French Children Don't Throw Food (7 page)

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
– agitated 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.

The French believe, as we do, that each baby is beautiful and special. But they also realize that some things about babies are just biological. Before we assume that our own children sleep like no others, we should probably think about science.

Armed with my revelation about the Pause, I decide to look at some of the scientific literature on babies and sleep. Much of what’s been written is published in English-language journals. What I find really surprises me: Anglophone parents are fighting the ‘baby sleep wars’, but Anglophone sleep researchers aren’t. They mostly agree about the best way to get kids to sleep. And their recommendations sound remarkably French.

Sleep researchers, like French parents, believe that, beginning very early on, parents should play an active role in teaching their babies to sleep well. They say it’s possible to begin teaching a healthy baby to sleep through the night when he’s just a few weeks old, without the baby ever ‘crying it out’.

A meta-study of dozens of peer-reviewed sleep papers
¹
concludes that what’s critical is something called ‘parent education/prevention’. That involves teaching pregnant women and parents of newborns about the science of sleep, and giving them a few basic sleep rules. Parents are supposed
to
start following these rules from their babies’ birth, or when their babies are just a few weeks old.

What are these rules? The authors of the meta-study point to a paper
²
in which pregnant women who planned to breast-feed were given a two-page handout. One instruction on the handout was not to hold, rock or nurse the baby to sleep in the evenings, to help him learn the difference between day and night. An additional instruction for week-old babies was that if he cried between midnight and 5 am, parents should re-swaddle, pat, change the nappy or walk the baby around, but that the mother should only offer the breast if the baby continued crying after that.

And from birth, mothers were instructed to distinguish between when their babies were crying and when they were just whimpering in their sleep. In other words, before picking up a crying baby, they should pause to make sure he’s awake. The researchers explained the scientific basis for these instructions. A ‘control group’ of breastfeeding mothers got no instructions.

The results are remarkable: from birth to three weeks old, babies in the treatment and control groups had nearly identical sleep patterns. But at four weeks old, 38 per cent of the treatment-group babies were sleeping through the night, versus 7 per cent of the control-group babies. At eight weeks, all of the treatment babies were sleeping through the night, compared to 23 per cent of the control babies. The authors’ conclusion is resounding: ‘The results of this study show that breastfeeding need not be associated with night waking.’

The Pause isn’t just some French folk wisdom. Neither is the
belief
that sleeping well, early on, is better for everyone. ‘In general, night wakings fall within the diagnostic category of behavioural insomnia of childhood,’ the meta-study explains.

It says there’s growing evidence that young children who don’t sleep enough, or who have disturbed sleep, can suffer from irritability, aggression, hyperactivity and poor impulse control, and can have trouble learning and remembering things. They’re more prone to accidents, their metabolic and immune functions are weakened, and their overall quality of life diminishes. And sleep problems that begin in infancy can persist for many years. In the study of breastfeeding mothers, the treatment-group infants were afterwards rated more secure, more predictable and less fussy.

The studies I read point out that when children sleep badly there’s spillover to the rest of the family, including maternal depression and lower overall family functioning. Conversely, when babies slept better, their parents reported that their marriages improved, and that they became better and less-stressed parents.

Of course, some French babies miss the four-month window for sleepteaching. When this happens, French experts usually recommend some version of crying it out.

Sleep researchers aren’t ambivalent about this either. The meta-study found that letting kids do controlled crying, either by going cold turkey (known by the unfortunate scientific term ‘extinction’) or in stages (‘graduated extinction’) both work extremely well, and usually succeed in just a few days.
‘The
biggest obstacle associated with extinction is lack of parental consistency,’ the study says.

Michel Cohen, the French doctor in Tribeca, recommends a rather extreme version of this. He says parents should make the baby feel cosy with his usual night-time bath and songs. Then they should put him in bed at a reasonable hour, preferably while he’s still awake. Then they should come back at 7 am.

In Paris, crying it out has a French twist. I start to realize this when I meet Laurence, a nanny from Normandy who’s working for a French family in Montparnasse. Laurence has been looking after babies for two decades. She tells me that before letting a baby do controlled crying it’s crucial to explain to him what you’re about to do.

Laurence walks me through this: ‘In the evening, you speak to him. You tell him that, if he wakes up once, you’re going to give him his dummy once. But after that, you’re not going to get up. It’s time to sleep. You’re not far away, and you’re going to come in and reassure him once. But not all night long.’

Laurence says 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. ‘If you don’t believe it, it’s not going to work,’ she says. ‘Me, I always think that the child is going to sleep better the next night. I always have hope, even if he wakes up three hours later. You have to believe.’

It does seem possible that French babies rise to meet their parents’ and carers’ expectations. Perhaps we all get the
sleepers
we expect, and the simple fact of believing that babies have a rhythm helps us to find it.