Understanding Teenage Needs

Written By:Sue Gnagy Fegan
When a new baby arrives in the world it is the first time that he's been out of physical contact with another human being. It is his first experience of being alone, the first experience of touching fabric rather than skin, the first experience of being dry rather than wet, the first experience of gravity without fluid to float in, and the first experience of being without the taste of mum's amniotic fluid, delivering onion, garlic, cumin, and all the other clues to mother's diet!

Additionally, it's his first experience of bright light. Although some light does filter through to the womb, bright light is something quite challenging to his not-fully-developed abilities of sight.

Likewise with sound, which until now has been muffled, much like you might hear as background sounds in apartment living, apart from the whooshes and gurgles of mother's stomach and intestines, and the familiar thud, thud of her heartbeat.

With all of this extraordinary stimulation, it's equally extraordinary that our newborn baby will continue to sleep only a tiny bit less than he did at 32 weeks' gestation, around 85-90% of the time - 20-22 hours each day.

With mother needing only 8, you'd be excused for wondering what could possibly go wrong, but as most parents know, those precious 8 hours can seem painfully out of reach.

We already know that many babies are born with very disrupted sleep patterns (my second child arrived doing 15-minute catnaps and this lasted for months), and this can be an indication of an undeveloped nervous system, particularly where mother hasn't been able to eat adequately, or to hold food down during the pregnancy.

Professor Evelyn Thoman has shown that mums who eat 3 or more serves of cold water fish (like salmon, tuna, founder, haddock, herring and sardines) each week tend to have babies who are calmer and sleep better than mums with lower levels of the DHA (a fatty acid) found in those foods.

There is a lot we can do to rectify these sleep problems quite quickly (as you'll see in Chapter 6) but first let's look at the mistakes that many of us parents make in the beginning that actually train our babies NOT to sleep.

Common Mistakes

1 Overstimulation

In my years as a behavioural therapist, this is arguably the most commonly identified cause of not only sleep problems, but of behavioural problems generally in children. We've become a world where everything is a race, including developing and growing up, and it's sad to see some babies placed in that pressure cooker even before they're born.

Although I have little respect for mother nature, this is one area where I believe there is evidence that mother nature provides very well for the optimum development of the newborn and that our job is NOT to stimulate in the early days, but merely to love and nurture.

Now, this doesn't mean that you have to have a quiet and dark home, far from it! It also doesn't mean that you can't take your new baby out to the shops or the gym, or to have lunch or dinner with friends. All of THAT stuff is just familiarizing your brand new baby with the ebb and flow of your life, with the family environment that you've created for him.

What I'm talking about here are things like:

• Special training programs for unborns or newborns, like music, sound or light shows
• Mobiles in the crib or cot
• Excessive handling by people other than the immediate family
• An overly noisy or busy environment

Your baby will do best if he's allowed to slowly acclimatize himself to an environment which is so different from the one he's enjoyed the last several months. That's how he'll learn to tell the difference between sleep time and wake time, and that's how his nervous system and brain will thrive the best. He needs to find the normal rhythms and patterns of a stress-free family environment.

One of the worst things you can do for your baby or toddler is to contrive an overly-stimulating environment - that is a recipe for mental ill health, and a young person who struggles to form healthy sleep patterns.

2 Under-stimulation

Some parents go too far the other way, keeping the new baby in a deathly quiet and dark room. This is all very nice because it does come fairly close to womb conditions, but it also doesn't allow the baby's body clock to respond to normal light and dark patterns and move into family-friendly sleep habits.

Have you ever taken a long flight Eastward at night, and then as you've flown into the rising sun, despite being dog tired, been unable to sleep? That's the effect of daylight on the hormones that govern sleep.

So you can appreciate that smart use of daylight and dark is one of the most powerful tools you can use to help your baby develop better sleep patterns! Get into the habit of placing baby in that quiet, darkened room from 7 pm to 7 am, and let him nap in the brighter, noisier area of the house during the day. Go on with your normal life, playing your usual background music, watching television, vacuuming, washing, enjoying normal conversation, just as you would normally and reasonably do.

Although there are lots more tips to help your baby, toddler or older child to move into much better sleep routines, these 2 tips will provide a lot of help!