More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
have absorbed the idea that every choice we make could damage our kids.
“For me, the evenings are for the parents,”
“My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it’s adult time.”
“love at first sight” just means feeling immediately and extremely calm with someone.
I once read in a book about feng shui that having piles of stuff on the floor is a sign of depression.
women have been denying themselves since adolescence: cheesecake, milkshakes, macaroni and cheese, and Carvel ice-cream cake. I crave lemon on everything, and entire loaves of bread. Someone tells me that Jane Birkin, the British actress and model who built a career in Paris and married the legendary French singer Serge Gainsbourg, could never remember whether it was “un baguette” or “une baguette,” so she would just order “deux baguettes” (two baguettes). I can’t find the quote. But whenever I go to the bakery, I follow this strategy. Then—surely unlike the twiggy Birkin—I eat them both.
...more
memorizing the possible causes of colic.
“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.”
“From zero to six months, the best is to respect the rhythms of their sleep,”
L’enfant et son sommeil (The Child and His Sleep).
The New Basics
“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.”
Cohen’s advice to pause a little bit does seem like a natural extension of “observing” a baby.
“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,”
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.
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.
What he’s saying is, just give your baby a chance to learn.
According to Cohen, it’s only until the baby is four months old. After that, bad sleep habits are formed.
Most say they started doing The Pause when their babies were a few weeks old.
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.
“It’s exactly the same thing with a crying baby: the first thing to do is to listen to him.”
Alison wasn’t just catering to her son’s demands. Despite her best intentions, she was creating those demands.
“The error would be to interpret this as a call, and thus derail our baby’s sleep train by picking him up,”
“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.”
“If he wakes up completely, you pick him up, of course.”
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.
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.
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.
“The results of this study show that breast-feeding need not be associated with night waking.”
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.
baby is a person who’s capable of learning things
“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.”
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.
“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.”
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 she 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.
From the age of about four months, most French babies eat at regular times. As with sleep techniques, French parents see this as common sense, not as part of a parenting philosophy.
With slight variations, mothers tell me that their babies eat at about eight A.M., twelve P.M., four P.M., and eight P.M.
They don’t expect to get what they want instantly.
usually waited five minutes before picking her up when she cried (and, of course, Paulette did her nights at two and a half months).
“The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself,” she says of her son, Auguste.
when the child is busy playing, they leave
him alone.
“The mothers who really foul it up are the ones who are coming in when the child is busy and doesn’t want or need them, and are not there when the child is eager to have them. So becoming alert to that is absolutely critical.”
It’s simply that the child must learn, from a very young age, that he’s not alone in the world, and that there’s a time for everything.”
“If kids have the experience that when they’re told to wait, that if they scream, Mommy will come and the wait will be over, they will very quickly learn not to
wait. Non-waiting and screaming and carrying on and whining are being rewarded.”
inclined to view a child’s somewhat random
“I think [Frenchwomen] understand earlier than American women that kids can have demands and those demands are unrealistic,”
