Creating Safety and Security with Your Infant - Navigating Sleep and Nighttime Feedings [Sleep 11]
In today’s episode, we’re jumping into parenting to talk about creating safety and security with your infant as you navigate bonding and sleep.
There are many approaches and opinions, some based in research and others based on intuition. Sharing from her studies as an attachment specialist to her own experiences as a parent, Dr. Kimber offers various approaches, ideas, and troubleshooting tips to help you and your child to get much-needed rest and sleep. And along the way, please keep in mind that all of us learn as we go on the parenting journey, so please give yourself compassion and grace along the way.
Key moments include:
01:35 – My parenting approach to my children and how different it was for each of my kids.
06:53 – A full-circle realization that I caused trauma to my son’s nervous system.
08:09 – What is secure attachment, and why is it the greatest gift we can give our children?
10:59 – What is the relationship of secure attachment to a child’s sleep?
15:41 – Understanding night-time demand feeding and how to effectively manage it.
17:55 – The importance of flexibility as a parent.
19:07 – An awareness of parenting goals — creating a rough draft for parenting structure.
26:00 – How anxiety and trauma affect your nervous system and, ultimately, your infant.
30:46 – Posturing yourself as a mom who can either be sleep-deprived or grateful for catching some zzz’s.
32:43 – Troubleshooting tips when you are a mom who has a baby who wants to play rather than sleep.
40:02 – How dysregulation affects your infant’s sleeping patterns, and my last-minute advice for mothers and fathers struggling to create a well-rounded sleep structure for themselves and their children.
Resources mentioned and additional resources:
Trauma-Proofing Your Kids: A Parents' Guide for Instilling Confidence, Joy and Resilience (by Dr. Peter Levine and Maggie Kline)
Trauma Through a Child's Eyes: Awakening the Ordinary Miracle of Healing (by Dr. Peter Levine and Maggie Kline)
Read more: Ferber Method
Read more: Adult Attachment Interview
The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind (by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson)
The Power of Showing Up: How Parental Presence Shapes Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired (by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson)
Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five (by Penelope Leach)
Touchpoints-Birth to Three (by T. Berry Brazelton and Joshua D. Sparrow)
Sleep: The Brazelton Way (by T. Berry Brazelton and Joshua D. Sparrow)
Please remember that this podcast is not a replacement for treatment by a healthcare or mental health professional. This content is created for education and entertainment purposes only.
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This transcript has been created using A.I. please excuse any missed words or incorrect grammar.
I’m so grateful you’re here. Today we are going to jump into parenting and helping to create bonding and sleep cycles. This is a topic that has a lot of opinions – some based in research and others based on intuition, maybe even other approaches have behind them brilliant marketers who are going to share how they created the perfect sleep environment for their children and that was good enough evidence that it should work for everyone. What I’m going to share with you – is my educated approach with my own biases from my studies as an attachment specialist during graduate school and really until I became licensed and then shifted my attention. I’m going to share how I approached both my children – I had different approaches because of my trauma and grief around having a stillbirth in between my living children. For my own anxiety, I needed to have my youngest nearer to me which was really the opposite of my oldest who needed to be in the other room for me to sleep. Before I start – I want to say this. If I say something about something you did but you’re realizing wasn’t the best from this podcast – I want to say this. We have incredible brains and neuroplasticity which means we can create new pathways over time. And I want to share this story with you as holding hope for when you’ve messed up – because there can be significant mess-ups as parents and repair is the way through those mess-ups. My youngest had to have surgery when he was 9 months. We said good-bye to him in the waiting room – he was all smiles and snuggling with the doctor. When he woke up- he likely was alone until he was more conscious and then we were able to be there with him. I was with him, standing by him – but if I’m honest – it was traumatic seeing him with tubes, and lying so still when we’d had a stillbirth. So I didn’t know I was in shock, his dad didn’t either – so I wasn’t likely as engaged and touching as I would be if I entered that surgery today. Fast forward a month later, I was at a training for Somatic Experiencing with Dr. Peter levine and they were giving overviews – one of the things was surgery and kids. You don’t leave them until they are knocked out and you are there before they wake up so they will never feel alone. You can imagine my panic. I rushed up to the speaker -saying I needed a session for my almost one year old…who did he know. His co-presenter happened to be practicing in my city – Maggie Kline. Her and Peter wrote two books – one for parents – Trauma Proofing Your Kids and Trauma through a Child’s Eyes (which is more for professionals). So we actually went in with him when he was about 18 months – a little more verbal and did some play therapy for a session – explaining what happened. We continued a little of the play therapy at home – telling him what happened… In my own thoughts as a professional – I figured transitions were likely going to be really hard. He left me feeling safe with the doctor, then without me he woke up alone. So I don’t want to get into the details about how I worked with him-that could be a whole podcast in and of itself but what I will say – is it took five years for him to be comfortable without panic to leave me when he went to school or any other situation. He had significant panic and because I knew what it was about – I had emotional space for it. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard and I didn’t sometimes wish he wasn’t like this but I knew where it came from so this gave me space.
