Hellobee

Confession – after Baby C was born, I became a bit of a baby sleep junkie. Baby C was a late term preemie, and in the wealth of information that was thrown at us in the NICU during her 10 day stay, the one item that stuck with me the most was “babies learn and grow best when they get enough sleep.” And since sleep was something I worried about most even before Baby C was born, given how utterly dysfunctional I tend to become with less than 6-7 hours of sleep, I made it a personal mission to make sure that Baby C slept well.

Luckily, we had a fairly easy time of it, most of which I owe to setting a routine as soon as we moved Baby C into the crib at 3 months (and luck, if we’re being completely honest). The biggest rough spot for me in the past 2 years has really been that Baby C is just not that big on sleep. Although she was sleeping through the night pretty quickly, her average night time sleep was pretty low on the average sleep scale for her age, and continues to be so as she’s getting older. She has a very obvious “off” switch, and it usually flips pretty late in the evening, no matter how much we tinker with her routine or bedtime. She loves her nap, but has to be woken in order for bedtime not to get even later. Over these years, I’ve learned all about wake times, have analyzed her sleep schedule down to the minute, and of course, whenever I hear of a well reviewed book about baby sleep, I grab it, in hopes of finding some magic answer to how to get my kid to sleep just a little bit more.

That’s how I recently came across Sleepless In America: Practical Strategies to Help Your Family Get the Sleep It Deserves (Harper Perennial, 2007) by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. Kurcinka is also the author of the popular Raising Your Spirited Child series, and is well reviewed in the parenting expertise circles, so when I saw that a friend of mine was reading Sleepless in America, I picked it up right away.

Kurcinka has a lot of expertise, both academic and practical. She holds a Bachelors and Doctorate in Education, as well as a Master’s in Family Social Science, and multiple licenses as a parent educator and early childhood teacher. She does extensive consulting on various parenting subjects, and especially on sleep, presenting at national conferences and to audiences ranging from individual families to care providers to the medical community. She runs a somewhat active blog on her website and is cited in news articles, especially on the subject of “spirited” kids.

Over the course of 18 chapters, Kurcinka covers topics that include misbehavior, sleep science and strategies to cope with disturbed sleep. What I found over the course of the book is that Kurcinka spends the bulk of it talking less about sleep and more about behavior issues, with her thesis primarily that many behavioral issues in kids can be explained by lack of sleep and too much activity during the day that inhibits kids from properly unwinding and being relaxed enough to sleep.

At first, Kurcinka had my attention. Baby C is a very active kid – jumping is her norm for moving around rather than walking – and even as the day comes to an end, she is often as bouncy and excitable as ever. It usually takes her over 45 minutes to fall asleep, no matter how much relaxation we attempt to insert into our evenings. However, it becomes pretty obvious just a few pages into the first chapter that what Kurcinka is focusing on are irregular sleep cycles. Letting kids stay up late, shifting schedules due to after-school activities, travel, etc., are all “culprits” in disturbing kids’ body clocks. As a result, they may sleep in and then shift bedtime even later that day, have to wake up early on a school day without enough sleep, miss naps and not compensate for the lost sleep, etc. Here, my attention began drifting because Baby C’s evenings are as regular as things get – we go out of our way to avoid evening commitments, making sure that we’re home for dinner, that we don’t turn on the TV, that we encourage quiet activities and a regular routine. Despite all that, we still see many nights where Baby C will do laps around her crib before finally settling to sleep.

My overall impression of the book is that it could be a great resource for parents of older kids (school age and higher), and especially those who haven’t really spent much time thinking about kids’ sleep. I say that without any judgement – my mom always found it bizarre that I worried so much about consistency and routine for Baby C and counted how much time she spent sleeping, and I’m definitely an exception in my circle of friends, who build kids into adult schedules instead of the other way around (and their kids sleep just fine). Perhaps it’s because I have done a fair amount of reading on kids’ sleep and body clocks and I do believe in the idea of routine and time to wind down that the book didn’t really resonate with me.

Kurcinka devotes the bulk of the book to the importance of wind-down time, and calming activities, including massage, book reading, quiet time and physical closeness with parents to get kids into a state most suitable for good sleep. She spends a lot of time analyzing kids’ misbehavior – tantrums, unusual shortness, snippiness, inability to pay attention to activities, etc. – and tying them to sleep deprivation as a cause. I found myself a bit skeptical at times, because while I think that sleep is important, there is also a lot to be said for age, ability to pay attention, subject interest and just general kids being kids, when it comes to “misbehavior.” Kurcinka does not differentiate age at all in her book, which I find odd given that kids under four years old have very different patterns of sleep than older kids and often less flexibility in their sleep cycles and body clocks.

What I did like about Kurcinka’s approach is that she focuses on the importance of parents helping their kids sleep. She argues openly against “crying it out” and behaviors that are often termed “coddling,” taking a lot of issue with the idea of “self soothing” as a realistic expectation for all kids at all times. I know that there is a lot of debate among parents about what works, and I am of the “if it works for you, then it’s the right way” mentality, as long as everyone in the arrangement is happy. I do tend to subscribe to Kurcinka’s approach, and do think that it’s important for parents to help kids sleep, though I also believe that it’s easy to create an environment where someone isn’t happy, be it the kid or the parents, and it’s important to find a balance that gets everyone some rest.

In sum, I wouldn’t categorize Sleepless in America a sleep book, like I would Ferber’s and Weissbluth’s and so on. Kurcinka’s book reads more as a self help book for parents who might be dealing with behavioral issues in their kids (and I would say that this would be more applicable to the school age set and beyond, since younger kids are often misbehaving due to their still maturing systems) and are looking for an alternative perspective on the roots of that misbehavior. I do think Kurcinka’s tips to ensure kids are sleeping regularly are good ones, and she does account for occasional need to stay up late and mix up a routine, but if you’re looking for reasons why your two year old does laps around the crib for an hour before she falls asleep (looking at you, Baby C!), this book is not going to answer that question.