This idea isn’t entirely new to me. It sounds familiar from some of my American sleep books. But it’s usually mentioned among lots of other advice. I may have tried it once or twice with Bean but never with particular conviction. No one ever pointed it out to me as the one, crucial, most important thing to do and to stick with.
Cohen’s singular instruction could solve the mystery of why French parents claim they never let their babies cry for long periods. If parents do The Pause in a baby’s first two months, the baby can learn to fall back to sleep on his own. So his parents won’t need to resort to “crying it out” later on.
The Pause doesn’t have the brutal feeling of sleep training. It’s more like sleep teaching. But the window for it is pretty small. According to Cohen, it’s only until the baby is four months old. After that, bad sleep habits are formed.
Cohen says his sleep methods are an easy sell for the res Sl fht=ults-oriented parents in his Tribeca practice. But elsewhere, he says, parents often need more coaxing. They’re opposed to letting their babies cry even a little. Cohen says he eventually persuades almost all the parents of newborns in his practice to try his methods. “I try to explain the roots of things,” he says. That is, he teaches them about sleep.
When I get back to Paris, I immediately ask French mothers whether they do The Pause. Every single one says that, yes, of course they do. They say this is so obvious they hadn’t thought to mention it. Most say they started doing The Pause when their babies were a few weeks old.
Alexandra, whose daughters slept through the night while they were still in the hospital, says that of course she didn’t rush over to them the second they cried. She sometimes waited five or ten minutes before picking them up. She wanted to see whether they needed to fall back to sleep between sleep cycles or whether something else was bothering them: hunger, a dirty diaper, or just anxiety.
Alexandra—who wears her curly blond hair in a ponytail—looks like a cross between an earth mother and a high school cheerleader. She’s extremely warm. She wasn’t ignoring her newborn babies. To the contrary, she was carefully observing them. She trusted that when they cried, they were telling her something. During The Pause, she watched and listened. (She adds that there’s another reason for The Pause: “to teach them patience.”)
French parents don’t have a name for The Pause; they just consider it common sense. (It’s the American in me who needs to brand it.) But they all seem to do it and to remind each other that it’s critical. It’s such a simple thing. It strikes me that the French genius isn’t coming up with a novel, mind-blowing sleep trick. It’s clearing out the clutter of competing ideas and focusing on one thing that truly makes a difference.
Now that I’m attuned to The Pause, I start to notice that it’s mentioned a lot in France. “Before responding to an interrogation, common sense tells us to listen to the question,” says an article on Doctissimo, a popular French Web site. “It’s exactly the same thing with a crying baby: the first thing to do is to listen to him.”
Once you get past the philosophical sections, the authors of Sleep, Dreams and the Child write that intervening between sleep cycles “indisputably” leads to sleep problems, such as a baby who fully wakes up after every ninety-minute or two-hour cycle.
It’s suddenly clear to me that Alison, the marketing expert whose son fed every two hours for six months, wasn’t handed a baby with weird sleep needs. She unwittingly taught him to need a feed at the end of every two-hour sleep cycle. Alison wasn’t just catering to her son’s demands. Despite her best intentions, she was creating those demands.
I never hear of a single case like Alison’s in France. The French treat The Pause as sleep solution number one, and something to wheel out when the baby is only a few weeks old. An article in Maman! magazine points out that in the first six months of a baby’s life, 50 percent to 60 percent of his sleep is sommeil agit S/emts é (agitated sleep). In this state, a sleeping baby suddenly yawns, stretches, and even opens and closes his eyes. “The error would be to interpret this as a call, and thus derail our baby’s sleep train by picking him up,” the article says.
The Pause isn’t the only thing that French parents do. But it’s a critical ingredient. When I visit Hélène De Leersnyder, the Proust-quoting sleep doctor, she immediately mentions The Pause, without any prompting. “Sometimes when babies sleep their eyes move, they make noise, they suck, they move around a bit. But in reality, they’re sleeping. So you mustn’t go in all the time and disturb him while he’s sleeping. You have to learn how the baby sleeps.”
“What if he wakes up?” I ask.
“If he wakes up completely, you pick him up, of course.”
When I talk to American parents about sleep, science rarely comes up. Faced with so many different and seemingly valid sleep philosophies, the one they ultimately choose seems like a matter of taste. But once I get French parents talking, they mention sleep cycles, circadian rhythms, and sommeil paradoxal. They know that one reason babies cry in the night is that they’re in between sleep cycles or they’re in sommeil agité. When these parents said that they “observed” their babies, they meant that they were training themselves to recognize these stages. When French parents pause, they do it consistently and confidently. They’re making informed decisions based on their understanding of how babies sleep.
Behind this is an important philosophical difference. French parents believe it’s their job to gently teach babies how to sleep well, the same way they’ll later teach them to have good hygiene, eat balanced meals, and ride a bike. They don’t view being up half the night with an eight-month-old as a sign of parental commitment. They view it as a sign that the child has a sleep problem and that his family is wildly out of balance. When I describe Alison’s case to Frenchwomen, they say it’s “impossible”—both for the child and for his mother.
