My English-speaking friends tend to view their kids as having unique sleep needs, which they just have to accommodate. I’m walking around Paris with a British friend of mine one day when her toddler son climbs into her arms, reaches under her shirt to clutch her breast, then falls asleep. My friend is clearly embarrassed that I’ve witnessed this ritual, but she whispers that it’s the only way he can nap. She carries him around in this position for the next forty-five minutes.
Simon and I had of course chosen a sleep strategy. Ours was premised on the idea that it’s critical to keep a baby awake after she feeds. Once Bean is born, we go to enormous effort to do this. As far as I can tell, it has no effect.
Eventually, we ditch this theory and try other ones. We keep Bean in the daylight all day and in the dark at night. We bathe her at the same time each evening and try to stretch out the time between her feeds. For a few days I eat almost nothing but crackers and Brie, after someone tells me that fatty food will thicken my breast milk. A New Yorker who stops by says she read that we should make loud whooshing sounds to mimic the sounds in the womb. We whoosh obediently for hours.
Nothing seems to make a difference. At three months old, Bean still wakes up several times a night. We have a long ritua S a ">Nl in which I nurse her back to sleep, then hold her for fifteen more minutes so that she doesn’t wake up again when I put her in her bassinet. Simon’s forward-looking view of the world suddenly seems like a curse: he’s thrown into a nightly depression, convinced that this is going to last forever. Whereas my myopia suddenly looks like a stroke of evolutionary brilliance. I don’t think about whether this will last six more months (though it will); I just live night to night.
What’s also consoling is that this is all to be expected. Parents of infants aren’t supposed to get any sleep. Almost all the American and British parents I know say that their kids began sleeping through the night at eight or nine months, or much later. “It was really early,” a friend of Simon’s from Vermont says, consulting with his wife about when their son’s three A.M. wake-ups stopped. “What was it, at one year old?” Kristin, a British lawyer in Paris, tells me that her sixteen-month-old sleeps through the night, then adds: “Well, when I say ‘sleeps through the night,’ she gets up twice. But each time, only for five minutes.”
I take comfort in hearing about parents who have it worse than we do. They’re easy to find. My cousin, who co-sleeps with her ten-month-old, hasn’t gone back to her teaching job, in part because she’s up feeding the baby much of the night. I frequently phone up to ask, “How’s he sleeping?”
The worst story I hear comes from Alison, a friend of a friend in Washington, D.C., whose son is seven months old. Alison tells me that for the first six months of her son’s life, she nursed him every two hours around the clock. At seven months old, he began sleeping four-hour stretches. Alison—a marketing expert with an Ivy League degree—shrugs off her exhaustion and the fact that her career is on pause. She feels that she has no choice but to cater to her baby’s punishing, peculiar sleep schedule.
The alternative to all this night waking is supposedly “sleep training,” in which parents leave their babies alone to “cry it out.” I read up on this, too. It seems to be for babies who are at least six or seven months old. Alison tells me that she tried this one night, but gave up because it felt cruel. Online discussions about sleep training quickly devolve into brawls, in which opponents claim the practice is at best selfish and at worst abusive. “Sleep training disgusts me,” one mother posts on babble.com. Another writes: “If you want to sleep through the night—don’t have babies. Adopt a three-year-old or something.”
Although sleep training sounds awful, Simon and I are theoretically in favor of it. But we’re under the impression that Bean is too young for something so militaristic. Like our Anglophone friends and family, we think Bean wakes up at night because she’s hungry or because she needs something from us or just because that’s what babies do. She’s very small. So we give in to her.
I talk to French parents about sleep, too. They’re neighbors, work acquaintances, and friends of friends. They all claim that their own kids began sleeping through the night much earlier. Samia says her daughter, who’s now two, started “doing her nights” at six weeks old; she wrote down the exact date. Stephanie, a skinny tax inspector who lives on our courtyard, looks ashamed when I ask when her s Ssk oteon, Nino, began “doing his nights.”
“Very late, very late!” Stephanie says. “He started doing his nights in November, so it was . . . four months old! For me it was very late.”
Some French sleep stories sound too good to be true. Alexandra, who works in a French day-care center and lives in a suburb of Paris, says that both of her daughters began sleeping through the night almost from birth. “Already in the maternity ward, they woke up for their bottles around six A.M.,” she says.
Many of these French babies are bottle-fed, or they drink a combination of breast milk and formula. But that doesn’t seem to make a crucial difference. The French breast-fed babies I meet do their nights early on, too. Some French moms tell me they quit breast-feeding when they went back to work, at about three months. But by that time their babies were already doing their nights.
At first I figure that I’m just meeting a few lucky French parents. But soon the evidence becomes overwhelming: having a baby who sleeps through the night early on seems to be the norm in France. Just as stories of terrible sleepers are easy to find among Americans, stories of spectacular sleepers are easy to find among the French. My neighbors suddenly seem less obnoxious. They weren’t baiting me; they actually believed that a two-month-old might already be “doing her nights.”
