Yesterday, I wrote about how we found ourselves struggling with sleep with Cee. We knew it was time to make a change, and we knew this meant asking Cee to fall asleep on her own at night, without one of us sitting in her room with her. This was not exactly a new thing for her; until the last 6 months, she’d been falling asleep on her own since she was a baby. Still, given how things had gone lately, this was a big change for all of us.

I want to share how we approached this transition, but I don’t believe this is a magic formula by any means. I don’t think there are easy answers to parenting challenges like these, and what works well in one family might be a flop in another. I am proud of how we thought this through and put a plan into action, and it has seriously given our entire family (Cee included) more happiness around bedtime. Here’s what we did.

1. Husband and I did this together. All of this would have been much harder without his help. He is great at staying calm in stressful situations, which has a calming effect on Cee, and he is thoughtful and empathetic. We also recognize that our relationships with Cee are different. He’s the more fun parent; he’s more lenient with Cee in many ways but is also very good at setting rock solid boundaries when it is important. I’m still the parent that she turns to when she needs comfort. This often means a sweet hug or snuggle session, but it can also mean being on the receiving end of a bunch of messy emotions. Cee and I also tend to end up in power struggles more often, something I’m working on. Because of these differences, Husband was the parent who initially sat down to talk with Cee about bedtime changes. We also made sure he’d be around at bedtime for the first few days (he often works evenings and nights, so this isn’t always the case), so that we could take turns and he could take over if needed.

The importance of a strong parenting partnership has been shown in the research. A recent study from Doug Teti’s Penn State lab found that one of the greatest predictors of high maternal emotional availability at bedtime (discussed in my last post) was the quality of coparenting, even when dads weren’t directly involved with bedtime.

2. We told Cee about the change. We told Cee that it was time for her to start falling asleep on her own again and that we wouldn’t be sitting in her chair anymore. We didn’t dwell on trying to explain why, because we didn’t want her to feel like this change was a punishment for previous bedtime behavior. We didn’t emphasize that big girls go to sleep on their own, because that might have made her wonder if being a big girl was really such a great thing. We simply told her that she used to fall asleep on her own, and we were going to help her do that again.

3. We asked Cee to help us make a new plan for bedtime. “How do you think we can help you with bedtime now that we won’t be sitting in your chair?” Husband asked. She replied, “You can sit in my chair.” And so he offered some ideas. Would it help if we checked on her after we said goodnight? Yes, she thought that would help. We also talked about giving Cee a few minutes of solo reading time in her bed after we said goodnight. I thought this would help her enjoy time alone in her room before we turned out the lights. She said she liked that idea, too. Otherwise, her bedtime routine stayed the same: potty, pajamas, teeth, book, snuggle and “busy day,” and then 4 kisses (cheek, butterfly, nosey, cheek) goodnight. (The reading plan only lasted for a few days. On the third day, Cee said she was just ready to go to sleep. Still, I think having it as an option helped; it was novel and built a little positive excitement around saying goodnight.)

4. We took a couple of days to prepare for the change. On a Monday, we told Cee that we would sit in her chair for two more nights (and naps), and then it would be time for her to fall asleep on her own. Over these two days, we reminded Cee several times that this change was coming and talked through her new routine.

5. We followed through. On Wednesday morning, Cee was sent home from daycare with a fever. As soon as I felt her forehead, I thought to myself that we’d probably need to postpone our sleep changes. Sleep experts always advise not to make big changes when a child is sick, and I think this is generally really good advice. But as I settled myself in her chair at nap time that afternoon, Cee said sleepily from her bed, “Is tonight the night that I will fall asleep on my own?”

She was telling me that she was ready. “That’s right,” I said, “this is the last time I will sit in your chair.”

“Hmmm…” Cee replied, and then she fell asleep.

By the evening, her fever was down, and she was comfortable. She fell asleep on her own that night within minutes and with no protest. The next morning, we congratulated her on her restful night of sleep. She protested more on the 2nd and 3rd nights, but I think that first night gave us all a little more confidence. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend that you plan to make changes to your sleep routine when your child is sick, but in this case, Cee was clearly ready, and postponing it might have made the whole thing seem open to negotiation.

6. We normalized Cee’s emotions. Even before implementing our new bedtime routine, I talked with Cee about how she was feeling about it, hoping that I could help her process some of her emotions ahead of time.

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“I know it will feel different and that it might be hard for you at first, but I also know that you can do it,” I told her.

“Do you think you will cry when we aren’t sitting in your chair at night anymore?” I asked.

She thought about this and said she wasn’t sure. I let her know that it would be okay to cry, that we understood that she might be upset, but that it wouldn’t change the plan because this was normal and to be expected. When Cee did cry for a few minutes during that first week, Husband told her that she was doing a great job staying in her bed, that it was normal to be upset, and that he cried when he was frustrated and sad as a kid, too. That seemed to help Cee a lot.

7. We set firm boundaries, but we also stayed supportive. For a few nights, Cee got out of her bed and came out of her room after bedtime. We reminded her that she needed to stay in her bedroom, walked her back to bed, and told her that we’d check on her again in a few minutes. When she did this several times, I told her that if she was having a hard time staying in her room on her own, then I would have to hold her door shut to be sure that she did. This was the hard part, but I knew this had to be a firm boundary. Of course, she tested it, and when I held her door shut, she cried. I told her that I’d come check on her again when she was in her bed, and then I let her be mad about it for as long as she needed. After a few minutes, she climbed back into bed, and I came in to tuck her in again. I helped her wipe away her tears, acknowledged that she’d been really upset, and told her that it would feel good to rest now. This happened a few times with me, but it didn’t happen with Husband at all. We both stayed firm about the rule that Cee needed to stay in her room, and we followed through with checking on her, as promised. Ultimately, I think Cee feels safer having clear expectations about staying in her bed, and this allows her to shift gears towards accepting restful sleep rather than fighting it.

8. We kept it up. We went on vacation a week after making these changes (again something that sleep experts don’t recommend). Cee was doing great at home, but I worried about whether we would be able to keep our boundaries in a different place. But we carried on with this as the plan. We brought a night-light and Cee’s cozy travel tent so that we could set up a nice bedtime atmosphere. We told her we’d be in the next room and that we’d check on her while she fell asleep. And she did just great.

A consistent bedtime routine kept us on track, even while we traveled.

9. We created lots of opportunities for connection before, during, and after our change. I know that it is easier for Cee to cope with a change like this when she feels really secure in our relationship. Parenting educator Andrea Nair uses the term “attachment tank” to describe the strength of connection and attachment between a parent and child. This image is really helpful to me, because it recognizes that sometimes our tanks get low, and the answer to that is more connection, more one-on-one time together. I’ve been working on trying to find more moments of undivided attention with Cee throughout the day, but it also helps me to build this into routines. One that we’ve tried these last few weeks is a Pajama Walk. After Cee is ready for bed, with her pajamas on and teeth brushed, we take a little walk around the neighborhood or sometimes just down to the end of our longish driveway and back (a 10-minute adventure at Cee’s pace). This is a time for us to talk about our day, check to see if the wild blackberries are ripe yet, enjoy some fresh air, and wind down. When we’re walking together, the distractions melt away, and we can really listen to each other without time constraints or outside agendas. We haven’t pulled this off every night (sometimes, it’s just too late), but it’s really lovely when we do, and it sets the tone for an easy bedtime. (I can’t remember where I read about this idea – maybe here?)

After all of these changes, bedtime is going really well. The moments leading up to saying goodnight are sweeter, because we’re not bracing ourselves for a struggle. After the first few nights, Cee hasn’t protested falling asleep on her own. We still check on her every 5-10 minutes after we say goodnight, but she often falls asleep by the first or second check. Sometimes she lies in bed and talks or sings to herself for a while, and that’s fine. When I was sitting in her chair at night, I would often hush her in my impatience, but now she has the freedom to wind down in her own way, and I have the freedom to do something else during this time. She’s getting more sleep and seems to be better rested and more resilient during the day, and we’re seeing fewer meltdowns at bedtime. There will no doubt be more sleep challenges to come, but I have a renewed sense of confidence in Cee’s sleep and our family’s expectations around it.

Have you made big changes with sleep with your toddler or preschooler? How have you helped your child adapt to the change?

A recent study about the stress of getting family meals on the table has been getting lots of attention from both the media and moms. A Slate piece, “Let’s Stop Idealizing the Home-Cooked Family Dinner,” posted Wednesday, has already garnered 3.5K comments on the article itself and more than 26K Facebook shares. This has obviously struck a nerve. While feeding a family is a big and often stressful job, some perspective about why we do it and what matters most about family meals might be helpful to families feeling the mealtime crunch.

The study itself, titled “The Joy of Cooking?”, was published in Contexts, a publication of the American Sociological Association geared to be accessible to the general public. The paper itself is a really interesting read and freely available online.

Researchers in the sociology and anthropology departments at North Carolina State University conducted the study. This was a qualitative study, which means that the data came in the form of stories, generated from interviews with real people. From the paper:

“Over the past year and a half, our research team conducted in-depth interviews with 150 black, white, and Latina mothers from all walks of life. We also spent over 250 hours conducting ethnographic observations with 12 working-class and poor families. We observed them in their homes as they prepared and ate meals, and tagged along on trips to the grocery store and to their children’s check-ups. Sitting around the kitchen table and getting a feel for these women’s lives, we came to appreciate the complexities involved in feeding a family.”

These kinds of methods are common in sociology and anthropology research, and they allow researchers to understand the many complex variables that contribute to how people feel and why they feel that way. However, we have to be careful about interpreting these studies beyond the individual stories that they provide. For example, this study wasn’t a random sample of moms, and it can’t give us quantitative information like the percentage of moms who find cooking to be an unbearable chore versus rewarding or enjoyable. It doesn’t allow us to look at correlations between family income and nights of home-cooked meals per week, for example.

Here’s what it can tell us: Among the moms interviewed for the study, a common theme was that getting a home-cooked family meal on the table was stressful. The authors discuss the dichotomy of foodie standards for homegrown, home-cooked, preferably organic, meals, prepared with love and joy, and the realities faced by many families today. The moms interviewed in the study talked about how with both parents working long, irregular hours, there is simply no time to cook, much less sit down at the table at the same time. Others talked about the trade-offs between spending time cooking or spending time with their kids at the end of the day. Many noted that it was hard to please everyone with one meal, so they ended up sticking to tried-and-true, if boring, recipes rather than experimenting with new foods and flavors.

Family meals don’t have to look like this. Credit: National Cancer Institute, Public Domain.

Interestingly – though not surprising to me – poor moms in this study actually routinely cooked at home, because they recognized that it was the most cost-effective way to feed their families. That didn’t mean that cooking was joyful, but it was a necessary part of raising a family on a tight budget, even with barriers like not having reliable transportation, access to good food stores, or well-equipped kitchens.

 However, middle class moms cited financial barriers, too:

“To our surprise, many of the middle-class mothers we met also told us that money was a barrier to preparing healthy meals. Even though they often had household incomes of more than $100,000 a year, their membership in the middle-class was costly. While they did not experience food shortages, they were forced to make tradeoffs in order to save money—like buying less healthy processed food, or fewer organic items than they would like.”

Let’s face it: planning and preparing meals is hard work. It takes time, money, and effort, and doing it in the presence of children can make it more difficult. It may or may not be enjoyable, but it is definitely work and should be recognized as such. The Pinterest boards, food blogs, and gorgeous food magazines can be helpful inspiration, but they can also set us up for unreasonable expectations for family meals.

There is good evidence that family meals are important to kids. Eating regular meals as a family supports greater fruit and vegetable intake and displaces soda and fried foods. Not surprisingly, this results in better nutrition, and these same patterns can last at least into young adulthood. Research also shows that adolescents who eat family meals are protected from disordered eating, overweight, and substance abuse. There’s always debate about whether these association are because of the meal itself or the conditions that make family meals feasible, but there is evidence that family meals provide benefits to kids independent of other factors.

But let’s also consider how “family meal” is defined in the research. For example, in this paper, kids were asked, “On how many of the past 7 days was at least one of your parents in the room with you while you ate your evening meal?” There is nothing in that definition about meals made from scratch with all-organic ingredients. There isn’t anything in there about using real plates and forks or even the nutritional quality of the meal. All of those things might be desirable and might add more pleasure to a meal, but the most important thing about family meals is time spent together. If everything else is causing stress, then remember that as the first priority for family meals.

However, we do want to serve nutritious meals to our kids and support them in growing good eating habits, so let’s think about nutrition for a minute. Putting together a balanced meal means including all or most of the food groups. By offering this variety of foods, at least for most meals, you pretty much ensure that meals will be nutritionally adequate without having to fret much about individual nutrients. Your balanced meals may be elaborate and impressive, but they don’t need to be. Protein can be a scoop of peanut butter served next to apples, chickpeas from a can, or 3-minute scrambled eggs. The grain can be whole-wheat sandwich bread with butter. Vegetables can be the frozen variety, prepared in a minute in the microwave, then seasoned with a little butter and salt. (From a nutrition standpoint, these options are just as good as fresh. Also, conventionally grown produce is just as nutritious as organic.) These meals may not meet the standards of Martha Stewart or Michael Pollan, but they can still be nutritionally balanced, and their easy preparation may allow dinner to be more relaxing.