The French believe, as we do, that their children are beautiful and special. But they also realize that some things about them are just biological. Before we assume that our own children sleep like no others, we should probably think about science.
Armed with my revelation about the The Pause, I decide to look at some of the scientific literature on babies and sleep. What I find shocks me: American parents may be fighting the “baby sleep wars,” but American sleep researchers aren’t. The researchers mostly agree about the best way to get kids to sleep. And their recommendations sound remarkably French.
Sleep researchers, like French parents, believe that beginning very early on parents should play an active role in teaching their babies to sleep well. They say it’s possible to begin teaching a healthy baby to sleep through the night when he’s just a few weeks old, without the baby ever “crying it out.”
A meta-study of dozens of peer-reviewed sleep papers
1 concludes that what’s critical is something called “Parent education/prevention.” This involves teaching pregnant women and parents of newborns about the science of sleep and giving them a few basic sleep rules. Parents are supposed to start following these rules from birth or when their babies are just a few weeks old.
What are these rules? The authors of the meta-study point to a paper that tracked pregnant women who planned to breast-feed.2 Researchers gave some of the women a two-page handout with instructions. One rule on the handout was that parents should not hold, rock, or nurse a baby to sleep in the evenings, in order to help him learn the difference between day and night. Another instruction for week-old babies was that if they cried between midnight and five A.M., parents should reswaddle, pat, rediaper, or walk the baby around, but that the mother should offer the breast only if the baby continued crying after that.
An additional instruction was that, from the child’s birth, the mothers should distinguish between when their babies were crying and when they were just whimpering in their sleep. In other words, before picking up a noisy baby, the mother should pause to make sure he’s awake.
The researchers explained the scientific b
asis for these instructions. A “control group” of breastfeeding mothers had gotten no instructions. The results were remarkable: from birth to three weeks old, babies in the treatment and control groups had nearly identical sleep patterns. But at four weeks old, 38 percent of the treatment-group babies were sleeping through the night, versus 7 percent of the control-group babies. At eight weeks, all of the treatment babies were sleeping through the night, compared with 23 percent of the control babies. The authors’ conclusion is resounding: “The results of this study show that breast-feeding need not be associated with night waking.”
The Pause isn’t just some French folk wisdom. Neither is the belief that sleeping well, early on, is better for everyone. “In general, night wakings fall within the diagnostic category of behavioral insomnia of childhood,” the meta-study explains.
The study says there’s growing evidence that young children who don’t sleep enough, or who have disturbed sleep, can suffer from irritability, aggressiveness, hyperactivity, and poor impulse control, and can have trouble learning and remembering things. They are more prone to accidents, their metabolic and immune functions are weakened, and their overall quality of life diminishes. And sleep problems that begin in infancy can persist for many years. In the study of breast-feeding mothers, the treatment-group infants were afterward rated more secure, more predictable, and less fussy.
The studies I read point out that when children sleep badly there’s spillover to the rest of the family, including maternal depression and lower overall family functioning. Conversely, when babies slept better, their parents reported that their marriages improved and that they became better and less-stressed parents.
Of course, some French babies miss the four-month window for sleep teaching. When this happens, French experts usually recommend some ver Smeniv heighsion of crying it out.
Sleep researchers aren’t ambivalent about this either. The meta-study found that letting kids cry it out, either by going cold turkey (known by the unfortunate scientific term “extinction”) or in stages (“graduated extinction”), works extremely well and usually succeeds in just a few days. “The biggest obstacle associated with extinction is lack of parental consistency,” the study says.
Michel Cohen, the French doctor in Tribeca, recommends a rather extreme version of this for parents who miss the four-month window. He says they should make the baby feel cozy with his usual nighttime bath and songs. Then they should put him in bed at a reasonable hour, preferably while he’s still awake, and come back at seven A.M.
In Paris, crying it out has a French twist. I start to realize this when I meet Laurence, a nanny from Normandy who’s working for a French family in Montparnasse. Laurence has been looking after babies for two decades. She tells me that before letting a baby cry it out, it’s crucial to explain to him what you’re about to do.
Laurence walks me through this: “In the evening, you speak to him. You tell him that, if he wakes up once, you’re going to give him his pacifier once. But after that, you’re not going to get up. It’s time to sleep. You’re not far away, and you’re going to come in and reassure him once. But not all night long.”
Laurence adds that a crucial part of getting a baby to do his nights, at any age, is to truly believe that he’s going to do it. “If you don’t believe it, it’s not going to work,” she says. “Me, I always think that the child is going to sleep better the next night. I always have hope, even if he wakes up three hours later. You have to believe.”
It does seem possible that French babies rise to meet their parents’ and caregivers’ expectations. Perhaps we all get the sleepers we expect, and the simple fact of believing that babies have a rhythm helps us to find it.