French parents don’t expect their babies to sleep well right after they’re born. But by the time these broken nights start to seem unbearable—usually after two or three months—they usually end. Parents talk about night wake-ups as a short-term problem, not a chronic one. Everyone I speak to takes for granted that babies can and probably will do their nights by about six months, and often much sooner. “Certain babies do their night at six weeks, others need four months to find their rhythm,” an article in Maman! magazine says. Le Sommeil, le rêve et l’enfant (Sleep, Dreams and the Child), a top-selling sleep guide, says that between three and six months, “He’s going to sleep complete nights, of eight or nine hours at a minimum. The parents will finally rediscover the pleasure of long uninterrupted nights.”
There are exceptions, of course. That’s why France has baby sleep books and pediatric sleep specialists. Some babies who do their nights at two months start waking again a few months later. I do hear about French kids who take a year to start doing their nights. But the truth is, over many years in France, I don’t meet them. Marion, the mother of a little girl who becomes one of Bean’s close friends, says her baby boy did his nights at six months. That’s the longest among any of my Parisian friends and acquaintances. Most of them are like Paul, another architect, who says that his three-and-a-half-month-old son sleeps a full twelve hours, from eight P.M. to eight A.M.
What’s maddening is that while French parents can tell you exactly when their kids began sleeping through the night, they can’t explain how this came about. They don’t mention sleep training, “Ferberizing”—a sleep technique developed by Dr. Richard Ferber—or any other branded method. A Sdedionnd they claim that they never let their babies cry for long periods. In fact, most French parents look a little queasy when I mention this practice.
Speaking to older parents isn’t much help either. A French publicist in her fifties—who goes to work in pencil skirts and stilettos—is shocked to learn that I have any baby sleep issues. “Can’t you give her something to sleep? You know, some medicine or something like that?” she asks. At the very least, she says, I should leave the baby with someone and recover at a spa for a week or two.
None of the younger French parents I meet either drug their kids to sleep or hide in a sauna. Most insist that their bab
ies learned to sleep long stretches all by themselves. Stephanie, the tax inspector, claims she didn’t have much to do with it. “I think it’s the child, he’s the one who decides,” she said.
I hear this same idea from Fanny, thirty-three, the publisher of a group of financial magazines. Fanny says that at around three months old, her son Antoine spontaneously dropped his three A.M. feedings and slept through the night.
“He decided to sleep,” Fanny explains. “I never forced anything. You give him food when he needs food. He just regulated it all by himself.”
Fanny’s husband, Vincent, who’s listening to our conversation, points out that three months is exactly when Fanny went back to work. Like other French parents I speak to, he says this timing isn’t a coincidence. He says Antoine understood that his mother needed to wake up early to go to the office. Vincent compares this understanding to the way ants communicate through chemical waves that pass between their antennae.
“We believe a lot in le feeling,” Vincent says, using the English word. “We guess that children understand things.”
French parents do offer a few sleep tips. They almost all say that in the early months, they kept their babies with them in the light during the day, even for naps, and put them to bed in the dark at night. And almost all say that, from birth, they carefully “observed” their babies, and then followed the babies’ own “rhythms.” French parents talk so much about rhythm, you’d think they were starting rock bands, not raising kids.
“From zero to six months, the best is to respect the rhythms of their sleep,” explains Alexandra, the mother whose babies slept through the night practically from birth.
I observe Bean, too, often at three A.M. So why is there no rhythm in our house? If sleeping through the night “just happens,” why hasn’t it just happened to us?
When I pour out my frustration to Gabrielle, one of my new French acquaintances, she recommends that I look at a book called L’enfant et son sommeil (The Child and His Sleep). She says the author, Hélène De Leersnyder, is a well-known pediatrician in Paris who specializes in sleep.
now="-1" face="Goudy Old Style MT Std">The book is baffling. I’m used to the straightforward, self-help style of American baby books. De Leersnyder’s book opens with a quotation from Marcel Proust, then launches into an ode to slumber.
“Sleep reveals the child and the life of the family,” De Leersnyder writes. “To go to bed and fall asleep, to separate himself from his parents for a few hours, the child must trust his body to keep him alive, even when he’s not in control of it. And he must be serene enough to approach the strangeness of pensée de la nuit (thoughts that come in the night).”
Sleep, Dreams and the Child also says that a baby can only sleep well once he accepts his own separateness. “The discovery of peaceful, long and serene nights, and an acceptance of solitude, is that not a sign that the child has recovered his inner peace, that he has moved beyond sorrow?”
Even the scientific sections of these books sound existential. What we call “rapid-eye-movement sleep” the French call sommeil paradoxal (paradoxical sleep) because the body is still but the mind is extremely active. “To learn to sleep, to learn to live, are these not synonyms?” De Leersnyder asks.
I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do with this information. I’m not looking for a meta-theory on how to think about Bean’s nights. I just want her to sleep. How can I figure out why French babies sleep so well if their own parents can’t explain it and their sleep books read like cryptic poetry? What does a mother have to do for a good night’s rest?
Oddly enough, my epiphany about the French sleep rules happens while I’m visiting New York. I’ve come to the United States to visit family and friends, and also to get a hands-on feel for one corner of American parenting. For part of the trip I stay in Tribeca, the neighborhood in lower Manhattan where industrial buildings have been converted into tony loft apartments. I hang out at a local playground, chatting with the other mothers.