I enjoy cooking – to a certain extent – and I have the privilege of usually having the time and money to prepare the kinds of foods that I want for my family. Still, from my own qualitative research in the laboratory of my kitchen, I’ve observed a few things. First, there is zero correlation between the effort that went into the preparing the food and the quality of the interactions between children and parents at the table. Second, there is a high correlation between the complexity of the meal I’ve prepared and my stress level by the time I sit down at the table. For me, both of these observations are unique to cooking with and for young kids, and I expect they’ll get better as kids get older and can help in the kitchen and better appreciate good meals. In the meantime, though, I try to keep meal preparation simple and focus on enjoying food together.

Are family meals important in your house? Are they a source of stress? How do you pull them off?

P.S. – I’m sorry for my long and unintended absence from the blog. I’ve received several expert peer reviews on my book manuscript and have been working on finishing up edits – the book will soon be officially IN PRESS! We’ve also been doing summer things like swim lessons, camping, and refinishing the deck. The leaves are starting to turn, the fall college term is about to start, and we’ll be back in more regular routines in life and on the blog soon. Hope you all have had a great summer!

I received a review copy of a really cool book over the summer: Zero to Five: 70 Essential Parenting Tips Based on Science (and What I’ve Learned So Far) by Tracy Cutchlow. I loved the book and wanted to review it on my blog, and the publisher offered to give away 5 copies to Science of Mom readers! (If you’re curious about my policy on reviews and giveaways, check my About Me page.)

Author Tracy Cuthlow with her daughter, Geneva.

Zero to Five is a book of parenting advice starting with pregnancy and going up through age 5. Author Tracy Cutchlow is a former journalist at the Seattle Times and edited John Medina’s books Brain Rules and Brain Rules for Baby. Then she had a daughter, now 2, and was inspired to create a book that would bring together relevant, evidence-based parenting advice into an enjoyable and accessible format. I’d say she succeeded.

Each of the 70 parenting tips are explained in 2-4 page spreads summarizing the research in the area and accompanied by gorgeous candid photographs of children and parents. The tips are practical, and they’re explained simply, but they’re rooted in science.

The book is divided into 7 topics headings, listed below with examples of some of my favorite tips in parentheses:

• Prepare (Bolster your friendships; Expect conflict as a couple)
• Love (Create a feeling of safety; Comfort newborn with the familiar)
• Talk (Talk to your baby a ton; Read together; Teach sign language)
• Sleep, eat, and potty (Guard your sleep; Guard baby’s sleep, too; Let baby decide how much to eat)
• Play (Let baby touch that; Save the box; Make music with baby)
• Connect (Choose empathy first; Allow mistakes, discomfort, boredom)
• Discipline (Be firm but warm; Label intense emotions; Teach instead of punish)
• Move (Rock, jiggle, and swing; Keep moving)
• Slow down (Be still; Don’t bother to compare)

Some of these tips are obvious, like talking to your baby. But they’re also really important, and that’s one of the things I love about this book. I think Tracy did a great job of focusing the book’s content on what is really important about how to care for babies and children. And some of these tips are things that I didn’t know or wouldn’t have thought about when I was newly pregnant, preparing to give birth to Cee. I was busy acquiring what I thought was essential baby gear (how many hours did I waste on Craigslist?), taking birthing classes, and ticking tasks off my to-do list. The advice to “bolster your friendships” (because you’ll need support) and to “expect conflict as a couple” (it happens to everyone) might have been very helpful in preparing to be a new mom, but nobody told me these things.

There are a few other things that I love about this book. I love that it is evidence-based. The book doesn’t include citations, and I know that some of my readers will miss that. But on the topics where I know the research really well, I can tell that Tracy stayed true to the science. I love that it emphasizes authoritative, respectful, and gentle parenting (again, supported by science) and provides some good examples from Tracy’s own experiences with parenthood. I also love how easy it is to flip through the book and just read one or two pages at a time, taking away a clear and simple message to try to implement as a parent.

One of the best and most unique things about this book is the photographs, taken by Betty Udesen. The photos are simply gorgeous. Now, I wouldn’t head to the bookstore thinking that I really needed a new parenting book with awesome photos, and the text of this book would make it great on its own. But the photos really add something special. They’re of real families who agreed to let the photographer into their lives to capture their everyday moments, and they feel very intimate. They aren’t generic stock photos. They each tell a story, and if you’re a parent, you recognize the chaos, mess, and beauty of your own life in these photos. The photos make the book a true pleasure to pick up and flip through, and your kids will enjoy looking at them too!

I’m really happy to recommend Zero to Five to all parents. It would make a fabulous baby shower gift, but I think it will still feel relevant even if your babies are a little older. I’m finding the baby sections to be good review in preparing for our second baby, and today I flipped through the pages on discipline again after Cee threw a tantrum that stretched me thin.

OK, so onto the giveaway. The publisher of Zero to Five, Pear Press, has offered to give 5 copies of the book to Science of Mom readers. Enter the giveaway by leaving a comment below with one of your own favorite parenting tips – from pregnancy on up. What wise advice do you give to new parents or do you wish you’d received as a parent-to-be?

One entry per person, please, and unfortunately, we can only ship to addresses within the U.S. I’ll close the giveaway in a week – next Monday (9/29/14) at 9 AM EST – and choose 5 winners at random. (I always use a random number generator to pick from the ordered comments.)

First, a baby update: no baby yet! I’m past 38 weeks now and definitely getting excited for baby’s arrival. I still feel like I have a lot of things on my to-do list that I’d ideally like to get done before I go into labor, but I’ve also entered a stage of acceptance that, ready or not, when the baby arrives, we’ll carry on with life even if the fridge isn’t fully stocked and the floors haven’t been mopped. However, one thing on my to-do list is this post, because I wanted to share with you a new parenting book that came at just the right time for me, and I think you’ll find it particularly helpful in the midst of the holiday craziness.

The book is Parenting in the Present Moment: How to Stay Focused on What Really Matters by Dr. Carla Naumburg, published in October by Parallax Press. I received a free review copy of the book, but as always, I only review books that I love and can whole-heartedly recommend (more on my review policy here). I have loved this book so much that I’ve already purchased several more copies to pass on to friends.

The last month or so has been really busy with copy-editing my own book and finishing up the college teaching term. A 3-week-long cold hit my late pregnancy body like a freight train in the middle of that, and I felt like I was barely getting to the most urgent tasks each day while my to-do list piled up around me. But every night, I would read a few pages of Parenting in the Present Moment before crashing into sleep, and I would feel like I could accept how that day had gone and reset my intention for parenting and for caring for myself for the next day.

First of all, I absolutely love the cover of this book. It speaks perfectly to the content of the book and one of the greatest challenges of parenting: maintaining balance even while your agile offspring challenge it. As a side note, something similar seems to happen to me almost daily: I squat down to pick something up, in a graceful way that only a 38-week-pregnant woman can manage, and my daughter comes up behind me to give me a surprise “hug,” which sends me teetering off balance.

Just seeing that photo makes me smile and feel motherhood has always been this way, regardless of the species, and I’m doing okay.

This book is about parenting with mindfulness. What is mindfulness? Naumburg explains, “Mindfulness is about making a choice, over and over again, to pay attention to whatever is happening in the present moment without judging it or wishing it was different.” Really paying attention to what is happening with our kids and in our own minds can help us come back to the present moment and respond intentionally and effectively, with kindness and compassion for our children and ourselves.

You might think that mindfulness is a strange topic for a parenting blog that focuses on science, but there are decades of studies documenting the benefits of mindfulness for the health of our minds, bodies, and relationships. The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, summarizes the benefits of mindfulness here, and Maria Konnikova wrote about them in a piece in the New Yorker earlier this year (with her links to studies included):

“We now know, for instance, that even brief mindfulness practice—typically, a kind of meditation that focuses on a particular aspect of the present moment, like your breath, your body, or a particular sensation—has a substantial positive effect on mental well-being and memory. It also appears to physically improve the brain, strengthening certain neural structures that are tied to heightened attention and focus, and bolstering connectivity in the brain’s default mode network, which is linked to self-monitoring and control.”

One of the first, and to me, most important, lessons of Parenting in the Present Moment is that parenting is a practice. Mindfulness isn’t something that you achieve and then carry with you for the rest of your life, like a badge of honor or a graduate degree. It takes work every day, but that also means that there is always room to try again or to try in another way. Over time, pieces of it get easier, and new challenges emerge, but we have to keep approaching it whole-heartedly, with as much attention and kindness as we can. Because we’re being mindful – paying attention – we can notice our mistakes. But because we are approaching parenting as a practice, we don’t need to beat ourselves up over our failures (which are inevitable). Rather, we can thoughtfully modify our approach in a way that suits our kids and us.

I can relate to this concept because I’ve practiced yoga for 15 years now, but I don’t consider myself an expert in yoga any more than I would ever call myself an expert in parenting. I’ve learned to always come to the yoga mat with humility and acceptance, with an intention to pay attention to my body and breath in each moment rather than to attaining some idealized form of a pose or unwavering balance or superior grace when compared with the person practicing next to me. (These lessons, by the way, are even more apparent when practicing yoga at 38 weeks pregnant.) Over the last few years, I’ve come to see writing as a practice as well – one that requires pages and pages of clumsy attempts and never anything approaching perfection. But it is my practice, mine to build, mine to learn from, and mine to share. So it is with parenting, too.

In Parenting in the Present Moment, Naumburg emphasizes that the practice of parenting is really hard work. “It’s about immersing ourselves neck-deep into the mud and mess, the tears and confusion, the anxiety and frustration, as well as intense joy and love,” she writes. As messy as it can be, that immersion is necessary if we are really going to understand our kids and figure out how to parent mindfully. But we also have to appreciate how difficult this work is and to give ourselves time to recover from it and reflect on how things are going:

“If we want to stay connected to our children in any given moment and over the long term, we need to learn to pay as much attention to ourselves as we do to them so we can know when we have maxed out our bodies and souls. It’s about having the insight, awareness, and discernment to know, and accept, that we need to step off the field and replenish ourselves on a regular basis so we don’t end up getting sick or injured, or inadvertently hurting ourselves or someone else.”

I’ve found so much wisdom in this book, but Naumburg does a wonderful job of imparting it not as some kind of guru or expert but as a humble parent. She holds a PhD in Clinical Social Work and is clearly well-studied and practiced in mindfulness, but she’s in the trenches raising two young kids with the rest of us. She tells us about her mistakes and assures us that she continues to make them. Parenting is a practice for her, too, and that makes her an authentic and friendly guide.

The core chapters in Parenting in the Present Moment focus on different components of parenting mindfully: staying connected, staying grounded, and staying present. Each includes specific examples, ranging from infancy to the teen years. Each also includes simple exercises or practices that can help us in the moments when we most need a little mindfulness. For staying grounded, for example, Naumburg recommends this sequence:

STOP:

Stop what you are doing.

Take a breath (or a few, and deep ones!)

Observe (your thoughts, feelings, physiology, and needs, and then observe those around you for the same)

Proceed (thoughtfully, based on your observations, rather than reacting to the initial moment of crisis)

Nearly any difficult thing we do, parenting included, could benefit from that sequence. When we do it, we are also modeling how to stay grounded to our kids.

I’m learning that mindful parenting is all about acceptance, and that’s something that I know I’m going to have to practice in this coming transition of a new baby. I’m going to have to accept all of the ways that my life will change, acknowledging that many will be temporary (such as the lack of sleep) but also that nothing will ever be the same. I’m going to have to acknowledge and accept, with as little judgment as possible, when Cee inevitably struggles with this transition, as I’m sure she will in some way. I’m going to have to work on staying connected with her as I build connections with and care for this new member of our family. And I’m going to have to work on staying grounded and finding ways to care for myself even while my family responsibilities increase. I’m glad to have Parenting in the Present Moment as a guide during this time.

Parallax Press is offering a giveaway of three copies of Parenting in the Present Moment to Science of Mom readers. To enter the giveaway, leave a comment below with one way – big or small – that you manage to stay connected, grounded, or present with your children or with yourself. I’d especially love to hear your experiences with this around the birth of a new baby! I’ll close the giveaway in a week, on December 24, 2014.

And in case I don’t get another chance to say it, warm wishes to you all this holiday season. Thanks for sticking with me through what has been a tough, rough, and beautiful year. Lots of love to you and your families.

I think it’s time to officially introduce you to our new baby! If you follow me on Facebook, you know that our baby boy was born just before Christmas, and if you’re not on Facebook, you’ve probably guessed as much. Here on the blog, I’ll call him BabyM until I come up with a better blog name. (I have the foresight to realize that BabyM won’t be an appropriate name forever, and nor will the other things I call him now, like Milk Man, Sweet Cheeks, or Little Guy. I’m already terrified of how quickly he will grow!)

BabyM’s birthday went well. I started having contractions at midnight, went to the hospital around 4:30 AM, and we had our healthy baby boy just after 9 AM. My labor with Cee lasted 30 hours, and although I don’t think I would do anything differently if I could, it was a marathon that included an epidural, Pitocin, and more than two hours of pushing. BabyM, on the other hand, came so fast that by the time the pain got really intense, there wasn’t time to think about an epidural. I didn’t have my heart set on anything about this labor and delivery – after wanting this baby for so long, I truly just wanted a healthy baby. Still, it was cool to have the experience of an unmedicated birth. I had fabulous support from the nurses, my OB, and my husband and mom, who were both there for BabyM’s birth.

