In this three part series, guest expert Gwen Kiehne shares her most impactful strategies for helping families work out their struggles with sleep. part 1 of 3

Gwen with my older daughter in 2016

Gwen Kiehne has a passionate interest in human development, with a particular focus on newborn, infant, and child emotional development and the transition to parenthood. She has been a postpartum doula for almost 8 years, and a certified sleep coach for 3 years, among other various birth professional hats. Gwen has worked with hundreds of families and cares deeply about helping parents find their inner wisdom and cultivate their own path on their parenting journey. She is the proud mother of a wonderfully curious 10 year old and a community organizer here in Seattle’s Central District.

Sleep is cultural Parents get to decide the sleep culture of your family Here are some helpful notes from Gwen:

1. As a postpartum doula, I observed that almost all parents pass through similar phases as they learn to parent newborns and infants. The first phase tends to center around feeding. I like to call this the “keep the tiny human alive” or “survival” phase where many parents are learning to breastfeed, they are focused on their changing and healing body, and their growing and changing baby. Once this phase starts to feel resolved, which happens at various stages for parents, the focus tends to become on sleep and figuring out how to which pieces of their life before baby they’re going to carry forward and how to integrate this new person into their life routines. I think of this as the “establishing the family culture” phase and a big part of that is doing some longer term sleep planning.

2. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive

   1. People having kids today are more informed than ever. Parents are often pulled between extremes. For example, I often reference the work of Dr. James McKenna who is a biological anthropologist who studies the breastfeeding relationship dyad in primates and humans. Most recently he coined the term breastsleeping to describe the natural biological interconnectedness between nursing and sleeping in human babies. His work is often used to describe a scientific basis for bed sharing and giving babies open access to the breast through the night. On the other side of the spectrum, you have the American Academy of pediatrics who focuses on Sudden Unexplained Infant Death and suffocation, warns against bed sharing, and makes a scientific argument for keeping babies flat on their backs on a separate flat firm sleep surface designed for infant sleep. If we’re looking for sleep solutions or support online, parents are often faced with choosing what kind of parent they are, one that cares about the psychological and biological connectedness that their baby feels or one that cares about whether their baby survives to breathe another day. It can be confusing and overwhelming to navigate. Parents are tired and they just want to do what’s best for their baby and often that’s not a clear cut path. If we can remind ourselves that science is descriptive rather than prescriptive, the evidence can inform our choices rather than steering them. 

   2. Some of our sleep ideas are based on science. It’s now becoming common knowledge that newborns need to sleep every 60-90 minutes, that they have short sleep/wake cycles, for example. Ww know that when babies fall asleep, they immediately fall into REM rather than passing through the light and deep sleep phases first as adults do. Most of our ideas and practices about sleep are cultural, however. Where a baby sleeps, what time bedtime is, how much holding or crying we tolerate, or whether or how our feeding choices interact with our sleep choices are all cultural decisions. Science and society have a lot to say about these choices, but ultimately, we as parents determine the culture of our family. The most important question to ask yourself when making choices about sleep or deciding whether to change something is, “what works best for my family?”

3. Everybody gets to have needs and boundaries

   1. Science seeks to describe, explain, and measure phenomenon, but it’s not always able to tell us what’s most practical. Only parents can decide what’s working or not working for them. We know that the majority of babies are not sleeping a solid 8 hours by 6 months, yet we expect this from ourselves and from our babies. Some parents expect that babies shouldn’t need attending to at night, that parents should be able to place a baby in a dark quiet room and leave them for 10-12 hours. It’s important to understand the developmental and biological needs of babies so that we can adjust our expectations accordingly. When I ask parents to identify goals for sleep, sometimes it’s clear that the work we need to do is actually about understanding what’s realistic and normal sleep for a 3 month old or a 2 year old. On the other hand, there can be pressure to adhere to prescriptive scientific advice or to a dogmatic philosophy for sleep that leads to parents sacrificing their own biological needs for sleep to focus on the needs of their baby. Often parents are reluctant to share details with me about how they’ve adapted to their situation either because it doesn’t perfectly adhere to the guidelines they feel they *should* be following or because they’re ashamed of how much they’ve sacrificed trying to make something work that just isn’t.