Man vs. Baby Read online

  SLEEP TRAINING

  As I write this, Charlie is about eight months old, and I can honestly say that no two days have been the same. We celebrate him sleeping through the night as if we’ve achieved a milestone, only to discover that he was just getting his energy together for the next four nights, when he parties in his crib like we’ve plied him with PCP and cans of Monster.

  It was when Charlie was about four months old that this excruciating unpredictability reached crisis point and I did something that up till then had been unthinkable. I deliberately sought out expert advice.

  The first thing I read was by one of the most eminent child psychologists in academic history, Dr. Benjamin Spock, who wrote:

  By four months most babies are sleeping mainly at night, perhaps waking once or twice.

  And I distinctly remember thinking: Oh, fuck off, Spock, and I looked elsewhere. . . .

  The most obvious place to turn for fair, reasonable, and measured advice was, of course, ISIS.

  ISIS

  During our childbirth classes, there was a bulletin board in the classroom suggesting that if we had a problem with a baby sleeping, the best people to consult were ISIS. It seemed an interesting sideline for a fundamentalist jihadi death cult. But I looked a little closer and discovered that ISIS, in this case, actually stood for Infant Sleep Information Source. This is a real organization, stubbornly clinging to its name, despite the rather larger organization currently building a following in Iraq and Syria. “We were here first,” I would imagine is the viewpoint of the Infant Sleep Information Source, and fair play to them and the head of their organization, Alan Qaeda. (I made that last bit up.) Anyway, despite the fact that Googling their name probably put me on some sort of MI5/CIA watch list, and that there is now a good chance I can’t travel abroad without customs officers turning me inside out, ISIS did provide an interesting insight.

  According to their website, when it comes to encouraging babies to sleep through the night there are two categories of techniques: preventative and therapeutic.

  I think that’s straightforward enough: preventative means “This is what to do so you don’t fuck it up,” and therapeutic means “This is what to do now that you’ve fucked it up.” Naturally, we tended toward the therapeutic.

  And these were some of the methods we tried.

  Sleep journal

  Keeping a sleep journal is quite a simple idea. Basically, you keep an hour-by-hour diary noting the times when your baby wakes during the night and for how long. This gives you insight into her personal sleep patterns. You can then time her naps and feedings better in the daytime and tailor her bedtime routine to her. One advocate of this system provided us with a diary to fill in, which included an example of the ideal twelve-hour sleep behavior of a four-month-old baby.

  We gave up after four days. Maybe we should have given it longer, but reading it back in the daytime, we found it was fast becoming the most depressing diary since Anne Frank’s.

  Baby hypnosis

  I’ve always been suspicious of the effectiveness of hypnosis. Ever since Martin Bignall told me in high school that hypnosis was a great way to “bang chicks.” Martin Bignall was fourteen years old and ninety-eight pounds, with heavy prescription glasses and acne that made God cry. If a “chick” had ever actually even spoken to Martin in real life, he would have imploded. Hypnosis didn’t work for Martin, and as far as I can tell it doesn’t work for anyone else. The only environment in which hypnosis seems to have any great success is on a cruise when the resident hypnotist drags a half-drunk attention seeker from the audience and gets him to eat a raw onion or pretend to be a chicken. As a technique for getting a baby to sleep, it’s useless.

  I did try it one night, though. Looking Charlie deep in the eyes, I explained to him that his eyelids were getting heavy in a calm, soothing voice. Charlie stared back at me and, to be honest, he seemed to do a better job of hypnotizing me than I did him. He stayed wide awake while I dozed off and woke up an hour later lying beside his crib, worried that he’d just had me clucking around the house for an hour trying to lay an imaginary egg.

  The pick-up, put-down method

  This method (advocated by the creepily named Baby Whisperer) stresses the importance of not rocking your baby to sleep. Instead you should pick him up when he cries and put him down again when he stops. Even if that’s hundreds of times. The problem is you end up picking him up and putting him down so often you might as well be rocking him to sleep. You are simply rocking the baby up and down rather than from side to side. It’s just semantics. The only value to this method is that it’s a serious workout. Lifting and putting down a twenty-pound weight thirty times in an hour is a crappy way to get a baby to sleep, but a great way to build some ripped biceps. We tried this for a couple of weeks. When that period was up, we were more exhausted than before, and getting nowhere. And despite the fact that I’d developed some serious guns in the process, I’d also developed the posture of Gollum. As a lady with the username #PrincessAnne12 commented on the Mumsnet sleep-training forum: “It proper fucks up your back.” (I’m not sure it was the real Princess Anne.)