I have to say that the last month has been pretty blissful. I say this with a bit of trepidation, because I know that bliss isn’t always the #1 word used to describe the postpartum period, at least if we’re being honest. But I feel lucky to have this baby, and I am claiming this bliss right now. I love holding BabyM, nursing him, and even, or maybe especially, changing his diaper. He’s most alert, and amazingly, calm during diaper changes. He can be a very quiet, calm little soul, but he can also turn on a dime. His cries can sound angry, arms punching the air, face red and broken into a sweat. He did cry for the better part of three hours tonight, so while I do feel incredibly happy right now, life is not all roses.

To be honest, there’s one big reason why I’ve enjoyed the postpartum period so much this time around. I’ve had incredible support. My mom stayed with us for three weeks, and then my mother-in-law came for another three. Both have been a huge help with Cee, BabyM, meals, and generally keeping things afloat. If there are mothers in your life who can fill this role, I highly recommend this approach. They are the reason why I’ve been getting enough sleep every night, why Cee has felt lots of extra love during this time, and why I’ve been able to enjoy BabyM without worrying about what’s for dinner. What a gift this has been. It will be a second adjustment period when we’re on our own, but at least now we’ve found some semi-predictable rhythms.

Cee loves her little brother, although she still mentions occasionally that she wishes he was a girl. And once, she said she wished she could be the only kid again. Tonight at bedtime, we talked about how we will handle her bedtime after grandma has gone home and I’m on my own (my husband often works nights) and BabyM is screaming. Cee’s first suggestion was that dad could just not work. So there are a few things to work through, but Cee also comes running to help with nearly every diaper change. And BabyM loves her already. His eyes get extra-alert, and he almost always turns towards her voice when she talks to him.

I mean, seriously, the cuteness!

I’ll stop gushing now and go to bed, but I hope to write more soon. As always, I have lots of blog topics swirling in my head, including some about BabyM, but too little time to sit down at the computer. I hope to fit more writing into my day soon as we start to hit more of a stride with naps (fingers crossed!).

Measles is back. The outbreak of this highly contagious viral illness that started at Disneyland in December has spread across the country and shows no signs of slowing. As of February 6, the CDC reported 121 cases in 17 states in this year alone, most linked to Disneyland. In 2014, we had 644 cases of measles in the U.S. This is a striking increase compared to the last 15 years, when we usually saw less than 100 cases in an entire year.

I’m sorry that so many people have been sickened in this outbreak and hope that it is reined in soon. This is no easy task given our mobile society and the fact that we like to congregate in places like Disneyland, schools, doctors’ offices, hospitals, airplanes, and shopping malls. Add to that the pockets of unvaccinated people where measles can easily spread, and we have a recipe for still more outbreaks until we can improve vaccination rates. In this situation, I particularly feel for those who can’t be vaccinated. Babies under 12 months of age and people who are too immunocompromised to get the MMR vaccine, like cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, are counting on the rest of us to get vaccinated and reduce the spread of this disease. Right now, we’re letting them down.

One positive outcome to this outbreak is that it has sparked lots more conversation about vaccines. It inspired me to be more public about proudly stating that our family is fully vaccinated. And I wrote an op-ed piece for my local paper, the Register-Guard, about the risk of measles in our community, given the low vaccination rates in our schools.

(Our baby, of course, has so far only received the newborn Hepatitis B dose. He won’t receive the MMR shot, which includes the measles vaccine, until 12 months of age.)

I spent a lot of time researching vaccines last year for my book. The result is an in-depth look at vaccine development, risks and benefits, and safety testing and monitoring. I also cover some specific vaccine concerns, like whether or not we give too many too soon (we don’t) and if we should be worried about aluminum in vaccines (we shouldn’t). (I don’t just tell you these things, though; I break down the science for you.) I read hundreds of papers about childhood vaccines, talked with researchers, and felt more confident than ever about vaccinating my kids on the recommended schedule.

There was one other bit of vaccine research that may have been the most meaningful to me: I flew to Florida to interview my grandmother, now 90 years old. She raised seven children before most of today’s vaccines existed. She was a mother during the 1952 polio epidemic that killed 3,145 and paralyzed more than 21,000 in the U.S. She was having her babies before a vaccine for rubella was available. That disease caused 11,250 miscarriages, 2,100 stillbirths, and 20,000 children to be born with birth defects in a 1964-1965 outbreak in the U.S.

My grandmother also nursed her children through the measles. Before the vaccine, nearly every child suffered through a case of measles at some point in childhood. During the current measles outbreak, I’ve seen some comments downplaying the seriousness of this disease. After all, most kids did survive measles without long-term consequences. However, many didn’t. Among those who didn’t survive was my grandparent’s second child, Frankie. In 1956, at the age of 6, he died of encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, a complication of measles.

My dad was the oldest of my grandparents’ children and the first of 3 boys: Richard, Frankie, and Larry. When the boys were little, the family lived in a faculty housing unit at Princeton, where my grandfather was an English professor. The families that shared the building were a tight-knit community. They built a playground together and parents took turns keeping an eye on the kids. “It was such a marvelous place to grow up,” my grandmother told me. “There were a whole bunch of kids, and you knew every single parent. Had conferences about your children and so on.”

Three brothers (from left to right): Richard, Frankie, and Larry Green, circa 1953 or 1954, in Princeton, New Jersey. Frankie died in 1956, at age 6, of encephalitis caused by measles. Photo by Margaret Green, used with permission.

In May of 1956, all three boys came down with measles. My grandmother remembers neighbors remarking that they were lucky to get it all at once, although this wasn’t surprising given that measles is one of the most contagious pathogens on earth. Those infected are contagious for several days before the characteristic rash appears, and the virus can survive in respiratory droplets, suspended in the air, for two days.

The first symptoms of measles are like those of a bad common cold: cough, runny nose, achiness, fever, and often an eye infection. The itchy rash appears several days later and usually lasts for about a week. Despite the discomfort, my grandmother told me, “It was also a special time, when the boys got lots of ice cream and presents and stayed home and were amused and had books read to them. And the three of them were together.”

After about a week, the boys’ rashes started disappearing, and they appeared to be getting better. My grandfather had just been offered a position at Johns Hopkins, and he drove to Baltimore to look for a place for the family to live, while my grandmother stayed home to care for the kids. She remembers the night when Frankie’s case of the measles took a surprising turn for the worse:

“I settled all three boys down to bed. These were sick boys, but they were all getting better. They were recuperating quickly, and they were all on their way to being completely well. I got Frankie settled and got him his glass of water and then went to bed myself. But as I was getting ready for bed, I heard this kind of funny noise and went in just to check one last time. He was draped halfway out of the bed, which was strange, and I rushed over to pick him up and get him settled and realized that he was unconscious.”

My grandmother and a neighbor bundled Frankie up and took him to the hospital, but he never woke up again. As my grandmother remembers it, he was in the hospital with a coma for about a week before he died. She was at home caring for the rest of her children when she received a call from the hospital telling her she had better come in. By the time she arrived, Frankie had already died. The pediatrician who broke the news to her took my grandmother to her own home and put her in her guest bed to let the news sink in before she went home to tell Frankie’s brothers that he was gone. (I think that my grandfather must have come home by then, but my grandmother doesn’t recall exactly when. She does have a vivid memory of looking out the window, seeing the beat-up top of his car, and feeling a wave of relief that he was home.)

Frankie died of encephalitis, one of the cruelest complications of measles, estimated to occur in about 1 in 1,000 measles cases. Even today, with the best medical care, about 15% of those with measles encephalitis will die, and of the rest, 25% have lasting neurological damage. Children’s book author Roald Dahl described his daughter Olivia’s death from measles, also due to encephalitis that developed when she seemed to be getting better.

Frankie’s death was heartbreaking, and it came as a shock to my grandparents, but it wasn’t unusual. Before the introduction of the first measles vaccine in 1963, three to four million people caught the virus each year in the U.S. Of these, 48,000 people were hospitalized; 7,000 had seizures; 2,000 suffered permanent deafness or brain damage; and 500 died. One in 20 caught pneumonia and one in 10 got an ear infection. The incidence of complications due to the measles remains high today, too. In the current outbreak, about 25% of patients have been hospitalized.

These are not just numbers and statistics. Frankie was a spirited little blonde boy with a wide smile, and the measles stole his life, ending it at age 6. Just like my children and your children, his parents loved him beyond measure.

I asked my grandmother to tell me more about Frankie, and she reached back 60 years and remembered the time that Frankie and my dad, in kindergarten and first grade at the time, played hooky from school and wandered around Princeton town all day. She said they got in “mild trouble” for this mischief. She remembered how desperately Frankie wanted a pair of toy six-shooter rifles the Christmas before he died. (He got them, though my grandmother first tried to convince him to use a couple of sticks instead.) And she told me this simple memory of Frankie at a small amusement park in Maine:

“And he got on an ordinary merry-go-round, and it came around so he saw us again, and he turned around and just beamed, as though he was saying, “Isn’t this the neatest thing?!” But you know, I can still see his face, and that happy, happy smile.”

The development of the measles vaccine was an incredible public health achievement. It’s very effective, inducing immunity to the measles in 99% of people who receive the recommended two doses. After its release, the burden of this disease dropped dramatically.

Measles cases reported in the United States between 1950 and 2010. The measles vaccine was first licensed in 1963. Source: National Center for Health Statistics, Health, United States, 2012: With Special Feature on Emergency Care (NCHS, 2012); Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, MMWR Summary of Notifiable Diseases, United States, 1993 (CDC, 1994).

The story is similar for other vaccine-preventable diseases (see graphs for each here). The introduction of each vaccine has resulted in a huge drop in disease incidence, along with all of the pain and suffering, health care costs, and lives that came with them. There’s a boatload of scientific evidence to support the safety and efficacy of every vaccine on the recommended CDC schedule, and I appreciate that science. Still, I think that one of the most compelling cases for vaccines comes from history. Vaccines have been so successful that most of our generation gets to live in the ignorant bliss of never having seen these diseases, much less in our own children.

We live in a privileged time. Just a few generations ago, our grandparents had no choice but to nurse their children through painful diseases, knowing there was a chance of serious complication and even death. Worldwide, measles still killed 122,00 people in 2012, mostly in parts of the world with limited access to the vaccine.

But here in the U.S., our generation of parents has a choice. We get to choose whether or not to vaccinate our children. And oh, how we treasure that choice. The trouble is that we’re so far removed from the pre-vaccine era that we can make the mistake of ignoring the stories of our grandparents and great-grandparents, stories of kids like Frankie. And we can make the mistake of believing that we make our choices in a vacuum. When we’re talking about infectious diseases, nothing can be further from the truth. Sure, a few can choose not to vaccinate, in addition to those who have a medical reason not to, so long as the rest of us do our part to maintain herd immunity. However, when too many make that choice, the disease regains its strength, and its first victims are often the most vulnerable.

I wrote most of this post while holding my 7-week-old baby boy. He is fighting his first cold right now. It’s just your run-of-the-mill cold virus, but his nose is filled with snot, and he has a sad little cough. I know he’ll be better soon, but I hate to watch him suffer. Mothers and fathers will always be nursing their babies through illness, but I’m glad to be a parent in the vaccine era, when herd immunity and my baby’s own immunizations can protect him from the worst of the world’s infectious diseases. Let’s hope we can keep it that way.

I’m really excited to welcome my friend Sarah Ruttan as a guest blogger this week. Sarah and I had our first babies 5 weeks apart when we both lived in Tucson, AZ, and we developed a tight bond as we shared the early months of motherhood. Sarah is also an experienced traveler – with and without kids – so I was thrilled that she offered to write about some of her experiences with international travel with young children on Science of Mom. Today, she reflects on why she and her husband choose to travel with their kids and how it has pushed her to the edge of her parenting comfort zone – and maybe beyond. Tomorrow, she shares her best tips for pulling off an international trip with kids. Enjoy, and please feel free to share your own experiences in the comments!

Stamps in their passport: The highs and lows of travel with children

By Sarah Ruttan

Our family recently returned from a trip to Peru. It was our first travel adventure outside of the U.S. with both our son (almost 4) and daughter (16 months). My husband was headed to Peru for a training program and we decided to try making the journey together. Before you congratulate me on successfully traveling to another continent with two kids in tow, I have a confession to make: I’m REALLY tired. And the trip – while a good experience – was only sort-of-fun, in the way that many experiences with young kids end up being: great highs, followed by meltdown lows.

I’m a slow learner when it comes to this parenting thing. I should have recognized that hauling two kids to Peru was going to be a lot of work and that we would arrive back home exhausted, barely able to process the experience, wondering if it was worth it. Yet, I needed to do it to know what my limits are when traveling with kids, to know how much is too much and what the right balance of adventure is for us at this point in our lives.

The author entertains her 16-month-old daughter on a 1.5 hour boat ride on the Amazon River in Peru.