I thought I knew my parenting literature. But these women make it clear that I’m just a dilettante. Not only have they read everything, they’ve also assembled their own parenting styles like eclectic designer outfits, following separate gurus for sleep, discipline, and food. When I naively mention “attachment parenting” to one Tribeca mother, she immediately corrects me.
“I don’t like that term, because who’s not attached to their child?” she says.
When talk turns to how their kids sleep, I expect these women to cite lots of theories, then to give the usual American complaints about one-year-olds waking up twice per night. But they don’t. Instead, they say that lots of babies in Tribeca do their nights à la française at about two months old. One mother, a photographer, mentions that she and many others bring their kids to a local pediatrician named Michel Cohen. She pronounces his first name “me-shell,” like the Beatles’ song.
“Is he French?” I venture.
“Yeah,” she says.
“French from France?” I ask.
“French from France,” she says.
I immediately make an appointment to meet Cohen. When I walk into his waiting room, there’s no doubt that I’m in Tribeca and not in Paris. There’s an Eames lounge chair, retro seventies wallpaper, and a lesbian mother in a fedora. A receptionist in a black tank top is calling out the names of the next patients: “Ella? Benjamin?”
When Cohen comes out, I immediately see why he’s such a hit with mothers. He has tousled brown hair, doelike eyes, and a deep tan. He wears his designer shirts untucked, with sandals and Bermuda shorts. Despite two decades in the United States, he has hung onto a charming French accent and parlance (“When I give my advices to parents . . .”). He’s done for the day, so he suggests that we sit outside at a local café. I readily agree.
Cohen clearly loves America, in part because America venerates its mavericks and entrepreneurs. In the land of managed care, he’s fashioned himself into a neighborhood doctor. (He greets a dozen passersby by name as we sip our beers.) His practice, Tribeca Pediatrics, has expanded to five locations. And he’s published a pithy parenting book called The New Basics with his picture on the cover.
Cohen is reluctant to credit France for the innovations he’s brought to lower Manhattan. He left France in the late 1980s and remembers it as a country where newborn babies were left to cry it out in the hospital. Even now, he says, “You can’t go to a park without seeing a kid take a beating.” (Perhaps this used to be true. However, in the scores of hours I’ve clocked in Parisian parks recently, I witnessed a spanking only once.)
But some of Cohen’s “advices” are exactly what today’s Parisian parents do. Like the French, he starts babies off on vegetables and fruits rather than bland cereals. He’s not obsessed with allergies. He talks about “rhythm” and teaching kids to handle frustration. He values calm. And he gives real weight to the parents’ own quality of life, not just to the child’s welfare.
So how does Cohen get the babies of Tribeca to do their nights?
“My first intervention is to say, when your baby is born, just don’t jump on your kid at night,” Cohen says. “Give your baby a chance to self-soothe, don’t automatically respond, even from birth.”
Maybe it’s the beer (or Cohen’s doe eyes), but I get a little jolt when he says this. I realize that I’ve seen French mothers and nannies pausing exactly this little bit before tending to their babies during the day. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was deliberate or that it was at all significant. In fact, it had bothered me. I didn’t think that you were supposed to make babies wait. Could this explain why French babies do their nights so early on, supposedly with few tears?
Cohen’s advic Shen wait. Coe to pause a little bit does seem like a natural extension of “observing” a baby. A mother isn’t strictly “observing” if she jumps up and holds the baby the moment he cries.
For Cohen, this pause—I’m tempted to call it “La Pause”—is crucial. He says t
hat using it very early on makes a big difference in how babies sleep. “The parents who were a little less responsive to late-night fussing always had kids who were good sleepers, while the jumpy folks had kids who would wake up repeatedly at night until it became unbearable,” he writes. Most of the babies Cohen sees are breast-fed. That doesn’t seem to make a difference.
One reason for pausing is that young babies make a lot of movements and noise while they’re sleeping. This is normal and fine. If parents rush in and pick the baby up every time he makes a peep, they’ll sometimes wake him up.
Another reason for pausing is that babies wake up between their sleep cycles, which last about two hours. It’s normal for them to cry a bit when they’re first learning to connect these cycles. If a parent automatically interprets this cry as a demand for food or a sign of distress and rushes in to soothe the baby, the baby will have a hard time learning to connect the cycles on his own. That is, he’ll need an adult to come in and soothe him back to sleep at the end of each cycle.
Newborns typically can’t connect sleep cycles on their own. But from about two or three months they usually can, if given a chance to learn how. And according to Cohen, connecting sleep cycles is like riding a bike: if a baby manages to fall back to sleep on his own even once, he’ll have an easier time doing it again the next time. (Adults wake up between their sleep cycles, too, but typically don’t remember this because they’ve learned to plunge right into the next one.)
Cohen says that sometimes babies do need to be fed or picked up. But unless we pause and observe them, we can’t be sure. “Of course, if [the baby’s] requests become more persistent, you’ll have to feed her,” Cohen writes. “I’m not saying let your baby wail.” What he’s saying is, just give your baby a chance to learn.
Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting Page 5