To believe in The Pause, or in letting an older baby cry it out, you also have to believe that a baby is a person who’s capable of learning things (in this case, how to sleep) and coping with some frustration. Michel Cohen spends a lot of time converting parents to this French idea. To the common worry that a four-month-old is hungry at night, he writes: “She is hungry. But she does not need to eat. You’re hungry in the middle of the night too; it’s just that you learn not to eat because it’s good for your belly to take a rest. Well it’s good for hers too.”
The French don’t believe that babies should withstand biblical-sized trials. But they also don’t think that a bit of frustration will crush kids. To the contrary, they believe it will make children more secure. According to Sleep, Dreams and the Child, “to always respond to his demands, and never tell him ‘no,’ is dangerous for the construction of his personality. Because the child won’t have any barrier to push up against, to know what’s expected of him.”
For the French, teaching a small baby to sl Sll angereep isn’t a self-serving strategy for lazy parents. It’s a crucial first lesson for children in self-reliance and enjoying one’s own company. A psychologist quoted in Maman! magazine says that babies who learn to play by themselves during the day—even in the first few months—are less worried when they’re put into their beds alone at night.
De Leersnyder writes that even babies need some privacy. “The little baby learns in his cradle that he can be alone from time to time, without being hungry, without being thirsty, without sleeping, just being calmly awake. At a very young age, he needs time alone, and he needs to go to sleep and wake up without being immediately watched by his mother.”
De Leersnyder even devotes a portion of her book to what a mother should do while her baby sleeps. “She forgets about her baby, to think about herself. She now takes her own shower, gets dressed, puts on makeup, becomes beautiful for her own pleasure, that of her husband and of others. Evening comes, and she prepares herself for the night, for love.”
As an American parent, this film noir scene—with its suggestion of kohl eyeliner and silk stockings—is hard to imagine in anything but the movies. Simon and I just assumed that, for quite a while, we’d rearrange our lives around Bean’s whims.
The French don’t think that’s good for anyone. They view learning to sleep as part of learning to be part of the family, and adapting to what other members of the family need, too. De Leersnyder tells me, “If he wakes up ten times at night, [the mother] can’t go to work the next day. So that makes the baby understand that—voilà—he can’t wake up ten times a night.”
“The baby understands that?” I ask.
“Of course he understands that,” she says.
“How can he understand that?”
“Because babies understand everything.”
French parents think The Pause is essential. But they don’t hold it up as a panacea. Instead, they have a bundle of beliefs and habits, which when applied patiently and lovingly, put babies in the mood to sleep well. The Pause works in part because parents believe that tiny babies aren’t helpless blobs. They can learn things. This learning, done gently and at a baby’s own pace, isn’t damaging. To the contrary, parents believe it gives the babies confidence and serenity, and makes them aware of other people. And it sets the tone for the respectful relationship between parents and children that I see later on.
If only I had known all this when Bean was born.
We definitely miss the four-month window for painlessly teaching her to sleep through the night. At nine months old, she still wakes up every night at around two A.M. So we brace ourselves to let her cry it out. On the first night, she cries for twelve minutes. (I clutch Simon and cry, too.) Then s S toght at ahe goes back to sleep. The next night she cries for five minutes.
On the third night, Simon and I both wake up to silence at two A.M. “I think she was waking up for us,” Simon says. “She thought that we needed her to do it.” Then we go back to sleep. Bean has been doing her nights ever since.
Chapter 4
wait!
I’m getting more used to living in France. After a march around the local parks one morning, I announce to Simon that we’ve finally joined the global elite.
“We’re global, but we’
re not elite,” he replies.
Though I’ve made some inroads in France, I miss the United States. I miss grocery shopping in sweatpants, smiling at strangers, and being able to banter. Mostly, I miss my parents. I can’t believe I’m raising a child while they’re 4,500 miles away.
Neither can my mother. My meeting and marrying a handsome foreigner was the thing she most dreaded when I was growing up. She discussed this fear so extensively that it’s probably what planted the idea. On one visit to Paris, she takes me and Simon out to dinner and breaks down in tears at the table. “What do they have here that they don’t have in America?” she demands to know. (Had she been eating escargot, I could have pointed at her plate. Unfortunately, she had ordered the chicken.)
Although living in France has gotten easier, I haven’t really assimilated. To the contrary, having a baby—and speaking better French—makes me realize just how foreign I am. Soon after Bean begins sleeping through the night, we arrive for her first day at France’s state-run day-care center, called the crèche. During the intake interview, we sail through questions about her pacifier use and favorite sleeping positions. We’re ready with her inoculation records and emergency-contact numbers. But one question stumps us: What time does she have her milk?
On the matter of when to feed babies, American parents are once again in sparring camps. You could call it a food fight: One camp believes in feeding babies at fixed times. Another says to feed them whenever they seem hungry. The American Web site BabyCenter gives eight different sample schedules for five- and six-month-olds, including one in which the baby eats ten times a day.
We’ve drifted into a hybrid. Bean always has milk when she wakes up and again before bedtime. In between, we feed her whenever she seems hungry. Simon thinks there isn’t a problem that a bottle or a boob can’t solve. We’ll both do anything to keep her from yowling.
Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting Page 6