Let’s be honest – there was an element of “We just want to prove that we can still do this” in our trip planning. Of all the things we missed most about life pre-kids, it was travel, and in particular, international travel. My husband and I have traveled to more than 30 countries. Some of those trips were taken as a couple in our pre-kid days, others on our own before meeting each other. I have fond memories of both my solo trips and our later trips together – carrying a backpack and exploring new cities, seeing foreign landscapes from the window of a train or bus, and clumsily navigating menus in languages we didn’t speak. These journeys expanded my view of the world and my place in it. We talked on those trips about what kind of travel we wanted to do when (if) we had kids.

I remember meeting a family on a trip we took just a couple of years after getting married. We were in rural Ecuador, staying at an inn in the Andes that could only be accessed by riding along a bumpy dirt road for miles in the back of a pickup truck. The family had two elementary school-age kids, and they had all collected dust in the back of the truck together. We shared a table for dinner one evening and commented on what great travelers their kids were. I was in awe of these parents. I wasn’t even a parent yet, but no matter – when the time came, I wanted to give my own kids these same experiences.

I thought of that family often when we were in Peru. Because the truth is, I do want to be that family. I want my kids to understand that there are many ways of living in this world and that we are but a small piece of a much larger puzzle. I want them to experience that feeling of being completely out of place in a new culture and to learn how to persist through the discomfort. I want them to experience the kindness of fellow travelers – and learn to reciprocate with their own small acts of generosity. I want them to go far enough away from home that they will appreciate coming back to it. I want them to collect stamps in their passport.

I’ll look back on the Peru stamps in our passports fondly, but we’ve collectively decided after this trip that we might wait a few more years before we really start amassing stamps in our passports. I’ll admit – it was fun to return to a corner of the world that I’d come to know as an adult traveler and see it again through my kids’ eyes. I remember stepping off the plane in Iquitos, a humid city in the heart of the Amazon. The kids watched from the windows of the bus, fascinated by the moto-taxis and transfixed by the chaos of urban life around them. As the months pass, these are the moments that stand out when I look at pictures.

Photos by Sarah Ruttan.

Yet, while traveling, I was caught off guard by how nervous I felt as a parent. I actually had a dream that our toddler fell off a boat and into piranha-filled waters of the Amazon. I am not typically an anxious parent, and I’ve definitely never considered myself a risk-averse traveler. The trip exposed my vulnerability and reminded me that while our kids can enrich travel, they also make it more complicated.

When we’re not traveling abroad, we love to hike and have spent many a happy afternoon on the trail together. This, too, has changed as we’ve had kids. Initially, my son was happy to sleep in a carrier while we completed the same hikes we had done sans kids. As he grew older (and heavier), there were hikes we started to avoid because neither of us wanted to climb 1,000 feet with a 30-pound toddler on our back.

This forced us to begin to shift our mindset about hiking with kids. We’ve slowly accepted that hiking as a family is – at this point – less about exercise and more about time spent together outdoors. It’s about our son setting the pace and finding treasures along the way. The payoff comes on the other end – when your children can begin to hike greater distances and (soon enough) are able to keep up with you (or leave you in the dust!). As with any act of parenting, there may be several years of input before you complete that magical favorite hike together.

Some days it feels like it would certainly be easier to just stop for a few years – hang closer to home, relax at the campsite – instead of coaxing a tired preschooler along a trail. I’ll admit that it’s hard to sometimes move along the trail at a turtle’s pace. However, those family hikes build an appreciation and love for the outdoors with our kids so that when their little legs are able to run up the mountain, they’ll actually want to be there with us. These acts of patience are really about building a family culture – a culture that says “we value spending time together outside.” So it’s still about the hiking, maybe just not so much about the exercise in the short term.

I’ve come to believe that this same idea is true for travel. Sure, we could stay close to home for the first few years. Everyone would sleep more, and lots of potential public meltdowns could be avoided. Yet, we’d be missing something along the way. Those early family trips build our family culture – they give us an opportunity to begin to teach our kids about the world around us, even if in small ways on local outings. Great moments – and memorable family stories – come from these journeys.

Our kids, too, build skills just as in hiking. They learn how to navigate airports, keep themselves occupied while waiting, sleep in strange surroundings, and eat food different from that served in our own house. These journeys ensure that when they’re older, we can plan a dream trip and know what we can reasonably expect of our kids as travelers. It’s still about the trip, but that trip might look pretty different these days.

For now, I’ve decided to meet my kids somewhere in the middle of home and Peru, somewhere where we’re both living a bit outside our comfort zone. Perhaps it is all about continuing to adapt – as travelers and as parents. It’s about pushing our kids a little, but mostly it’s about meeting them where they’re at and recognizing that our limits, tolerance, and comfort zones for travel might be different than they used to be. For this too shall pass, and one day soon I’ll be watching both kids roll their own suitcases past customs in a foreign land.

Photo by Sarah Ruttan.

Author bio: Sarah Ruttan is a lover-of books, mom, and sometimes-writer. She currently lives and works in Austin, TX. When she’s not hiking and traveling, she works as an educator, where she gets to share her love for great books and writing with her students and fellow teachers.

Have you traveled internationally with your kids? How do you find the right balance between adventure and comforting routines for your family?

By Sarah Ruttan

In yesterday’s post, I talked about the highs and lows of traveling abroad with young kids. While we’re not planning any international trips in the near future, we definitely learned some important lessons on this trip that we’ll take into account when planning future travel. Some of this advice relates to any type of travel with children, but there are special considerations when traveling out of the country.

1. Travel light. We didn’t bring a stroller, opting instead for our trusty Ergo. I almost felt naked getting onto the plane, yet also slightly liberated. The cobble stone streets of colonial Peru wouldn’t have made a stroller any fun, anyway. Depending on your destination, mode of travel, and itinerary, you may be able to leave car seats behind, or rent them for any car rides you’ll take. We planned our trip so that we were primarily traveling by plane or boat and made do without car seats for the short taxi ride from the airport. (Once there, we also found that most taxis didn’t have seat belts or clips, so we wouldn’t have been able to use car seats had we brought them.) We strategically packed a few clothing items that both kids were about to outgrow so that we could leave the clothes and have room for a few souvenirs on the return trip. [This paragraph was edited after posting to emphasize that the car seat decision is really dependent on where you’re traveling and how you plan your trip. It isn’t one to be taken lightly, and Sarah and her husband carefully considered their options before deciding not to bring them. ~Alice]

A word about diapers: We only had one child in diapers and brought just enough with us to last until we knew would be in a city where we could buy more (4 days worth). Diapers are bulky to pack and widely available in most cities, so only bring what you absolutely need.

Photo by Sarah Ruttan.

2. Think about time zones. Sometimes you can’t choose where you travel, but when you do have a choice, consider how many time zones you want to cross with young kids. Jet lag can be brutal for adults, and it’s worse with toddlers who often take several (painful) days to adjust. We didn’t choose Peru because of time zones, but it was definitely a nice perk to only contend with a one-hour adjustment. We’ll likely save crossing the Atlantic or Pacific until our kids are a bit older and able to entertain themselves once we’re home and I want to sleep!

3. Choose an itinerary that will work for your kids at whatever stage they’re in. We didn’t do Machu Picchu on this trip because our daughter (at 16 months) was too young to safely be at high altitudes – we’ll save it for next time. Instead, we chose a family-friendly rainforest lodge (at sea level) that we knew both kids would love. Also, consider non-stop versus multi-leg journeys. Our trip down to Peru involved 3 flights, including a long overnight flight and early morning hours spent waiting in an airport. While it sounded adventurous at the time we booked it, it turned out to be less than fun with two tired kids.

4. Find a good travel clinic for your family to ensure you’ve considered health concerns. They will help you research which vaccines are necessary for travel and which regions have a high incidence of malaria so that you can take precautions. Start your online research here. Be aware that most insurance companies don’t cover these optional vaccines.

5. Bring a family mascot. Ours was Curious George. Choose the favorite (portable) stuffed animal du jour around your house. Curious George crashed all of our pictures and we captured shots of him in all the locations we visited – it got my photo resistant kids to smile and made my son interested in taking pictures. It also helped us to kill time when we were waiting. Just don’t lose the mascot and cause a meltdown!

Photo by Sarah Ruttan.

6. Pack hand sanitizer – but give up on worrying about the germs. Our oldest son is well trained with hand sanitizer. We had several travel-size bottles with us and used it throughout the day. We got lucky this time. No one even got close to getting sick, despite all the random things I know were put in mouths and/or consumed, especially by our toddler.

7. Anticipate that language barriers may be difficult for your child depending on their personality and stage of verbal development. I did not expect this challenge (and should have). Our preschooler has been exposed to Spanish but had never been in an environment where everyone speaks a different language. He went from gregarious to clingy almost instantly. We translated everything that was happening around us so that he could understand. A longer stay would have helped him learn more language and (likely) make some friends that would have helped his shyness.

8. Mingle – or let your kids do it for you. This, frankly, is one of the greatest advantages of traveling with little ones regardless of where you are and whether or not you speak the language. Kids almost guarantee that you will have social interactions with fellow travelers and locals alike. We likely won’t forget our toddler dancing to local music in front of a crowd of strangers one evening or being held by countless strangers. We talked to more fellow travelers and locals than we did when we were traveling as adults – and our travel was richer for it.

9. If you get attention, soak it up. Our daughter has red hair and blue eyes. This is a rarity even in the U.S. but almost unheard of in Peru. Everywhere we went she got attention from well-meaning passersby. She was at an age where she was oblivious to the extra attention she was receiving, whereas older children might feel more self-conscious. If your kids are sensitive to the extra attention, be sure to build in breaks every day where everyone gets some quiet time.

Photo by Sarah Ruttan.

10. Ask about where you’re seated on the plane ahead of time. I did not – and it turned out to cost us a night’s sleep on our overnight flight into Lima. Some airlines will try to put families in the bulkhead seats (this is the first row after business class) because of the extra legroom. This turns out to be a terrible idea at night, because this is the only row in which you can’t raise the armrests, meaning no one can get comfortable or lay across laps. On our return trip I asked ahead of time to be further back in the plane so that everyone could sleep.

Have you traveled internationally with your kids? Leave a comment below to add to this list and help other parents planning trips. What did you learn? What did you pack that you couldn’t have done without? What would you do differently next time around?

Author bio: Sarah Ruttan is a lover-of books, mom, and sometimes-writer. She currently lives and works in Austin, TX. When she’s not hiking and traveling, she works as an educator, where she gets to share her love for great books and writing with her students and fellow teachers.

Cee is four. Four-and-one-third, but she can’t wait to be four-and-a-half. We’ve drawn out those fractions. And she asked if we could make a cake for her half birthday. Four-and-a-half is a big deal when you’re four-and-one-third.

She’s exploding with awareness about the world, and I’m just trying to keep up. She wants to know what the sky is made of, how many pennies are in a dollar, and why it’s still light at her bedtime now. She “reads” books to BabyM and her dolls with the confidence of a librarian, and she makes art every day (usually with glitter). She sits on the workbench in the garage and watches her dad work, and she knows better than I do where to find tools. She is eager to help and independent.

Until suddenly she’s not. Tears spring from her eyes, seemingly out of nowhere. She clings to me or stomps her feet in anger, depending on the catalyst for the meltdown. She’s four (and a third!), after all. She has a new little brother, and she has to compromise sometimes. And that can be really hard.

Anyway, that’s Cee now. Days with her are full of surprises, mostly good ones.

At bedtime tonight, we read a long book and then talked about our day together. We sang our “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” the way we have ended our bedtime routine since she was a tiny infant. (I wonder when she’ll outgrow that. I’m in no hurry.) I kissed her four times (cheek, butterfly, nose, and cheek again). All a very sweet bedtime routine, until it’s over.

And then the stalling began. There were questions about today and questions about tomorrow. There were demands for more kisses and hugs. There was a hangnail on her pinkie that she swore would keep her awake. I sat back down on the side of her bed.

“Cee, do you know what I do after you go to sleep?”

“No.”

“I write.”

“What do you write?”

(She knows that I wrote a book. I’ve been working on the page proofs and the index for the last month, tasks that aren’t exciting to me, much less a 4-year-old. But now that all that is done, I had to pause for a minute to think about her question before I answered.)

“Sometimes I write stories. Sometimes I write about science. Sometimes I write about my day so that I can remember it a long time from now.”

Her eyes lit up with the first mention of stories.

“Oh, mama! Do that! Write stories!”

For the first time, I felt like Cee could appreciate my life outside of her. I’ve been writing and teaching, and often leaving her to do it, for the last couple of years, but I don’t think she’s thought much about that work except that it takes me away from her.

That thought is also always in my mind when I work – it takes me away from my kids, or at least means a sacrifice of much-needed sleep. As a mostly stay-at-home mom, work feels like a guilty pleasure to me now. Finally, a little time alone at my computer! It does little to contribute to my family’s income, but it enriches my life.

Finally, I can see how my work might enrich my daughter’s life, too. On her face tonight was admiration and respect for me, a writer of stories. It made me want to write more, for myself and for her.

Of course, I still had to get out of her room at bedtime, and I still had to endure another round of stall tactics. That’s life with a four-and-one-third-year-old, even one starting to understand that the world doesn’t completely revolve around her.

