Wikis tagged with Sleep

  Looking for information about cosleeping? We've got a great list here for you!    Click here for a list of Mothering Magazine on-line articles about co-sleeping, the Family Bed and related topics. Get started with this great article by Mothering's founder: Sleeping With Your Baby by Peggy O'Mara   Basic Instinct A dad can do so much more than defend the cave. New research shows that he too has the biological goods to nurture baby http://www.todaysparent.com/lifeaspa...1225399&page=1 Children Need Touching and Attention, Harvard Researchers Say by Alvin...

In the past 4 years since becoming a mother and an enthusiastic breastfeeding supporter, I have learned that myths about breastfeeding and formula are running rampant.  I am left frustrated and concerned that our formula culture has won, that our mothering instincts have been trampled by the corporations that would prefer a dollar over a healthy child. Most significantly, I have seen many, many mothers state that their breast milk never came in, or that it dried up after a couple months.  I know that some women genuinely do not produce milk due to Insufficient Glandular Tissue, and I...

(Photo courtesy of http://katelyndemidow.blogspot.com/)         I am going to commit a huge natural parenting faux pas and admit something…. I kind of hate co-sleeping. I don’t actually 100% hate it.  There are lots of beautiful things about sleeping with your kids.  But, since I am complaining (I will get back to the good stuff later) I should mention some things that make me think I won’t miss this stage. ~Being squished ~Waking up numerous times a night as each of the four children wander into our room ~Sleeping sucking my stomach in with my arm at a...

Every once in a while I hear about a mother struggling to be the perfect “attached parent” and feeling like she is failing miserably. I don’t know exactly what attachment parenting means to you, in fact, I am not sure what it means to me. But I do think that many of us feel like failures if we haven’t checked off a million things on our “perfect attached mom” list. I hear women expressing guilt over the fact that they don’t : -cloth diaper -nurse two kids -nurse past a year -co-sleep -do crafts or are feeling overwhelmed and not good enough because they do: -use a...

Did you know astronauts nap? While two fly the plane one takes a 40 minute nap. NASA found that for 26 minutes of that time the astronaut was asleep and the entire 40 minutes boosted their performance by 34% and their alertness by 54 percent. This got me thinking about all those “stop” signs I went through when my kids were young and I was severely sleep deprived and how a 40 minute nap could have been my ticket to… well, less tickets. Lately I’ve been obsessed with napping, of sorts. Not the fall flat-on-your-face-and-collapse nap (I know those all too well). I’m obsessed with a...

I posted this on my BOLD blog, but I thought I”d repost here for all you pregnant mamas (and not pregnant!)! For those of you who have read my Mothering Magazine blog you’ll know my new obsession lately is napping. Not just any nap, but a yoga nidra nap. I’m so nap-happy this year that starting on Mother’s Day I plan to commit to taking one nap every day for a year. And I want you to too. The science is out there: naps can be life-changing, increase productivity, elevate mood and a yoga nidra nap can do even more – including helping moms with childbirth trauma heal. Naps...

  This baby is a good sleeper but I'm not It’s 2:30 in the morning and I’m wide awake. A post on sleep was not in the line-up for this week’s blogging but here I am in a pitch black 50 degree house and all the other topics I had planned to write about (weird but normal in postpartum women, how Cheri Huber stuck a gun in her stomach and pulled the trigger before she found Zen Buddhism, more on the philosophy behind going diaper free) feel irrelevant right now. I remember my father having insomnia. From my room I would hear him go downstairs in the middle of the night and turn on...

“Getting any sleep?” This seems to be the question of choice that well-meaning strangers, family members, and friends all ask me. I guess Americans enjoy talking about sleep and in our culture we equate babies with sleepless nights. Plus I’m practically holding up a sign with the dark circles under my eyes and my mussed hair: SLEEPLESS LADY. Usually it’s not the baby’s fault. Four-month-old Baby Leone does what a baby needs to do: wakes up at night to nurse or to use the potty or to let me know that her diaper’s wet. Then she goes right back to sleep (unless she decides, at 4:00...

We’ve all been through it, the hours battling a small body to fall asleep, the endless tossing and turning and the “I don’t wanna go to sleep. I’m not tired yet.” We cajole. We sing. We dance. We offer favorite toys. We offer promises (bribes); five nights without a battle, and you can get a new toy or whatever it is with which we can bribe them. And later, when our patience runs out and they really need to be to sleep, we start threatening and trying to reason with a small tired body that is already beyond reason. Two hours later, a lifetime it seems, you’re wondering...

A new research study shows that co-sleeping is best for kids right up to ages three and four.    There is actually a wealth of research that I discuss in my book, to support co-sleeping, yet it rarely makes the headlines in the mainstream.  Most parents fear that co-sleeping and SIDS are interlinked and it simply isn’t true.  Unless you are grosly overweight, a smoker, or a heavy drinker/drug user the safest, and most desirable, place for your child is right by your side for as long as they want.   Many co-sleepers have a family room/bed that accommodates everyone – large and small. ...

