Sleeping Through the Night

Now that Natalia is 6 months old (yikes!) and beginning solid food, many people reasonably (?) expect her to start sleeping “through the night”.  However, I’ve been getting this question almost from the beginning.

There is a very good biological reason why tiny babies need to feed every few hours, day and night; basically, because the size of their stomachs only allows them to eat so much at a time.  (Here is a great visual that helps show the difference between a one day old baby’s stomach and a one month old baby’s stomach: http://babiesfirstlactation.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/the-newborns-stomach/.)  As you can imagine, as the baby grows into a child and then an adult, her stomach grows right along with her.   

Therefore, the bigger the person, the more she can eat at a time.  Conversely, the smaller the person, the less she can eat at a time.  And if she can only eat a little bit at a time, she will naturally need to eat more frequently than a bigger person, who can fill up and not get hungry for hours. So, since a baby gets hungry once she goes through her rather small meal, she inevitably will wake up at night when she gets hungry. Trying to force a young baby to sleep through the night is ill-advised.

Now, I will say that there are only very few things I enjoy more than sleeping in.  As a melancholic and a spirited adult, I tend to need more sleep than many others.  So you can be sure that adjusting to new motherhood in terms of sleep deprivation was not something I looked forward to or had an easy time with.  Even so, I do not consider getting Natalka to sleep through the night as some sort of milestone that will “finally” allow me to enjoy her more. Of course, when she does finally sleep through the night, it will be a milestone, and I will be quite happy to no longer have my nightly sleep interrupted.  But I am in no hurry.

First of all, how do we define sleeping “through” the night?  How many hours exactly counts as sleeping “through” the night?  I’ve heard “six” as the standard, but that hardly qualifies as sleeping through the night for me, who gets grouchy with much less than 10 hours of sleep.  So whether I wake up every four hours or every six makes little difference, because I’m not getting the optimum stretch of sleep that I as an individual need anyway.  If Natalia is sleeping in six-hour stretches, how ought I answer the question then?  

On the other hand, there are proponents of parenting that aims to “show baby who’s boss” by ignoring a baby’s cries in an effort to “teach independence” and hence get the baby to sleep up to 12 hours overnight.  It seems that this is an old idea that won’t die in modern times which many people – parents and non-parents alike – seem to consider some magical milestone about which to inquire at seemingly every meeting with a new mom or dad.  

Assuming we could agree on how to actually define “sleeping through the night”, what good would it do for me to answer in the positive?  All I can expect is the inquirer to smile and say “oh, good.”  And if I answer in the negative?  It’s not like the inquirer will then volunteer to take over parts of the night shift for me.  

I suppose that fellow parents ask this question simply as an attempt to find something to bond over with me.  Though if we follow different parenting styles, we may need to look outside the box for such camaraderie.  Mere artificial milestones won’t do the trick.

I did make this faux-pas a few months ago when I asked a friend with a son 8 months older than Natalia if he was sleeping "through" the night.  In my case, I was asking because I wondered what was in store for me and my little one.  I suppose it only becomes a nuisance if a parent is faced with the same question over and over again from many different people and over an extended period of time.

So let me offer a standing reply for most likely the next 6 months: No, Natalia is not yet sleeping through the night.  She wakes up on average every 4 hours, usually because the urge to pee wakes her up (I know this because her diaper is dry and she pees on her little potty), and to fill up her still small stomach.  As she starts taking in more and more solid food, I do expect her to start sleeping for longer stretches of time.  However, this will come at a price, since less frequent nursing will lead to a diminished milk supply, and of course eventual weaning.  So don’t assume that I’m looking forward to a full night’s rest necessarily, as I am fully aware that each phase of my baby’s life will come with its own pros and cons, and the best I can do is to focus on the positives and enjoy them to the fullest.

While we’re on the subject of answering reemerging questions: No, Natalia doesn’t yet have any teeth either.  And Yes, we are “still” breastfeeding. (The World Health Organization recommends breastfeeding for “at least” the first two years of life, and the American Academy of Pediatrics notes that breastmilk [or formula] is to be a baby’s primary source of nutrition for the entire first year of life.)