Dear BabyM,

You are 3 months old, and as your mother, there is something I must confess to you: I haven’t yet cracked open your baby book. It sits neatly on my nightstand, undisturbed and unmarked, while a succession of telling objects rotate around it as the nights go by: pacifiers (mainly rejected by you), nipple cream, novels, water glasses, vitamin D drops (barely remembered by me), burp cloths, tiny nail clippers, cards of congratulations, a copy of Goodnight Moon, and a messy pile of kids’ books and scribbled papers left by your older sister. These last three months have been wonderfully full. I marvel at how much you’ve changed in such a short amount of time and know how quickly these present moments will slip into the past. I don’t want to forget them.

You were born in the cold drizzle of the Oregon winter. Trees stood leafless, like skeletons against the gray sky. On the coldest mornings, a lone hummingbird urgently probed the frozen hummingbird feeder for nectar, returning again and again. Inside, our Christmas tree twinkled. Our house was full of good smells as your grandmothers cooked us biscuits for breakfast, soup for dinner, and pie for dessert.

On the morning you were born, a nurse placed you on my chest. Your skin was gray like the sky, but it warmed to pink as your small lungs found their rhythm. You were born with a full head of dark hair, still wet, matted down on your head. You bobbed your head up and down on my chest and pushed your feet into my belly, full of instinct to find my breast. You fed with ease and gazed up at me with bright eyes.

From that first day, I’ve loved your eyes. We still don’t know what color they are, but they are wide, observant, and calm. Your gaze still stops me in my tracks every day. It makes me put down my phone, forget my to-do list, and sit with you a little longer.

Photo by Amanda Reed

Your first days with us were cozy and warm, sleepy and slow. You nursed and then drifted into sleep, your body going limp into mine with certain trust. I watched you sleep and felt full of gratitude.What else can I tell you about newborn you? You sucked on your hands from your first day. You did not like to be swaddled, preferring to have your hands close to your face. You liked to sleep close to me and feed often, around the clock. When you weren’t eating or sleeping, you were alert, and usually calm. You stretched your limbs, and your eyes followed our faces and voices.

You became a part of our family. We waited a long time for you, and once you were here, it seemed like you filled a spot that was always yours. Your sister dotes on you, and she is mostly generous in sharing me with you. One of our biggest challenges has been to convince her to let you sleep, because she really wants to play with you. You also adored her from the start, turning your head towards her voice. Some of your very first smiles were for her.

Already, the season has changed. Now our world is filled with blossoms of spring: daffodils, hyacinths, and forsythia. Three hummingbirds compete for a spot at the feeder, then flit off to cherry blossoms for more nectar. The days lengthen, and the sun shines.Already, you have outgrown a drawerful of tiny outfits. Your cheeks have filled out, and your body has lengthened. Your skin has lost its translucence. You kick with happiness and wave for attention, your movements more confident and strong each day. You watch the world with awareness that you are part of it. You smile easily. You are a steady little person, not easily bothered by our barking dog or the sound of your sister’s steps thundering down the hall. You sleep for long stretches in the night and greet me in the morning with a happy grin. You open your mouth wide as if to let out a big laugh, but all that we hear is a soft coo.

I worry that one day you’ll read this and think I wasn’t being honest – that I composed a history happier than the reality. I guess I should mention that you do cry through most of every car ride and sometimes when you’re tired. And yes, there are lots of days when I feel exhausted or overwhelmed. But these words are all true, and in fact, they feel inadequate to describe how much happiness you’ve brought to our family and how much we enjoy spending time with you. I want you to know that.

I know how quickly the time will pass. The cherry blossoms will dry out, shrivel up, and drop to the ground – or get knocked down with the spring rain. It will happen gradually, but one day we’ll suddenly realize that the blossoms are gone and the trees have fully leafed out. Just like one day you’ll be rolling, then crawling, then walking. The days will pass by like pages in a flip book, each one distinct and full, but together, a blur from one season to the next.

I’m in no hurry for this season of your infancy to pass, but there is no stopping it. In the end, what will we hold of this time? We take photos and videos, and I will write in your baby book, I promise. Still, I know the details will slip away, like petals from a tree. What will remain of your infancy? A feeling, I suppose. A sweetness, I hope, one that we can savor for years to come. And you – because the person you are now is just the beginning of the person you will become.

Imagine my surprise when, last week, my editor at Johns Hopkins Press emailed me to ask that I check over the Amazon page for my book. What? There’s an Amazon page?! As far as I knew, my book wasn’t coming out until the fall. I did a search for my name and book title on Amazon, that great vault of hundreds of thousands of books, this is what I found:

I guess this is really happening, dear readers! And it’s happening sooner than I thought. The book will be released on July 2, and it’s available for pre-order now!

This is super exciting but also terrifying at the same time. It means that some people might actually read my book. They might like it or they might not, and that’s just the way it is. I hope you read it and like it, though. I would not have had the motivation or courage to write this book if not for all of you – smart people who read my blog and comment on it. You showed me that there are other parents out there, like me, who are curious and want to know more about the science of parenting. You showed me that tone matters – that if we are going to communicate and support each other, we have to start from a place of respect for each other. You showed me that our stories matter, and that nuance is important. As I dug into the science of parenting decisions, I found examples where science gives us a clear course of action but just as many where the science is so murky that we are left to follow our hearts, well-informed as they may be, and hope for the best.

Another surprise when I scanned through my book’s Amazon page for the first time was the reviews. I hadn’t seen these yet, and they brought tears to my eyes. What I was trying to do with this book came through to these readers, and that made me so happy. Here’s what several wonderful folks had to say about my book:

Finally, someone has brought some science—and some sense—to the mommy wars. Should be required reading for all new (and old) parents. 

~Emily Oster, Brown University, author of Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong—And What You Really Need to Know

 

Alice Callahan has written a breakthrough book, combining the compassion, warmth, and angst of a mother with the measured reasoning of a scientist. She helps parents not only understand how science works, but how they can access that science to answer their questions. She’s found a way to access the scientist in all of us.

~Paul A. Offit, MD, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

 

Yes! An easy-to-read, fascinating, nuanced review of the science behind new parents’ biggest health questions. Many of these issues—infant sleep, breastfeeding, vaccines—have or will hit your ‘Should I panic?’ button. With gentle guidance, Alice Callahan puts your fears to rest.

~Tracy Cutchlow, author of Zero to Five: 70 Essential Parenting Tips Based on Science (and What I’ve Learned So Far)

 

Too many of today’s parents treat science as a weapon, using it to justify some choices and condemn others. Yet, most don’t fully understand what science can and cannot tell us. By giving parents a comprehensive understanding of how science relates to parenting, Alice Callahan has helped us turn this weapon into a tool for peace. Callahan untangles basic scientific concepts, reveals the realities and limitations of research, and advocates for a measured approach to parenting science that eschews absolutes and acknowledges nuance. The Science of Mom is a rare gem in the parenting canon—smart, sensitive, and a lifesaver for a generation of parents caught in the nebulous spider’s web of Internet ‘wisdom.’ 

~Suzanne Barston, author of Bottled Up: How the Way We Feed Babies Has Come to Define Motherhood, and Why It Shouldn’t

 

Families routinely search for health information. The Science of Mom makes it easy collecting evidence for health decisions and putting it into perspective with a mom-to-mom connection. Callahan’s advice is thoughtful, backed by science and feels fueled of love. She is willing to provide powerful advice when detailing the science and safety of vaccines. Keep this book in arm’s reach as you support your infant for calm and direction. 

~Wendy Sue Swanson, MD, MBE, FAAP, Seattle Children’s Hospital, author of Mama Doc Medicine: Finding Calm and Confidence in Parenting, Child Health, and Work-Life Balance

 

Fascinating! Think of all the controversial, hot-button topics that parents obsess about in a child’s first year—from vaccines and feeding, bed-sharing to sleep training. Weighing the scientific evidence, Callahan offers balanced insights and in-depth answers—a far cry from the oversimplified advice prescribed by many ‘parenting experts.’ The result: a must-have guide that’s substantive and extremely engaging. 

~Jena Pincott, author of Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies? The Surprising Science of Pregnancy

I’m so grateful to these thoughtful people, all authors themselves, for taking the time to read my manuscript and write short reviews.

I hope you’ll check out my book and let me know what you think!

My last post went into great detail about the research on age of starting solids and health outcomes, including nutrition, growth, illness, and allergies. If you read that post, you know that there are small risks and benefits of starting earlier or later (in the range of 4-6 months), but there’s no evidence for an optimal age of starting solids for all babies. Here’s what to look for instead, starting with a brief summary of the data on age:

1. Your baby is at least 4 months of age.

Read my post on this if you want to know the details and see the references. If not, here’s a summary:

• There is good evidence that it’s best to wait until at least 4 months of age to start solids, unless advised otherwise by a doctor for a specific medical reason.
• Starting solids between 4 and 6 months of age may give babies a boost in iron nutrition, assuming they’re getting some good dietary sources of iron. Exposure to potentially allergenic foods, such as wheat and eggs, by about 6 months may reduce the risk of allergy to those foods.
• Exclusive breastfeeding until 6 months of age may reduce your baby’s risk of minor gastrointestinal infections, although this isn’t shown in all studies. For moms, it may also result in greater weight loss and prolonged lactational amenorrhea.

Whether or not you start solids at 4 months, 6 months, or somewhere in between is up to you and your baby. The research on this topic is still evolving, and either is a fine choice. In fact, given that babies develop at different rates, it seems unlikely that all babies would be ready to start solids the moment the clock strikes midnight on their 4-month birthday or 6-month birthday.

This was the same sentiment eloquently expressed in a 2009 editorial by British pediatrician Martin Ward Platt, using the term “weaning” to mean starting solid foods:

“The weaning debate has been largely predicated on the notion that there is some magic age at which, or from which, it is in some sense ‘‘safe’’ or ‘‘optimal’’ to introduce solids. Yet it is highly counterintuitive that such an age exists. In what other area of developmental biology is there any such rigid age threshold for anything? We all recognize that age thresholds are legal inventions to create workable rules and definitions, and have no meaning in physiology or development, yet when we talk about weaning we seem to forget this.”¹

Given this, it’s really up to you to follow your baby’s lead, watching for the developmental signs discussed in the rest of this post.

2. Your baby can sit upright and hold his head up straight.

These gross motor skills signal that your baby has the core body strength and stability needed to eat solid foods. Pediatric feeding specialist and certified speech language pathologist Melanie Potock explained why this is so important on my Facebook page:

“Gross motor stability (in this case trunk stability) provides the support for fine motor skills. It’s very hard to learn to eat purees off a spoon or do any sort of self-feeding of soft solids if the trunk is not supported. Try it yourself by letting your trunk relax and fall into the back of your dining chair, slightly slumped. Now stay that way and try to bite, chew and swallow. Imagine if you were just learning to eat this way!”

[I’m thrilled that Melanie Potock wrote a guest post explaining more about why stability is so important and how to best seat your baby comfortably at the table here: S.I.T.! Feeding Your Child Using Stability and Independence at the Table]

In other words, when babies have gross motor stability in place, they’ll have a much easier time with the fine motor and oral motor skills needed for feeding. That means that baby should be able to sit comfortably upright, on his own or with a little support, and hold his head up to face you. In one study, babies were able to sit in a caregiver’s lap without help at 5.5 months, on average, but this milestone was quite variable (standard deviation of 2 months).²

Trunk stability is also important because it allows you and your baby to be able to be face-to-face during feeding and for your baby to be an active participant in deciding whether, how much, and how fast to eat. You offer baby a bite, and he leans forward and opens his mouth if he’d like to accept, or he turns his head away to say no thanks. With good trunk stability, a baby can communicate his wants and needs to you, and you can be responsive to them. This way, feeding becomes a respectful and pleasant conversation between the two of you.³

Feed your baby responsively, watching for his cues of wanting more or being done, like a back-and-forth conversation.

3. Your baby has the oral motor skills to handle solid foods.

At birth, most babies are already skilled at sucking. Sucking is an involuntary reflex that develops around 32 weeks of gestation, and babies practice it in utero before birth. Sucking gives them the skill to efficiently transfer milk through a nipple, whether from breast or bottle.

To eat from a spoon, a baby needs a different set of oral motor skills. She needs to have the jaw stability and coordination to open her mouth when offered a bite. She needs to have lost the tongue thrust reflex present earlier in life, which meant that if you placed food on her lips or in the front of her mouth, her tongue would immediately push it back out. Instead, she needs to be able to move her tongue to push food to the back of her mouth. Her gag reflex needs to have toned down and moved to the back of her mouth, finally allowing her to swallow her first bites of food. These oral motor skills will be in place sometime between 4 and 6 months for most babies.²

Some babies and/or their parents prefer to skip purees and start right in with self-feeding soft foods. This requires greater oral motor development to bite off pieces of food and use the tongue to move it between the jaw for mashing before swallowing. It also requires fine motor development to rake foods on a tray, pick them up, and put them in her mouth.

All of this development is pretty impressive when you think about it, and in most babies, it happens right about the time when they start to need nutrition from additional foods beyond breast milk – around 6 months.

Babies gain the gross, oral, and fine motor skill needed for feeding at different ages. These data are based on a longitudinal study with 57-60 babies assessed at each time point (Carruth and Skinner, 2002).