Coming full circle – I didn’t know better and I caused trauma in my son’s nervous system that might have caused significant distress for a long period of time. Luckily – I kept giving him the road map, telling him why his body was afraid but reminding him of his feeling of safety once he was at school and we repaired. I don’t know if this will come up again at a later time in adulthood or when he becomes a parent but for now, it’s all good. So please remind yourself, hope lies in the repair.
The greatest gift we can give our children is what’s called a secure attachment. A secure attachment is created when we show up consistently so that our infant learns that when he or she has a need, it’s met in a reasonable manner. Secure attachment gives us a sense that we belong – we are seen, soothed, safe and secure as Dr. Dan Siegel describes. I’ll put several of his books in the shownotes. We also have an experience that when we explore “my caregivers” isn’t threatened – meaning they don’t get anxious, don’t let me put myself in danger… so as I go into adulthood inside of me I have the sense of security and freedom. For those of you interested in the science -- In our imperfect but seems to be robust research – using what’s called the Adult Attachment Interview or a Strange Situation for toddlers, we believe that between 1970s to 1999 about 50% of the population was secure – irregardless of socioeconomic status – which means regardless of how many resources a person has in the home or stress levels it wasn’t a predictor for attachment styles. I’ve heard a couple of attachment professionals speak in the last couple of years – and that number seems to have dropped to 45% - which would make sense – we can’t give our children what we don’t have inside of us unless we do our own internal work but I only found one research article from 2009 that suggested this after looking at 10,000 AAI. Still – even if we haven’t dropped – 50% isn’t a good number.
What does this have to do with sleep? Well sleep is one of those primary ways we can help create a secure attachment for an infant because he or she cries when they wake up. Wake up feeling hungry, lonely, cold, warm – something has made them uncomfortable and they are helpless to change their situation without help. So you’re nightly response is creating inside of your infant an understanding of what to expect. If you let your infant cry for over 10/15 minutes – we know in some of the infant studies this creates a terror response inside of them with heart rate/breathing rates. You will find that over time, if you let your infant cry for long periods – he or she will adjust by no longer crying -but this isn’t a healthy adaption. This is learned helplessness – why cry when no one comes. I’m going to be possibly controversial here about sleep training. From an attachment stance, Babywise, the Ferber methods – are really just bad. They say you can let your baby cry for 20 minutes until they go back to sleep. I haven’t seen any hard science that supports that. If you have – one that was published in a research journal – please send it to me. These methods, unless you have a baby that this type of program completely works (which I want to say that no baby 100% fits this program because you have to be flexible – like accounting for growth spurts or times where teething is happening or sickness – this can be where pain means an infant needs to be soothed – if you are making them stick to a sleep schedule where you don’t interfere, you aren’t creating that secure internal sense where they can be comforted and soothed. On the other side, demand feeding, sleeping, etc. where the infant is the one in charge – also isn’t helpful. You definitely create a sense of safety but what goes missing is an ability to learn how to navigate stress or self -soothing which is a muscle that needs to be built over time. So -how do we find the balance?
A couple things help – get to know the different cries of your baby. Different tones, efforts, etc. will help. Sometimes, if you tend to dissociate when your baby cries too much, it can be hard so you might need some professional help during this time while crying is the main source of communication for needing something. 2. Have flexibility. You have to have flexibility in order to account for those less frequent times like when you’re traveling, or baby’s teething, growing, etc. Or naptime was interrupted by a loud noise so night sleep cycle off…. 3. Now this one may seem contradictory but I do think having a rough schedule of what you do on most days is super helpful. Here I do appreciate the structures of thinking about your goal is to wait 2 ½ hour to 4 hours in between feedings after your infant reaches say three or four months. So some things I would do is if I could see a child was starting to get fussy and showing he was hungry say at 2 hours – if I could I’d tell my husband to walk with him outside to distract him for however long until the fussiness took over the distractive activity…then I’d feed. It’s harder to distract this way when you are the food source, however if my husband wasn't home – I certainly would carry him around until he was very clearly saying “food! Food!” persistently – then I’d feed him regardless of the time, and we’d start the next feeding time from that point – not a set time that had to be made everyday. Now nap times- there too – I’d have some flexibility but had a target time in mind. My daughter was an absolute horrible napper – she slept for 20-40 minutes whereas my son was a great napper – he’d sometimes sleep so long I’d have to make sure all was okay or wake him up by snuggling with him so he’d get to bed at a decent time – which for me was 7 pm.
