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 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 nights 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 paediatric 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 3½-month-old son sleeps a full twelve hours, from 8 pm to 8 am.
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 promoted by Dr Richard Ferber – or any other branded method. And they claim that they never let their babies cry for long periods. In fact, most parents look a little queasy when I mention this.
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 babies learned to sleep long stretches all by themselves. Stéphanie, 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 3 am feed 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 believes that 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 3 am. 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 over coffee one day 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 paediatrician in Paris who specializes in sleep. The book is baffling. I’m used to the straightforward self-help style of English-language 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 the “pensées 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, so called 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 sleep. I just want her to sleep. But 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’s a mother got 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 US to visit family and friends, and also to get a hands-on feel for one corner of Anglophone parenting. For part of the trip I stay in Tribeca, the neighbourhood in lower Manhattan where industrial buildings have been converted into smart loft apartments. I hang out at a local playground, chatting with the other mothers there.
I thought I knew my parenting literature. But these women make it clear that I’m an amateur. 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 quickly corrects me.
‘I don’t like that term, because who’s not attached to their child?’ she snaps.
When talk turns to how their kids sleep, I expect these women to cite lots of theories but then to complain that their one-year-olds wake 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 take their kids to a local paediatrician called 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 him. When I walk into ‘Michel’s’ 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, doe-like eyes and a deep tan. He wears his designer shirts untucked, with sandals and Bermuda shorts. Despite two decades in the US, he has hung on to a charming French accent and parlance (‘When I give my advices to parents …’). He’s done for the day, so he sugg
ests 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 neighbourhood doctor (he greets a dozen passers-by by name as we sip our beers). His practice, Tribeca Paediatrics, 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. But 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 fruit 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 parent’s 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 a sleep strategy, 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 advice 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 that 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 breastfed. 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 also normal for them to cry a bit when they’re first learning to connect these cycles. If parents automatically interpret this cry as a demand for food or a sign of distress, and rush in to soothe the baby, he’ll 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 usually can’t connect sleep cycles on their own. But from about two or three months they often 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 asleep on his own even once, he’ll find it easier to do it again the next time. (Adults wake up between sleep cycles too, but we typically don’t remember this because we’ve learned to plunge right into the next one.)
Cohen says that sometimes babies do need to be fed or picked up at night. 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.
This idea isn’t entirely new to me. It sounds familiar from some of my English-language 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 has ever pointed it out to me as the one crucial 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 they do the Pause in the baby’s first two months, their babies can learn to fall back asleep on their own. That means parents don’t have 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 results-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. But Cohen says he eventually convinces 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 asleep between sleep cycles or whether something else was bothering them: hunger, a dirty nappy, or just anxiety.
Alexandra is 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 inter rogation, common sense tells us to listen to the question,’ says an article on doctissimo.fr, a popular French website. ‘It’s exactly the same thing with a crying baby: the first thing to do is to listen to him.’
I notice that once you get past the philosophical sections, the authors of Sleep, Dreams and the Child write that intervening in 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 businesswoman in Miami whose son fed every two hours for six months, hasn’t just been handed a baby with weird sleep needs. Much more likely, she has unwittingly taught the baby to need a feed at the end of every two-hour sleep cycle. Alison thought she was merely catering to her son’s demands. In fact, despite the best intentions, she was creating those demands. What seems like an act of maternal devotion and self-sacrifice starts to seem like a giant misunderstanding.
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 per cent to 60 per cent of his sleep is sommeil agité – agit
ated 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 mentions the Pause right away. ‘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.’
French parents don’t just know about the Pause. They know why they’re doing it. Once I get them 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 ‘observed’ their babies, they were trying to train themselves to recognize these stages.
When I talk to Anglophone 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.
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 assumption. 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 French women, they say it’s impossible – both for the child and for his mother.
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