How will you know that your baby has the oral motor development to eat solids? One indicator is that she’s putting her hands and toys in her mouth without gagging on them. But at a certain point, you’ll just need to offer her a bite of food and see what happens.

4. Your baby is interested in beginning and continuing to eat solids.

By 4-6 months, most babies are showing interest in foods if you’re eating around them. BabyM has been in our arms at meals since he was a newborn, and by 4 months, he was sitting up in our laps and lunging forward towards our plates. He was watching us eat and grabbing at our hands and utensils as if he wanted in on the fun. I was also giving him his vitamin D drops on a spoon, and he was eagerly opening his mouth for it.

Of course, grabbing for food doesn’t mean that your baby is hungry or even has an interest in trying food – just that he is interested in putting in his mouth what you’re putting in yours. Think about it… babies this age explore everything with their mouths. And here you are, putting something in your mouth, and looking pleased about it. Of course your baby wants to get in on that action.

Still, this interest is a sign that your baby might be up for trying solids. So if he’s sitting up and putting things in his mouth, you might now try a bit of food. Offer him a bite, but always let him choose if he wants to take it. Wait until he opens his mouth for it. Let him move that food around in his mouth, taste it, swallow, and think it over. Then, does he open his mouth for more? If so, carry on with the next bite. If he doesn’t show interest in another bite – not opening his mouth, turning his head away, or even starting to fuss or cry – then you know he’s not quite ready. Give him a few days or a week or more before you try again, and just let him chew on a spoon at dinner until then.

I tried giving BabyM a few bites of food around 4.5 months. I’d been researching this topic, and as I said, he was showing lots of interest in food and the spoon, so we tried a bit of sweet potato. He readily opened his mouth for the first bite but then pushed most of it right back out onto his lips (tongue thrust reflex in action). He fussed a little and showed no interest in a second bite. A few days later, I offered him a taste of oatmeal thinned with breast milk, and he had the same response. So, we took a break from solids for a while. BabyM continued to join us at the table, where he learned other things about food – that it’s enjoyable, social, and something to be shared with family.

Just today, at 5 months and 1 week, BabyM was grabbing for the leftover pot roast I was eating for lunch. I threw some in the food processor and offered him a few bites. He ate like a pro from the spoon and kept opening his mouth for more bites, even fussing a little when I was too slow to offer him more. Letting him lead the way ensures that eating will be a pleasant experience from the start.

This brings me to my last point: It’s really important not to pressure a baby to eat.

What’s most important is getting off on the right foot with feeding responsively, showing your baby that he’s in charge of deciding whether to eat, how fast, and how much. You’ll notice there aren’t a ton of references on this post, because there really aren’t a lot of studies evaluating outcomes based on starting solids according to developmental readiness. (Age, apparently, is much easier to evaluate, as evidenced by the reference list in my last post.) But everything about readiness to eat solids hinges on this important concept of responsive feeding, and there is strong evidence to support this.

Responsive feeding sets infants up to eat and grow well. For example, one recent study found that when mothers of 4-month-olds had low awareness of infant hunger and satiety cues, they were more likely to pressure their babies to eat, and their babies were more likely to be picky eaters at 2 years of age.⁴ Some research indicates that greater sensitivity to infant cues results in slower (and presumably healthier) weight gain in infancy, perhaps contributing to healthier weight in childhood.^5,6

In another study, mothers who were responsive in their feeding of solids had babies that seemed to self-correct their growth trajectories in late infancy. That is, babies that had gained weight quickly in early infancy showed slower growth between 6 and 12 months, and those that were growing slower began to gain more. The opposite happened when mothers were more controlling in their feeding: smaller babies stayed small, and bigger babies gained more.^7,8 Babies are good at self-regulating caloric intake to meet their needs, and we want to do everything we can to trust this innate ability and honor their cues.

Is doubling of birth weight a sign that baby is ready for solids?

I’ve seen doubling of birthweight, or hitting about 13 pounds, listed as an indicator of solids readiness on several reputable sites (plus plenty of less reputable ones). Problem is, I can’t find any research to back this up or any explanation of where this “milestone” comes from. As far as I can tell, it’s completely arbitrary. It may be true that most babies who have doubled their birth weight are ready to start solids, but there’s no evidence that a certain size is important. Instead, it’s about gross, fine, and oral motor skills, and interest in eating.

Here are two of my favorite books for advice about feeding solids:

(These are affiliate links to Amazon, so I get a small commission if you decide to order one. Thank you for supporting Science of Mom!)

• Child of Mine by Ellyn Satter
• Fearless Feeding by Jill Castle and Maryann Jacobsen

You can’t beat Satter’s Child of Mine for insightful discussion of responsive feeding and feeding dynamics. The only problem is that some of the information about starting solids is a little outdated – mainly that she recommends delaying potentially allergenic foods, and I think she’s a little too devoted to rice cereal for some of my reader’s tastes. Fearless Feeding is more concise and gives lots of practical advice about what to feed at this stage. Of course, my own book also includes several chapters on feeding solids, with details on when and how to begin and the best foods to feed. My book – The Science of Mom: A Research-Based Guide to Your Baby’s First Year – is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

References:

1. Platt, M. P. W. Demand weaning: infants’ answer to professionals’ dilemmas. Arch. Dis. Child. 94, 79–80 (2009).
2. Carruth, B. R. & Skinner, J. D. Feeding Behaviors and Other Motor Development in Healthy Children (2–24 Months). J. Am. Coll. Nutr. 21, 88–96 (2002).
3. Black, M. M. & Aboud, F. E. Responsive Feeding Is Embedded in a Theoretical Framework of Responsive Parenting. J. Nutr. 141, 490–494 (2011).
4. Cassells, E. L., Magarey, A. M., Daniels, L. A. & Mallan, K. M. The influence of maternal infant feeding practices and beliefs on the expression of food neophobia in toddlers. Appetite 82, 36–42 (2014).
5. Worobey, J., Islas Lopez, M. & Hoffman, D. J. Maternal Behavior and Infant Weight Gain in the First Year. J. Nutr. Educ. Behav. 41, 169–175 (2009).
6. DiSantis, K. I., Hodges, E. A., Johnson, S. L. & Fisher, J. O. The role of responsive feeding in overweight during infancy and toddlerhood: a systematic review. Int. J. Obes. 35, 480–492 (2011).
7. Farrow, C. V. & Blissett, J. Controlling Feeding Practices: Cause or Consequence of Early Child Weight? Pediatrics 121, e164–e169 (2008).
8. Farrow, C. & Blissett, J. Does Maternal Control During Feeding Moderate Early Infant Weight Gain? Pediatrics 118, e293–e298 (2006).

How did you know your baby was ready to start solid foods?

I keep saying that I’m going to blog more, especially since I have a new baby to write about. But finding time to write has been easier said than done because of – you guessed it – the baby! Just as I was submitting grades for my spring term course and thinking that I’d have more time to devote to the blog, BabyM stopped napping. Flat out stopped. And now, finally, after a 2-week nap strike, we’re getting back on track. I’m excited to have time to write again, but I feel woefully behind on all the things I’ve wanted to tell you.

Those who have followed this blog for a while know that I wrote a lot about sleep back when Cee was a baby and toddler. Several readers have written me asking how sleep is going with BabyM and what we’ve done differently this time around, and I hope to write more about the early development of his sleep soon. For now, let’s talk about this nap strike while the memories are still fresh.

Grabbing a nap in the middle of a hay ride during the nap strike… sleeping, but definitely not in his bed.

Since BabyM was about 3 months old, he’s fallen asleep in his own bed for naps and bedtime, usually completely content and without fussing before sleep. (Getting to this point was a gradual and supported process that I’ll write more about later.) As BabyM grew, his naps also grew in length until they organized themselves into 3 naps – one in the morning, one in the early afternoon, and a catnap in the late afternoon – together totaling about 3-4 hours of sleep. That nap routine was blissful. It gave BabyM the rest he needed, and it gave me time to get a little work done or spend one-on-one time with Cee.

Most of the science on infant napping is focused on the value of naps to a baby’s learning and development. For example, a study published in February found that napping improved 6- and 12-month-old infants’ declarative memory (memory for facts and events) after learning how a puppet worked.¹ These authors speculated that perhaps infants need frequent naps so that they can consolidate memories soon after learning new information, as the “temporary” storage in the hippocampus is limited in infants’ brain. Other studies have found that napping helps with learning language.^2,3 But really, you probably don’t need science to tell you that napping is important to babies.

However, as far as I can tell, there isn’t much research on what factors set babies up for good nap routines or might derail them. Advice about appropriate intervals between naps and transitions in number of naps is really useful, but it seems to be based on experience and everyday observation, not empirical research. And I wasn’t able to find any research on nap strikes or “regressions” to help me understand BabyM’s nap strike. So, lacking much science, I’ll just share my experience and what helped us survive the strike.

BabyM’s naps started unraveling when he was around 5.5 months old. It happened gradually at first. He showed signs that he was getting tired, and we’d go through our normal routine. The last part of our routine is standing by his bed to sing a soft song, and he snuggled into my shoulder rubbing his eyes as usual before I put him in his crib. Normally, he drifted off to sleep happily after this routine, maybe grunting a bit and stretching out his limbs before finally falling to sleep.

As the nap strike began, everything about our routine was the same, but he just stopped falling to sleep for some naps. I would leave the room and hear him rustling around and talking a bit over the monitor for about 10 minutes. Then he’d start fussing. Usually, he wasn’t crying – just fussing – but absolutely NOT sleeping. At first this happened maybe once out of every 4 naps, then one in 3 naps, then wham! Every nap was like this.

I tried letting him fuss with brief periodic checks for reassurance, thinking he just needed some time to wind down. However, this almost never resulted in sleep, even after several nap attempts each day. He was tired, and he would grab catnaps here and there when he could – in the car, in the stroller, in the Ergo carrier. But those naps were never more than about 40 minutes (one sleep cycle), and he never seemed rested when he woke up.

What was going on? You’ve probably guessed it already, but BabyM was working on some major developmental achievements. He had been rolling sporadically for a few months, but suddenly he seemed to want to work on it. Maybe he was just realizing that he could use rolling to get somewhere, or maybe he was strong enough to really enjoy the process. During the nap strike, I would finally get my tired, fussy baby out of bed and lay him down on a blanket. He would rub his eyes and then happily get to work with rolling and wiggling around the blanket. He was also suddenly more conversational, making big babbling noises and watching us for responses. Interestingly, BabyM still fell asleep easily and on his own at bedtime, but I suppose that the world was just too exciting for napping during the day.

Having too much fun to nap!

That was the same interpretation of sleep gurus I asked about nap strikes. Heather Turgeon, co-author of the book The Happy Sleeper (highly recommended!), told me this:

“My guess is it has to do with a higher, more sophisticated level of consciousness – brain activity that is new and exciting. On the outside you’re seeing his social engagement, babbling, and moving, and on the inside it’s that buzz of cortical activity and a greater awareness. I think it makes it harder to fall asleep during the day, temporarily.”

Given the research I mentioned earlier that shows how naps can help babies learn and remember things, it seems ironic that they can have a harder time sleeping during times of lots of learning!

I also asked Dr. Craig Canapari, director of the Yale Pediatric Sleep Center, if he could explain BabyM’s nap strike. He told me,

“There are very clearly reports of sleep issues coincident with developmental leaps. My non-neuroscientist understanding is that this is perhaps the excitement of being on the cusp of something new— but of course there is probably some real biological underpinning.”

Like so much in parenting, it’s always good to hear that a challenge like a nap strike is normal and that it will pass, right? And even though we don’t understand why nap strikes happen, that image of BabyM’s busy brain helped me to be patient with him during the strike.

After 2 weeks of nap refusal, BabyM finally came around. It happened suddenly, with his morning nap on his 6-month birthday. He just fell asleep without any fussing or fanfare, as if nothing had ever happened. Since then, he’s been back to napping well and happily most of the time. Halfway through his lullaby, he now arches his back towards his crib, and as soon as I set him down, he rolls right onto his side or his tummy to get comfy for sleep.

It’s hard to keep perspective when you’re in the middle of a baby nap strike. You wonder if your baby will ever nap again, and you feel desperate for a predictable routine. At least, that’s how I felt. It helped me to hear other stories about babies going on nap strikes and coming back around in time. Looking back at our experience, I can offer a few tips to parents struggling with a nap strike:

1. Be consistent. This wasn’t always easy, but I tried to stick with the sleep routines that had worked previously, even when they didn’t seem to be working at all. I knew BabyM could fall asleep on his own, and it reassured me that he still did it at night. I trusted that he would return to napping well, and I tried to avoid adopting new sleep routines. Instead, I just offered the opportunity to sleep in his bed at least a few times per day. If he continued to fuss, I got him up, gave him some time to play, and then tried again after a while. I think this consistency probably helped him jump back into good naps when he was ready.

2. Be flexible. If you think this sounds like a contradiction to my first tip, you’re sort of right. But BabyM was tired, and I wanted him to get a little rest. So, in addition to nap attempts in his bed, he usually had a few opportunities to rest in the stroller, Ergo carrier, or car seat during the day. Again, these weren’t usually great naps, but they gave him a break, and they allowed Cee and I to get out of the house. I also chose a few naps to nurse BabyM to sleep when we had house guests and our house was chaotic and overstimulating. I didn’t want BabyM to learn that nursing was necessary for sleep, but doing this a few times helped him catch up on sleep. He was back to sleeping on his own a few days later.

