Pa r t 3

Solving Napping Problems:

Customized Solutions for Your Family

We have already talked a great deal about how important

naps are to your child’s health, mood, and happiness, and conse-

quently, to
your
health, mood, and happiness. So, it’s likely that

you are now a true believer in the magic of naps. But what if your

child isn’t a believer? What if your child won’t nap when you want

her to? Or what if naps are much too short or if your little one

requires an elaborate ritual of parent acrobatics in order to sleep?

That’s when you get to be investigator, researcher, teacher, and

the ultimate purveyor of all things nap!

The following section outlines the most common nap problems

and provides a variety of solutions for each one. Scan through the

topics for your child’s nap issues and select those solutions that

make the best sense for you and your child. Put together a plan

using the guidelines in Part 1 of this book, or simply begin using

the tips as soon as you read about them.

Nap problems can be complicated, and it may take a few adjust-

ments to your plan along the way, but the end results are defi nitely

worth every minute of effort.

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Catnaps

Making Short Naps Longer

See also: Newborn Babies (Part 2); Shifting Schedules:

Changing from Two Naps to One Nap; The Nap Resister:

When Your Child Needs a Nap but Won’t Take One

I have a four-month-old mini-napper! I can

usually get her to go to sleep, but she always

wakes up exactly forty minutes after I put her

in bed. How can I get her to take longer naps?

This is an amazingly common occurrence. I have discovered

that most mini-nappers are between two months and eight

months old. Most of these babies fall asleep being fed or while in

a car seat, sling, rocker, or someone’s arms. They are then trans-

ferred to bed, where they sleep between thirty and fi fty minutes.

These factors clearly point to some possible causes and will lead us

to the potential solutions.

Could It Be One-Cycle Sleep Syndrome

(OCSS)?

In the fi rst six to eight months of life, a baby’s full sleep cycle

ranges from forty to sixty minutes. When you add your baby’s

brief in-arms falling-asleep time together with the nap time, the

total is
one sleep cycle
. If you’ll recall from the fi rst part of this

book, human beings sleep in cycles, and there is a brief awakening

63

64 Solving Napping Problems

between them. An independent sleeper will get comfortable and

fall right back to sleep, likely not even realizing that he’s awake.

What this tells us is that a short napper cannot put himself back

to sleep, so his nap appears to be over at the end of one sleep cycle.

So, you see, it’s likely that your mini-napper is suffering from what

I call
one-cycle sleep syndrome
(OCSS).

Here’s how to understand what’s going on with your baby.

Imagine this: It’s your bedtime. You get into your nice, comfy bed

with your favorite pillow and a soft blanket, and you fall asleep.

If a while later you wake between sleep cycles and everything is

exactly the same, you might change position, pull the covers up,

and then fall right back to sleep, possibly without even remember-

ing this happening.

What if you woke up to fi nd yourself sleeping on the cold

kitchen fl oor without blankets or pillow?

Would you simply turn over and go right back to sleep? I know I

wouldn’t! It’s likely you would wake up shocked. You’d worry about

how you got on the kitchen fl oor. You certainly wouldn’t fi nd it

comfortable! In order to fall back to sleep you would have to go

back to bed. Even though you would still be tired, you’d be wide

awake by then. It may take time to get back to sleep. But you prob-

ably wouldn’t sleep deeply because you would be concerned about

ending up on the fl oor again.

This is how it is for a baby who is held, nursed, rocked, bottle-

fed, or otherwise aided to sleep. She falls asleep under certain con-

ditions, but at the end of her fi rst sleep cycle, she wakes up briefl y

and fi nds herself in entirely different conditions. She startles,

wondering, “What happened? Where am I? I can’t sleep like
this
!”

At this point she’s awake, and you think naptime is over. But in

reality, this is just the halfway point.

The key for many short nappers will be to identify the dif-

ferences in conditions between
falling asleep
and
waking between

cycles
. Then, you can either make these two conditions more simi-

lar or plan for the midcycle awakening and help your baby fall

Catnaps
65

Alyssa, one week old, and Aliyah, three years old

back to sleep when it happens. Lots of solutions and ideas will

follow.

Nap Sleep Versus Night Sleep

Many babies who have OCSS for naps also have the same issue at

night. While their sleep cycles may be longer or they might slide

back into sleep between some of their cycles, they still require your

assistance for many of their night wakings. Therefore, by identify-

ing this problem and taking steps to solve it at naptime, you might

also reduce or eliminate night waking.

Some babies, on the other hand, take short, one-cycle naps but

sleep through the night just fi ne. How can that be? Actually, it

is easy to understand. There are
many
conditions that occur for

66 Solving Napping Problems

night sleep that are different from day naps. The house is darker

and quieter at night. There are subtle routine changes, such as a

bath and pajamas for bedtime but not at naptime. You act differ-

ently when putting your baby down for a nap versus when you put

him down for nighttime sleep at the end of the day when you are

tired and heading toward sleep yourself. In addition, all the bio-

logical forces at work on your baby’s system function more compel-

lingly at bedtime than they do during the day, such as homeostatic