Nightime feedings of course are the hardest – At night – I didn’t let me kids cry very long. I didn’t want their nervous system to get worked up, making it harder to go to sleep once I fed them. All feeding schedules were irrelevant to me during the night. Now, as they got just a bit older say 6 months if I had the energy I might go rock them if I could for 15 minutes to delay the feeding if it had been 2 hours but this isn’t about withholding – it’s more of a focus of trying to help their digestive systems get a better schedule going – now of course – they wake up in part because of what I’ve been eating and drinking since I breastfed so it’s complicated and that’s why I really don’t like the rigidity of say a babywise method. I held with flexibility the Ferber method and had good success but something that helped me is I had the bigger picture in mind – I’m creating a secure attachment. That’s what I’m doing right now so again at night I was a very responsive mother. Now I’ve mentioned that for my oldest, I had her sleep outside of the room after the first four to six weeks. I was a light sleeper so could hear her. For my son, he slept in our room for months because I was so anxious that something was going to happen to him, since our second child was born still at 34 weeks, I could sleep better with him beside me because if I felt anxious and woke up, I could pause and listen to his breathing or put my hand in front of his mouth and feel the air. This made it so I slept a bit better rather than having to go in and out of bed. Now, one thing that some of you mothers may experience if you’ve also had a pregnancy loss – is there isn’t as much angst about losing sleep because you had this incredicble longing to have a baby in your arms stealing your sleep, for myself – I had just deep gratitude that I had a baby to care for so I was along for the ride. And if I could say anything about sleep routines – how can you get in a posture of being excited about how much sleep you got versus feel the angst of how much you didn’t get. And you can always listen to episode 2 which discusses 6 ways to navigate sleep deprivation. A couple of troubleshooting things – your baby isn’t a great night sleep in that after feedings it feels like play time – I think this is a hard one. If your baby will let you, put him back into his crib. If there is a lot of crying involved, then when this happened with us, I’d put the child in our bed but not give any toys – and not engage but would say, Mommy’s sleeping. If you want to play you need to do it by yourself. Any attempt at engagement – I wouldn’t 100% ignore but I’d be slow to respond and when I responded it would be with a redirect.
Another troubleshoot is – family bed? For me, I just couldn’t miss out on my sleep so I didn’t have it happen. There were occasions, like when our son died and Eden was 3.5 and having nightmares in her room by herself. We had her sleep with us and then transitioned her back to her own bed. When we had a child want to sleep in the middle of the night with us, I would walk that child back to bed or carry and snuggle for a little bit in their bed but I just didn’t want to send confusing messages and reinforce, come sleep with mom and dad because honestly, who wouldn’t want to – it’s warmer, there’s another person which is always less scary, it’s cozy – but it doesn’t help build up that self-soothing system that I think is important. We did lots of things like – fuzzy blankets and as soon as possible, had them pick them out so they had ownership for it. Stuffed animals – sleeping with them – yes please. Never had television before bed to winddown – I’m not a fan. Big on books, stories, - everything you should be doing as an adult – no screens.
So just to wrap up – I don’t think on-demand parenting is the right way (this is like saying your baby knows exactly what he or she needs and that’s a bit ridiculous when you think of it. Just like all of us, if we are in a dysregulated state – we can’t think straight. There isn’t something magic that a baby has that makes them have clarity in a dysregulated state. In fact, they for sure don’t have this because there brain and neuropathways are still being made in fact, they are identifying which neuropathways are most helpful because they need to trim some since they have so many connections and growth happening in their brain when they’re infants. I also don’t agree – and would say it’s downright damaging to create a secure attachment in most children to use in a manner where the program is absolutely followed rigidly. Helping your infant develop sleep patterns is part of helping them have a regulated nervous system. So be thinking – how can you clear things off your plate to be a bit more sleep deprived during this time or how can you focus on replenishment so you’re getting filled? I know for me – it was really hard with my oldest. But realizing that getting outside, having a meal plan, and napping when she napped so that I had a messier house was really helpful for me to navigate the sleep deprivation.
I hope this was helpful for those of you parents or grandparents navigating this. Remember to give yourself so much compassion and grace. It is such a journey – Creating space for people for some of us can be hard. I wasn’t a good enough person when I first had kids – they shaped me, changed my character for good. So good to be with you. Subscribe where you listen to podcasts and A great way to replenish your soul is to sign up for my newsletter – comes out twice a month. You can find me over at drkimber.net. Until next time. Be well.