By Aletha Solter Issue 122 January/February 2004 The term “cry it out” refers to the practice of leaving babies in their cribs without picking them up, and letting them cry themselves to sleep. A modified version of this approach is to go to the baby every few minutes to pat her on the back or reassure her verbally (but not pick the baby up), and to increase the length of time gradually so that the baby eventually “learns” to fall asleep alone. But there is no doubt that repeated lack of responsiveness to a baby’s cries—even for only five minutes at a time—is potentially damaging to the...

By Stephanie Nakhleh   Cosleeping was no fun at first. Instead of the nighttime bliss I'd been promised by attachment-parenting enthusiasts, my baby often acted like a nocturnal animal—prowling the sheets in the wee hours, howling for no clear reason. I felt cheated. Where was the state of harmony everyone had told me about: those sweetly synchronous sleep patterns, the magical ability to sleep through midnight nursings? Almost everyone else in the world did this, right? Why was it so hard? In exasperation, I talked my reluctant husband into trying to train our baby to sleep through...

By Kathleen Dyer Ramos Issue 114 September/October 2002 Controversies concerning parent-child cosleeping abound in both the popular parenting advice literature and professional scientific literature. Previous researchers have suggested that an understanding of the familial and cultural context of children's sleep might help resolve some of the controversy. The two studies described here are attempts to explore the context of cosleeping. Why Do Some Families Share Sleep? Anthropologists have observed that cosleeping is common in collectivistic cultures (where the needs of the group are...

By Tina Kimmel Issue 114 September/October 2002 The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the Juvenile Product Manufacturers Association (JPMA, the crib manufacturers' lobby) recently launched a campaign to discourage parents from placing infants in adult beds or sleeping with them, based on data showing that infants have a very small risk of dying in adult beds.1,2 The CPSC implies that infants in adult beds are at greater risk than infants in cribs, but as we know, and as they know, babies also die in cribs. What we need to do is calculate the relative riskiness of an...

By V.K. Harber   All primary caregivers know the drill. Kid’s head hits pillow, adult’s feet hit pavement (so to speak). If  you’re anything like me, naptime is when you run around the house, not unlike a chicken with its head cut off, attempting to do everything you couldn’t do while you were tending to your little bundle of joy. Of course, I’ve also been known to pop a bowl of popcorn and catch up on episodes of Modern Family on Hulu. Just depends on the day.     When I first had my son, despite the fact that every single experienced mother I knew told me to sleep when he slept, I...

The Stillness Game: a script to help you relax your child down to sleep In a previous post, I discussed the art of creating a ‘stillness game’ with our young one to help him learn to relax down to sleep. While there are a plethora of CDs, books, and MP3s (I know, I’ve made one too) out there to help you, sometimes, it’s best for your child to hear your voice in helping them to relax down to sleep. I’ve found that the keys to relaxation with children are voice and music. There are a variety of methods out there from Transcendental Meditation to using mantras to relax. I’ve found...

Last week I shared a short post here on Mothering Magazine about how attachment parenting can make you crazy.   I have actually posted many times on my personal blog about my difficulties, frustrations, and yes, love of attachment parenting.  How hard this type of parenting (or really ANY type of parenting) is for me is no secret.  I am a mom and sometimes I struggle. When I share these thoughts on my frustrations with AP the response is overwhelmingly positive.  There are many, many other mothers who struggle as I do.  There are other women who are sleep deprived despite others saying it...

Compassionate Connection: Nonviolent Communication with Children  By Inbal Kashtan Issue 110 January/February 2002 When our baby was a week old, his grandfather expressed concern that my partner and I were holding him too much. Since then, Grandpa has worried about cosleeping and extended nursing, and we have continued to talk together about the differences in our parenting philosophies. At one point Grandpa tried to harmonize our obviously different approaches: "Surely we all want the same thing," he said. "We want our children to grow up to become independent." We do want our son to...

By James J. McKenna Issue 114 September/October 2002 Mothers and infants sleeping side by side, also known as cosleeping, is the evolved context of human infant sleep development. Until very recent times, for all human beings, it constituted a prerequisite for infant survival; outside of the Western industrialized context, for the majority of contemporary people, it still does. Because the human infant's body continues to be adapted only to the mother's body, cosleeping with nighttime breastfeeding remains clinically significant and potentially lifesaving. This is because, of all mammals,...

By Megan Leary     I was at an event supporting midwifery legislature when I saw the Le Leche League booth and made a bee line for it.  I have been pretty fortunate in that breast feeding has gone great from the start for my daughter and me, but my issue now was that breastfeeding was going almost too well.  She was now a year old and she was nursing like a newborn again.  I was up every two hours at night nursing her and then up-and-at-em the next day for my full time job.  Needless to say, I was perpetually tired and desperate for some mama advice.   Tears welled up in my eyes as...