Closeness, attachment, bonding… these are the essential building blocks of family life.
And sleep is an essential human need, too!
When a baby comes along, most parenting models choose one or the other. For example, controlled crying and related techniques focus on the parents’ need for sleep. However, those models believe that bonding and attachment need to be sacrificed in order to make this happen.
On the other side, Classical Attachment Parenting deeply values bonding and attachment; but this is often seen as incompatible with uninterrupted sleep.
I have a deep compassion for the parenting paths that each of us chooses. We have important reasons for choosing as we do… based on our core beliefs about connection, feelings, and the meaning of life.
So, I like to offer the Aware Parenting approach as something that will resonate with some parents.
Practising Aware Parenting, we no longer need to choose between sleep and secure attachment.
With this model and its associated practices, parents have the amazing experience of bonding with their babies, their babies become securely attached, and babies are usually sleeping through the night in the second half of their first year.
Issues such as difficulty getting to sleep, frequent night waking, and not sleeping for long, are all seen as having a particular reason which parents can provide the solution for.
So, how can this be? That we can offer our baby secure attachment, and sleep restfully?
To answer this, we need to look at Aware Parenting theory. Practising Aware Parenting means we go beyond wanting a night’s sleep. It even goes beyond secure attachment, although it includes both of these. With Aware Parenting, we are given the incredible knowledge that babies have true feelings from birth, and to stay connected with themselves, they need those feelings to be heard. Yes, that’s it, even if our baby has a beautiful natural birth, and we co-sleep, and breast-feed on demand, and carry our baby in a sling, and respond sensitively to her cues, she still has feelings to express. Painful and uncomfortable ones. If she has experienced stress in utero, a challenging birth, separation after birth, or unmet needs, she will have even more feelings to express.
The difference between the two main other paradigms becomes clearer here. (Again, holding all choices compassionately and all parents with understanding and love)
In controlled-crying approaches, parents are told that babies crying alone before sleep helps them to self-soothe and learn to go to sleep by themselves. This is seen as an important human skill.
Here, the baby expresses painful feelings, but those feelings could very well be about being left alone.
For feelings to be healing, a baby needs to have someone holding them and being present with them. If there is no-one present, the baby feels fear, anxiety, terror… and eventually, there is not enough safety to feel the feelings, and the baby stops crying… but you will notice them sucking their thumb or clutching onto a blanket, or a soft toy. These are signs that the baby has learnt to repress her true feelings through these approaches. The baby may well wake up during the night, perhaps several times, but she no longer believes that in crying, someone will come to her and be with her. She simply continues with her thumb-sucking or object-clutching to numb her feelings. She has learnt not to speak her deepest needs, and not to express her feelings.
If you have followed advice and have done this with your baby, please have compassion for yourself. If you now want to do things differently, you can help your baby heal from this experience with Aware Parenting practices.
In Classical Attachment Parenting practices, parents stop or prevent crying by feeding for comfort, jiggling, rocking, and wearing down in a sling or carrier. Here the vital need of a baby for closeness is profoundly acknowledged. However, this does not provide space for a baby to express any uncomfortable or painful feelings that emerge in her. She learns to ask for food, or to move, or to distract herself when she feels upset.
Again, if this is something you have done and you now want to listen to your baby’s feelings, you can also start doing this, and listen to the past pent-up ones too, with Aware Parenting practices.
We are all learners in this parenting journey. Each of us evolves way past what our parents gave to us, and it is equally important to hold in mind that our children will evolve way past what we have been and done with them. We are not the end of evolution; merely a link in its chain.
But what we can do is consciously choose to keep evolving in our relationship to ourselves and in the ways we relate to our babies and children.
Our children keep inviting us to evolve. Those places where the invitation is strongest are those places that we find most challenging….
So, if our baby wakes frequently, or doesn’t ever seem happy, or cries for no apparent reason, or bites us; all these invite us to be more as human beings and as parents. To learn, and to grow in particular ways.
In the decade that I have been offering support to parents in the practice of Aware Parenting, I have talked to many hundreds of mums and dads who are wanting and willing to grow in their parenting. So many of them came with their baby’s sleep as the presenting issue and as the apparent problem driving them to something more.
The way I see things, what seems like a problem is always some deeper part of ourselves, calling ourselves to be more.
So many of these parents came to Aware Parenting wanting more sleep, and found that, to their surprise, they found so many other gifts. They got more sleep, and more restful sleep. But they also got more intimacy with their baby. More eye contact. More joy and smiling.
They received a new way of being with their own feelings, and a new way of understanding the habitual ways they protected themselves from feelings. They experienced relief, and a deep sense of compassion, in no longer trying to stop their babies and children from feeling any uncomfortable feelings.
They experienced a deeper sense of compassion for their babies, themselves, and other people. They learnt how to have more joy in their own lives, and to include their sad feelings too. They learnt to look within themselves when they were feeling pain, or frustration, or anger, and to see how those feelings were not caused by their children, but instead were invitations, helped along by their children, to become more whole as human beings.
They learnt to become more compassionate to other parents and more celebratory of just how much it requires to keep becoming more aware and present as a parent and a human being.
For many, it became not just a way of parenting, but inspired a whole different way of living – more fully, more zestfully, and more intimately…..
So, if you want secure attachment for your baby or child, and lots of sleep for you all, and you are also willing to enquire within yourself, to grow and flourish, to keep developing as a human being so that you can be an even more present, empathic and loving parent, then I invite you to look into Aware Parenting.
You can read Aletha Solter’s book – The Aware Baby – and find out more about her work at www.awareparenting.com She has also written several other books, including Tears and Tantrums, Helping Young Children Flourish, Raising Drug-Free Kids and Attachment Play.
You can read more of my articles at www.parentingwithpresence.net and www.lovingbeing.com.au