A sweet nap in my lap, after nursing to sleep.

3. Be patient, and trust your baby. A few days into our nap strike, I was not feeling patient. I’d tried tweaking the nap timing to see if that was the issue, but it made no difference. I started poring over all of my sleep books looking for some magic bullet. I was certain I needed to do something to fix this! It was tempting to think of nap time as a battle of wills, but I can’t recommend this approach. Learn from my story and know that a nap strike can be a normal response to big developmental changes, and it will pass without any great intervention. Stay calm, and trust that your baby will work things out so long as you provide those predictable, familiar ways to nap when he’s ready again.

4. Let your baby grow. In our case, I really think that BabyM couldn’t nap because he was awakening to new possibilities for movement in his world and interaction with the people around him. Whenever I could, I put him down on a blanket so that he could practice rolling, hoping that this would help him work out his current fascination with movement and get better at finding a cozy position to sleep. When he tried out his voice with exuberant babbles, I tried to be responsive and join him in conversation. I don’t know if any of this helped the nap strike pass more quickly, but it was clearly how BabyM wanted to spend his time. And watching him and appreciating this big developmental leap helped me to see the silver lining of the nap strike.

If you, like me, love watching babies move, then you’ll appreciate this video of BabyM playing with his balance and playing peek-a-boo with himself in a mirror. (Yes, our floral carpet is awesome, but not as awesome as BabyM’s hair – and lack thereof. Also, a warning that our dog barks at about 0:55, and it’s a little startling.)

Has your baby gone on a nap strike? What did it look like? What helped you cope? Consider sharing your story here to help parents in the thick of it!

References:

1. Seehagen, S., Konrad, C., Herbert, J. S. & Schneider, S. Timely sleep facilitates declarative memory consolidation in infants. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 112, 1625–1629 (2015).
2. Gomez, R. L., Bootzin, R. R. & Nadel, L. Naps promote abstraction in language-learning infants. Psychol Sci 17, 670–4 (2006).
3. Hupbach, A., Gomez, R. L., Bootzin, R. R. & Nadel, L. Nap-dependent learning in infants. Dev. Sci. 12, 1007–1012 (2009).

(Book and product links in this article are affiliate links to Amazon. I only link to things that I highly recommend. If you purchase something through a link, your cost is the same, but I receive a tiny commission. This helps me to maintain this blog and pay for an hour or two of babysitting here and there so I can write. Thanks for your support!)

I’ve been unpacking after a week-long trip to my mom’s house. Among the items I’m pulling out of my backpack: 2 nonfiction books that I’ve been wanting to read, 2 copies of The New Yorker, 1 new legal pad for writing, plus clothes for running and yoga.

I barely cracked open the books and magazines. The legal pad is as clean as ever. The workout clothes are still neatly folded and fresh smelling. I’m exhausted, and I’m laughing at myself. After almost 5 years of motherhood, why do I still hold on to the hope that I’ll be able to catch up on reading, writing, and exercise when I’m traveling with my kids? Why do I insist on bringing all of these things with me – just in case! – on top of all of the other many pounds of car seats, travel crib, diapers, clothes, snacks, and books and toys? Will I ever learn?

This feels like a little representation of what motherhood is to me. It fills up my life so much – in good ways and in challenging ways – and I never accomplish as much as I set out to do. I have to remind myself that at this stage, caring for my kids is a lot, and it is enough. I will keep trying to carve out time for myself, so that I can do the things that I love, but I won’t beat myself up over it if my plans sometimes fall through.

Our trip was wonderful, though. It was great to catch up with my mom and extended family. It was just the kids and me, and my first time flying with both of them. Both Cee and BabyM did really well. Cee loves traveling now and packed lots of entertainment for herself on the flight. BabyM is an amazingly good-natured and flexible baby (I know this, because Cee wasn’t), and he handled traveling with ease. Even when he was wired and awake long past his bedtime on our last flight, he was still grinning at the people sitting around us and craning his body to catch glimpses of computer screens and seatbelt signs. Before that, there was about an hour on one flight when BabyM was sleeping and Cee was happily occupied with coloring and the iPad, and I DID read a full article from The New Yorker. If you’ve traveled with little kids, you know what a feat this is. I know it may not happen again for 2-3 years.

And now, I’m glad to be home and to have a little help with childcare so that I can catch up on things. Like, for example, I published a book last week! And now I better get to work promoting it. More soon!

P.S. – The giveaway for my book on the blog is now closed. The two randomly chosen winners were Jenny B. (comment #30) and Meghan (#48). I’ve heard from Jenny, but Meghan, if you’re reading this, I sent you an email. Write me back with your address! The GoodReads giveaway is still open. Go put your name in that hat – I’d love to see more entries over there!

I’ve loved hearing from readers who are enjoying my book this week! Several have emailed me, written notes on my Facebook page, and left wonderful Amazon reviews. I’m full of gratitude and so glad that parents are reading and enjoying my book. It’s a truly awesome feeling.

On top of all of that, I recorded an interview with Rachel Martin of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday this morning. Talk about an exciting and nerve-wracking and amazing experience. The interview will air this Sunday morning. Will your kids pipe down long enough for you to listen to it? Mine probably won’t. Thank goodness for the internet. I’ll post a link here once it’s up.

For those who don’t yet have the book or are new to my blog, I thought I’d share the book’s Introduction here, so that you can get a better feel for my writing and the contents of the book.

INTRODUCTION

I was a scientist first. I started working in research labs as a college student, then as a lab technician, and then went on to graduate school for a Ph.D. in nutritional biology. By the time my husband and I decided we were ready for a baby, I was a postdoctoral fellow studying fetal physiology. For the previous decade of my life, I had been working to understand the world through the lens of science. I asked questions and sought answers by designing and conducting experiments in the lab. I pored over journal articles, trying to make sense of my data and figure out what important questions to ask next. My job was to measure, analyze, and explain. If I felt lost, then the way out of darkness was always to learn more, maybe by repeating an experiment or immersing myself in the scientific literature until things started to look a little clearer.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when I didn’t get pregnant in the first couple of months of trying, I tackled it in the best way I knew how: with science. I measured my basal body temperature and tracked my cervical mucus. I recorded my data in a spreadsheet and searched for patterns in color-coded graphs. I pulled out my reproductive physiology textbook to brush up on ovulation and how to optimize our chances at fertilization. It’s hard to say whether any of this helped me to get pregnant any faster, but it did at least give me a feeling of control, though perhaps at the expense of romance.

When I eventually did get pregnant and became a mother, this same story played out again and again, with different details. Pregnancy and childbirth were just the beginning. Caring for my daughter, Cee, brought lots more questions. Where should she sleep, and when could I expect her to sleep through the night? When should she start solid foods, and what should I feed her? Should I be worried about vaccine safety? Between feeding and rocking, changing and bouncing, and soothing and singing, I found myself digging into the science of parenting.

At about the same time, I left the research lab so that I could spend more time with Cee and explore other career paths, but I missed talking about science with like-minded colleagues. I started the Science of Mom blog as a place to share and discuss what I was learning about parenting, and I was thrilled to find a community of equally inquisitive parents looking for solid science. My blog readers were fascinated by the complexities of the science and always ready with new questions, which inspired me to keep researching and writing. At some point, I wanted to be able to develop these topics in a more cohesive manner, and that journey became this book.

Why do we look to science for answers to parenting questions? For most of human history, how we cared for our babies was passed quietly from generation to generation, one mother to the next. It varied around the world, and it changed over time, but it was informed by culture, environment, and necessity–not science. But for our generation, new parenthood means making a huge number of decisions with little familial or cultural guidance. Most of us live far away from the parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, and brothers and sisters who might have guided us into parenthood in generations past. Instead, we have unlimited advice from the Internet, a resource that empowers us to find our own answers but at the same time overwhelms us with confusing information. If our babies won’t nap or we’re struggling with breastfeeding, we can ask Google for answers or solicit opinions from social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Very quickly, we find ourselves in a minefield of conflicting information and opinions, often paired with a little judgment from all sides.

Science is a tool that can help us get closer to the truth in the midst of all this confusion. It can help us to sidestep the opinions and philosophies and anecdotes that fuel parenting debates. We look to science, not to confirm what we want to believe or to prove others wrong, but rather to make the best decisions we can as parents.

It isn’t that science has all the answers to our parenting questions. For some questions, like those that are medical in nature, science can be a great guide. For others, like parenting practices, it can often only give us clues that we then have to figure out how to apply to our own families. The truth is, from a scientific standpoint, parenting is an immensely complicated thing to study. How do we sort through and quantify so many variables–along with all the differences between babies and families–and, statistically, make some sense of it all? Something so complex can rarely be reduced to a right way and a wrong way. What science can do is zoom out to look at large numbers of babies and families to reveal patterns and averages and ranges of normal. It can give us a broader perspective that can be hard to find during the day-to-day tasks of caring for a baby. It can reveal risks and benefits that we may not have considered, allowing us to approach decisions in an objective way. Science may not offer a protocol for parenting, like the procedures that I perfected in my research lab, but it can help us make smart decisions for our families.

Science can also help us rise above parenting controversies. In many cases, if you carefully study the data, as I did in my research for this book, you see that there’s rarely a strong case for everyone doing things in the same way. There’s plenty of room for parents to make different choices about how their baby eats and sleeps, for example. When you understand the limitations of the science, you are empowered to follow your heart and your child’s lead. And in cases where the science gives us a clearer answer, it can help us make decisions more confidently. We don’t have to waste our energy arguing or defending ourselves, because we’ve looked at the evidence, and we’re comfortable with our choices. This frees up valuable time and energy to focus on our babies, take a nap, or work on things important to us instead of scouring conflicting Internet articles for nuggets of truth.

I begin this book, in chapter 1, with a sort of crash course in evidence-based parenting. If we want to examine parenting decisions in a scientific way, then we have to understand how science works, how to parse through many studies to find the most relevant ones, and how to interpret research in a meaningful way. This outline will give you an idea of how I approached each topic in this book, and it should also prepare you to tackle your own questions with science as your guide.

In chapters 2 and 3, I zoom in on a few medical questions important to newborn babies, including when we should cut the umbilical cord and why newborns receive an injection of vitamin K and a smear of antibiotics in their eyes. These may be small questions in the scheme of a baby’s first year of life, but they each provide a fascinating case study in the history and science of newborn medicine. In chapter 4, I step away from decision-making and appreciate new babies as scientists do, for their incredible abilities to sense and explore their new world with touch, sound, sight, and smell. Understanding our newborns sets the stage for how we care for them responsively and how the parent-child relationship develops over time.

In the rest of the book, I examine some of the biggest questions and sources of angst for parents: breast and bottle-feeding (chapter 5); sleep safety and bed sharing (chapter 6); baby sleep patterns (chapter 7); vaccine safety (chapter 8); starting solid foods (chapter 9); and healthy nutrition for the older baby (chapter 10). As I researched and wrote each chapter of the book, I read hundreds of scientific papers, talked to scientists, and interviewed parents for their real-life stories. I looked for answers, but I also wasn’t afraid to investigate and question the parts of science where things are still uncertain, and that is often where I found some of the most interesting stories.

I didn’t write this book pretending to be a parenting expert. I am just a mom with big questions, and I had the scientific training and the curiosity to dig for the answers. I didn’t set out to argue one side or the other on controversial topics. Instead, I’ve tried to be honest about what the science does and doesn’t tell us, even when that might be different from the simplified recommendations handed down to us from parenting authority figures. I loved getting buried in convoluted literature searches, trying to find some kind of truth that could be useful to you and me. Thanks for coming along on this journey with me. I hope it makes your job as a parent a little easier–and maybe more interesting, too.

From The Science of Mom: A Research-Based Guide to Your Baby’s First Year, by Alice Callahan. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press.  Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

You can order my book from any of the following sites: Johns Hopkins Press (use discount code HNAF for 30% off), Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, Indigo, Kobo, and Indiebound – or order it through your local independent bookseller.

I was thrilled to be interviewed by Rachel Martin for NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. The interview aired yesterday, but you can listen to it and read the transcript here:

‘Science of Mom’: Scientist Sorts Through Studies So Parents Don’t Have To

I’m not going to even try to pretend that this was not a HUGE deal to me. I grew up listening to NPR every single day. We lived in a very small house, where the bedrooms were all basically right off of the kitchen, and the sounds of Morning Edition woke me up just about every morning. We listened to NPR in the car on the way to and from school and then back at home while we made dinner. The familiar voices of NPR hosts and the opening jingle were a part of my childhood. And while some kids might dream of being a professional athlete or famous actor, I dreamed of being on NPR. I figured that a good life goal was to do something interesting or useful enough to justify an NPR interview. I never dreamed that it might come out of a parenting blog, but life is full of unexpected surprises.

I recorded the interview with Rachel Martin on last Thursday morning. We’d had the interview scheduled for a week or so, but it wasn’t until about 10:30 that morning – 30 minutes before I needed to leave for the studio – that the show’s producer sent me a list of topics he thought Rachel would ask about. I was actually surprised by a few of them, so I took a few minutes to think through some answers and jot down notes.