  Fading

  Also called “withdrawal.” The idea of the fading method is that you gradually wean your baby off the need to have you around so she can go to sleep. You do this by sitting in a chair beside the baby’s crib, and then moving the chair a little bit farther away every night, until eventually you are out of the room. The theory is that the baby begins to go to sleep without needing you. One website suggested moving the chair back a foot every night. And here was the problem with this technique. I don’t know how big the average nursery is, but ours is six feet wide, with Charlie’s crib being two feet from the door. By the second night we were already sitting outside the room. Not so much “fading” as fucking off. Apparently fading should start showing results after just two weeks. Well, two weeks equates to fourteen feet. If we’d moved the chair at that rate, I’d have found myself, after two weeks, completely out of earshot and sitting on our neighbor’s driveway, feeling like a bit of a dickhead. There was even some suggestion to persevere for months. At the same rate of fading, I would have spent the end of the first month passing the local post office, the second month the library, and within five months I’d have made it to the Baptist church on the other side of town.

  The extinction method

  For such a controversial method, you would have thought they would come up with a less aggressive-sounding name. It sounds like a euphemism a hit man might use. And, while taking out a hit on your baby would solve the sleeping issue, the extinction method is not quite that brutal. In fact, there is another, more up-to-date name for it, but it isn’t much better: the “cry-it-out method.” Like I said, not much better. The cry-it-out method sounds an awful lot like the “shut-up method” or the “suck-it-up method.” (But at least they’ve got rid of the word extinction and all its associations with murder, death, and the genocide of endangered species for Chinese sex medicine.)

  The cry-it-out method, or CIO, basically involves allowing babies to cry themselves to sleep.

  We didn’t try this. That is not a judgment on people who do. (It should be well established by now that I don’t have the faintest clue what the fuck I’m talking about.) I know a lot of people who swear by the CIO method and their kids seem to be growing up without the homicidal triad of psychological issues: bed-wetting, cruelty to animals, and a love of setting fires.

  From my understanding of it, it’s not just a case of ignoring the baby’s crying, it’s about allowing her to realize that she’s safe on her own. Allowing her to self-settle. (Which prompts the question: Why don’t they call it the self-settle technique?)

  I will say this: I don’t remember how my parents dealt with my crying as a baby, but my mom always tells the same story. When I was a bit older than Charlie is now, I would scream the fillings from teeth to avoid sleeping. And one night, at the end of their tether, my mom and dad decided to let m
e cry it out. After an hour or so, all was silent. My parents were obviously delighted: it was tough to leave me to cry, but if it worked, it worked. As the story goes, after a couple of hours they came in to check that I was okay, to discover that I hadn’t been sleeping at all, but had spent the previous two hours painting myself and the walls in my own shit.

  I smiled and waved one brown hand at my mom, and I was never left to “self-settle” again.

  * * *

  There are a thousand other methods that sleep coaches and gurus recommend as they take advantage of your tiredness to pry open your wallet. But, in truth, they are all just variations on three basic techniques:

  Technique 1: Don’t let them cry at all—you goddamn snowflake.

  Technique 2: Let them cry a bit—you pathetically confused, indecisive moron.

  Technique 3: Let them cry—you inhuman, grotesque, heartless monster.

  So, don’t worry about which one you choose, you’ll be wrong. Besides, judging by the number of parents on Facebook at 3 a.m., none of this crap actually works.

  WHAT WORKS

  As anyone who has researched sleep training in the wee hours of insanity will testify: sorting the shit from the chocolate is virtually impossible. No other subject is such a minefield of contradictions. When I first mentioned sleep training on my blog, I got messages with professional advice in droves. The first (and only) two I read began like this:

  1. “Leaving a baby to cry is not torture. It does not cause stress or lasting emotional problems for babies.”

  2. “For a baby, being left to cry is torture.”

  When experts contradict each other so flagrantly, advice becomes meaningless.

  I’m sure all these gurus who promote their theories have done a great deal of research into sleep patterns of babies. I’m sure they have carried out all kinds of experiments and have loads of letters after their names. You can tell. They start paragraphs with sentences like: “Young or old, as darkness falls your pineal gland releases the hormone melatonin. This sets . . .”

  . . . Sorry, nodded off there for a second.

  And this is one of the things that is so infuriating about expert advice. Contradiction really means: nobody truly knows anything. Not really. And banging on about the pineal or any other gland, when we’re in a sleep-deprived state and want answers, is a bloody joke. Parents don’t want to understand the science; we want a quick fix. We don’t want to hear that there isn’t a quick fix. We want one.

  Expert: “Yeah, but there isn’t a quick fi—”

  Parent: “You’re not listening.”

  So, there comes a point at which ignoring all the advice becomes eminently reasonable. When rocking a baby to sleep, or allowing her to feed when she wants, or even allowing him to sleep in your bed seems sensible. I understand that I will be creating a monster, that in two years’ time I will have a toddler who will never sleep . . . but so what? goes the thinking. If I don’t start getting just a few hours a night, I’ll be dead by then anyway. And so we fall back on the things that we are repeatedly told are “the worst things you can do,” and we do it purely because they work.

  Pacing

  . . . until your feet bleed. Picking a baby up when it is crying is often enough to stop it from being upset. Rocking it from side to side is the next stage. And if that doesn’t work, the next level is pacing . . . until you have worn a groove in your carpet that resembles the approach to the dartboard in a dive bar. As an experiment, one week I put on one of those pedometer/step calculators to see how much I was pacing. I’d used one before we had Charlie, and on average I then did about thirty-two thousand steps every seven days. But, in comparison, here are stats from when Charlie was about four months old and refusing to nap:

  In one week, I clocked nearly fifty miles. I worked it out: it’s the equivalent of me walking from my house to Grimsby (the UK town where happiness goes to die). Barefoot.

  So it’s safe to say that pacing is a bit of a drain on precious energy. But there are three big advantages to it:

  1. It does get the baby to sleep (enough for you to be able to put him down, anyway).

  2. It keeps you fit.

  3. By pacing back and forth, rather than walking in a straight line, you never actually arrive in Grimsby.

  The one disadvantage of pacing is that according to almost all experts, it is one of those “worst things you can do.” “Pacing with a baby in arms conditions them to be overly dependent on . . .” blah blah. Shush, you’ll wake him up.

  The car

  Realistically, there are only two reasonable explanations for driving around deserted streets in your underwear at three o’clock in the morning. Either you’re frantically trying to dispose of the body of a dead prostitute or you are trying to get a stubborn baby to sleep.

  Moving cars just work.

  It was a few months into the battle for sleep when we discovered that putting Charlie in his car seat and taking him for a spin around the block had the same effect as chloroform. We noticed that when we were out during the day he would fight his daytime nap, but if we were going out in the car we needed only move a matter of feet and he would instantly be comatose, like a narcoleptic sheep. It occurred to us both at the same time: Would this work in the evening, as a last resort?

  Sure enough, that night, when Charlie became unsettled, I put him in the back of the car and went for a drive. After less than five minutes he was fast asleep. In fact, so deeply asleep that when I got back, I was able to detach the car seat and carry it up to his room. And then simply pour our sleeping baby into his crib.

  Convinced that we’d hit on something incredible, I went online the following day to see if this was a technique that others used; and sure enough, I found that millions of parents do exactly the same thing to get their kid to sleep. I also found it referred to in the expert advice as “the second worst thing you can do.” For fuck’s sake.

  The reason we noticed that the car thing worked was because we had observed daytime behavior, Charlie’s and ours, and it was quite a revelation. . . .

  Daytime stimulation

  When people say they “slept like a baby,” they don’t tend to mean that they slept intermittently and regularly woke up shrieking, soiling themselves, and tearing at their own face in a desperate bid to receive attention. When people use that phrase, they usually mean that they slept soundly and without conscience. Because babies aren’t stirred by conscience . . . but they are stirred by everything else.

  The lightest noise will stir a sleeping baby—it is the reason why parents ghost around the house at night. Why parents are transformed into nighttime ninjas—ninjas whose code of honor begins not with Bushido, but with an understanding never to flush the toilet after 8 p.m. Parents must learn to become one with their house, adept at avoiding creaky floorboards and that groany seventh step on the stairs, which, with a footfall, used to sound like a nun sighing, but now sounds like Björk being given a kick in the ass. To become masters of silence, parents must learn the art of withholding a cough until your throat is on fire and withholding a sneeze until you sneeze internally and it feels like you’re going to shit your pants as your eyeballs explode outward. It is retreating from the side of a crib refusing to breathe and willing your heart to stop. Not long enough for you to keel over and die, but just long enough to stop making that infernal ba-boom, ba-boom that sounds deafening in the silence you have created.

  Parents learn to communicate silently using eye movements and a made-up sign language similar to the one used by soldiers advancing quietly through jungle terrain. And just as the silence has been mastered, just as all noise has been tamed, just as the peace of stillness carries your baby into that restful nothingness . . . some bastard who lives next door walks past your house opening a bag of chips and it’s all for fuck-all. Thanks a lot, Trevor, enjoy your sour cream and onion, you selfish prick.

  In noticing that Charlie was happy to fall asleep in a noisy environment like the car, we started to th
ink that maybe we were going about this whole thing wrong. Maybe we were being too quiet. Just maybe, creating an environment of silence was causing the exaggeration of noise that made Charlie wake up at night.

  This is a blog post about that moment of realization:

  The ongoing “Man vs. Baby” battle for sleep continues. . . .

  Sshh, Charlie’s asleep. But can anybody explain why when he naps during the daytime we could have a war in our house fought with brass instruments and he wouldn’t stir . . . but put him to bed at night and a mouse could fart into a handkerchief forty miles away and he’ll instantly bolt wide awake like “What the living fuck was that!?” . . . It’s not that he doesn’t sleep at all, he’s just a lighter sleeper than O. J. Simpson’s new missus.

  The most infuriating thing is when he’s fast asleep and I’m lowering him into his crib . . . or backing away from it . . . and my elbow or knee joint makes that bloody cracking noise . . . that’s literally all it takes to wake him up.

  To make matters worse, it turns out I have the body of an arthritic eighty-year-old. I never noticed before how much my joints creak and crack . . . ? In a quiet house, me attempting to move silently sounds like someone has thrown a load of damp wood on a fire.