Meanwhile, I was counting on my husband to watch BabyM and pick up Cee from her morning camp while I was at the studio. He had come home from a night shift that morning but then left for a bike ride, and he was just a few minutes late in returning from his ride. I was imagining him in injured in a ditch on some lonely highway and started making plans to get BabyM up from his nap and take him with me so that I could make the interview on time (never mind the missing husband!). But luckily, my husband made it just in time to give me a sweaty kiss and take over kid duties, and I drove to KLCC, my local NPR affiliate station. It wasn’t until I arrived at the studio door that I realized that I had left my notes at home.

Oh well. I took a couple of deep breaths and a drink of water. Someone showed me how to put on the headphones and pull up close to the microphone, and before I knew it, I was talking with Rachel Martin.

Rachel was so easy to talk to, and that helped me to at least pretend to be relaxed. We talked for about 20 minutes, but the interview was edited down to about 5 minutes. I expected this, because I know that author interviews on the show usually run about that length. Also, if you listened to the full tape of our interview, you would have heard me say, “Hang on, I lost my train of thought….” in the middle of it! So I’m sure that the show’s editing made me sound better.

I was really happy with how the segment turned out and thought the show did a great job with it. However, in the editing process, a little bit of nuance was also lost. It’s really tough to address four big parenting questions in five minutes. For example, when Rachel and I talked about cord clamping, we also talked about the concern of greater risk of jaundice with delayed cord clamping. I think the benefits of delayed cord clamping probably outweigh that possible risk, but it’s still important to acknowledge both risks and benefits that come with any decision.

When we discussed bedsharing in the full interview, I described the limitations of the evidence base on this question – how the studies don’t always do a great job of accounting for all of the other factors that matter to sleep safety, among them alcohol and drug use, smoking, bedding, and breastfeeding. I also emphasized that there is good evidence that sleeping close, though on a different surface, is protective against SIDS, a message that I feel is too often lost in public health campaigns about safe sleep. I’m glad that they included my mention of cosleeping on couches and chairs as far more dangerous than intentional bedsharing. It’s a really complex question, and I devote an entire chapter to it in my book. I hope that the edited interview at least gave a hint of that complexity.

Rachel also asked me about vaccines. She noted that this issue is controversial among some parents, and I pointed out that while I cover lots of controversial questions in my book, on this one, the science is really clear that the benefits of vaccinating your kids far outweigh the risks. I was bummed that this discussion wasn’t included in the final segment, but I understand given the time constraints. And again, I thought the folks at NPR did a tremendous job of distilling our conversation into the most important points.

It was all really fun for me, and I learned a lot, too. I really take my time with writing and love the written word as a medium for discussing science with heart and nuance – and I think parenting discussions really require this. But it’s also an important skill to be able to be accurate, concise, and conversational, so it was fun to have the opportunity to practice that on NPR. Big gratitude to NPR for choosing to feature my book and recognizing that science can be helpful to parents!

Amazon is currently sold out of my book, but you can still order it and receive it as soon as they get it in stock. Check these other sellers to see if they have it in stock: Johns Hopkins Press (use discount code HNAF for 30% off), Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, Indigo, Kobo, and Indiebound – or order it through your local independent bookseller. Oh, and thank you to readers who have left great reviews on Amazon! Each one really helps my book, and it makes my heart sing to hear that you liked it!

Since last week’s shooting at Umpqua Community College, I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of gun violence in our country. This isn’t a typical topic for me, but of all the things that we worry about as parents, this should probably be among the top of our list.

My 4-year-old daughter, Cee, is full of questions, and she looks to me to help her understand the world. Why was the moon was so red on the night of the lunar eclipse? How do our eyes work to let us see? Can Mary Poppins really fly? These are a few of the things I’ve tried to explain to her lately.

There are heavier questions, too. When a friend’s bike was stolen last week, Cee wanted to know why a person would take something that belonged to someone else. A day or two later, our family witnessed a car accident while we ate dinner outside of a restaurant. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but when the driver at fault emerged from his car, he was clearly intoxicated and a little aggressive. “He’s being mean,” Cee said. “He should really try to be helpful.” We left the restaurant soon after, but she’d already seen those interactions, cataloging them into her reference list of observed human behaviors.

It isn’t easy to explain to a young child why someone would steal or drive drunk. It isn’t easy, but I do my best to find the words. After all, I consider it my job as a parent to help my daughter calibrate her moral compass as she gradually learns more about the world. But when I contemplate explaining a school shooting to her, I am at a loss for words.

And so, I was relieved to be able to shield Cee from the news of last week’s shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, just an hour down the road from our town. I kept the radio off on that day and the days that followed, and I saved discussion of it for hushed adult conversations after bedtime.

I am particularly shaken by this shooting, though, in part because it feels so close to home for us. Roseburg is a small town, and some of the most seriously wounded victims were transported to our better-equipped hospital. Cee didn’t realize it, but those victims touched her life when she heard especially loud sirens on the playground of her preschool that morning. I always tell Cee that when we hear sirens, it means that someone is on their way to help another person in need. But I also know that she’s beginning to understand that there is a less rosy side to every emergency, that not all injuries are accidents and that they can’t all be fixed.

Last week’s shooting also feels close to home because I teach at our local community college. In fact, after I picked Cee up from preschool on the day of the shooting, she and I and her baby brother dropped by campus to visit a colleague who was giving Cee some hand-me-down clothes. Later, when I heard the news, I realized that if the shooter had attended college in our county, I would have put my kids in harm’s way that day. And on any day, if the shooting had been on our campus, it could have just as easily been my colleagues, my students, or even me, huddled in fear in a classroom with a gun pointed towards us.

Thinking about this, my first impulse was to vow never to take my kids onto campus again and maybe to only teach online courses from now on. But quickly, I recognized the futility of this attempt to protect my family. If that’s my strategy, then I’d better also avoid shopping malls, theaters, grocery stores, and of course, my children’s schools. I can’t promise my kids that something like this won’t happen to us.

At Cee’s age, she’s too young to be burdened with this darkest side of human nature. I want her mind to be filled with the wonders of the natural world, the safety of her family and home, and the kindness of friends. As for the more difficult realities of life, I want her to be able to ease her way into grappling with those, facing them in little bits so that they don’t shake her sense of security and her faith in humankind too much. The magnitude of the problem of gun violence in our country feels far too big for a little girl to grasp.

Cee will be a kindergartner next year, though, and I know that she’ll start hearing about events like these from her peers and older kids. It’s hard enough to face these tragedies myself, but being a parent means each one weighs a bit heavier. This is the reality of parenting in America today. It means having to find the words to make sense of the senseless for my children. It means coming to terms with the fact that a shooting like this could touch our family more closely, that we or our children could be victims. Worse still, one of our children could be the shooter. Everyone involved, after all, is someone’s child.

As I prepare to have these tough conversation with Cee, I’m thinking about some of the core points I will want to convey. The first is that we should grieve for those who died unnecessarily. We should feel despair and helplessness and anger. We should be shaken to our cores. It is the honest, human response, and we don’t want to become numb to tragedies like these.

Second, every tragedy is a chance to remind ourselves and our kids to be kind to one another, to open our hearts and ears to those who feel alone or misunderstood. It is up to us to build communities where we all take care of each other.

And finally, I think we all have to resolve to do better. We have to find a way to prevent this from happening again and again and again. If, as parents, we just stand by and hope that it won’t happen to us, then what kind of example are we setting for our children?

How do you talk to your kids about gun violence?

There is no doubt that having a new baby changes everything about sleep. Between fussing, feeding, diapering, and soothing, it is broken into fragments, and the sum of all of those pieces doesn’t usually feel like enough. There’s also your baby’s safety to consider. Nobody likes to think about SIDS, but it is the most common cause of death in babies beyond the newborn period (1), and we want to do everything we can to prevent it. If we could, we might sit awake and watch our babies breathe all night, but of course, we need to sleep, too.

In balancing the need for sleep and safety considerations, one of the factors that parents consider is how close to sleep to their babies. Roomsharing is associated with a lower risk of SIDS. However, some parents find that they sleep better when the baby sleeps in a separate room. Others sleep best with their babies close to them. There are also cultural expectations that influence sleep practices, with roomsharing (and often bedsharing) being the norm in many parts of the world but less common in the U.S. and other Western countries beyond the newborn period (2,3). When I asked readers on my Facebook page about their experiences, the responses were across the map. (I will share some of those responses, with permission, throughout this post.)

In this post, I want to take a closer look at the science behind roomsharing. How does it affect the sleep of babies and parents when they sleep close or apart? How does it protect babies from SIDS? For how long is this important?

(Note that bedsharing raises different questions for sleep quality and safety, and those are beyond the scope of this post. I discuss bedsharing safety in this and this post, and devote most of a chapter to it in my book.)

What is the official advice on roomsharing?

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends roomsharing without bedsharing as an ideal sleep environment (4). However, they don’t specify how long this arrangement should be continued. In the U.K., both the National Health Service and UNICEF U.K. recommend roomsharing for at least the first 6 months. In Australia, parents are advised to roomshare for the first 6-12 months. (International readers, can you share the official advice about roomsharing where you live in the comments?)

Berthe Morisot [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

How does roomsharing with your baby affect sleep?

A study published last month in the journal Sleep Medicine is the largest and best-designed study to investigate this question (5). The study followed 153 middle-class Israeli families, all consisting of married couples having their first baby. Sleep was evaluated in the mothers in the third trimester of pregnancy and again in both mothers and babies at 3 months and 6 months postpartum. The moms and babies wore actigraphs for 5 nights in a row at each time point, and the mothers also kept sleep diaries for each night. I do not understand why, in 2015, researchers don’t care more about fathers’ sleep, but it wasn’t even considered in this study.

The families in this study weren’t advised where their babies should sleep – they each made their own choices. At 3 months, most babies (76%) were sleeping in their parents’ room. At this age, 58% of infants were fully breastfed and 25% were partially breastfed. At 6 months, 50% were roomsharing; 32% were fully breastfed, and 28% were partially breastfed.

Bedsharing didn’t seem to be common in this study – just 7 and 8 infants were reported to be bedsharing at 3 and 6 months, respectively. However, this was determined in a single question asking moms where the baby slept, with the following choices: (a) Infant crib in a separate room; (b) Infant crib in parent’s room; or (c) parents’ bed. I’d be willing to bet that a lot of roomsharing infants were also partial bedsharers, maybe coming into bed with parents at some point in the night, and that wasn’t captured in this study. Regardless, the paper reports no differences in sleep patterns between roomsharing and bedsharing infants, so these two groups were combined for all the data analyses.

Feeding method mattered in this study. Breastfeeding moms and babies had more fragmented sleep, and babies breastfed at 6 months were more likely to be roomsharing at that age. Because of this effect, feeding method was controlled for in the analysis of sleep patterns.

So, how did roomsharing affect sleep? The roomsharing moms had more fragmented sleep than those whose babies slept in a separate room. They didn’t sleep less overall – both groups of moms had an average nighttime sleep of just under 6.5 hours – but roomsharing moms woke more often and spent more time awake during the night. Their longest uninterrupted sleep period during the night was on average 2 hours and 20 minutes at both 3 and 6 months, compared with about 2 hours and 47 minutes in the moms who didn’t roomshare. Again, this difference was found after accounting for the effects of breastfeeding or formula-feeding on sleep.

Does this difference in sleep patterns really matter? The researchers asked the moms to rate the quality of their sleep from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best sleep. At 3 months, the roomsharing moms rated their sleep quality a bit lower than the solitary sleeping moms (6.58 vs. 7.20, p<0.05). At 6 months, there was no significant difference in these ratings. The roomsharing moms did nap more during the day at 6 months, so that might have helped them compensate. This makes the difference in sleep quality appear to be pretty small, but it’s also important to remember that all of these measures are reported as averages. Some moms might find that roomsharing really disrupts their sleep and others not at all, so the average doesn’t tell the whole story.

One interesting finding that I didn’t see reported in the news stories on this study: Roomsharing was associated with a lower risk of depression at 3 months and lower risk of anxiety at 6 months. This doesn’t mean that roomsharing directly improves mothers’ mental health – it’s just a correlation – but it is worth noting. Other studies have found the opposite – that roomsharing or bedsharing are associated with greater risk of depression (6,7).

What about the babies? How did they sleep? In the Israeli study, roomsharing or sleeping in a different room actually didn’t seem to affect the babies’ sleep as measured by the actigraphs. However, when babies slept separately, their moms weren’t aware of some of their wakings. That is, the actigraph recorded some wakings that weren’t noticed by the moms, so the babies must have put themselves back to sleep without calling for help from a parent in the next room. With roomsharing, those wakings are more likely to wake the mother and disrupt her sleep.

One of the big limitations of this study was that it didn’t ask moms why they chose their sleep arrangements. However, roomsharing or not wasn’t related to the babies’ sleep patterns so was most likely driven by maternal preference. Supporting that, the moms who had a harder time sleeping in pregnancy and at 3 months were more likely to roomshare at 6 months. We have no way of knowing if the roomsharing moms would actually sleep better if their babies were in a separate room. Maybe they made that choice because it was the best way for them to sleep. Maybe putting their babies in a separate room would have caused more anxiety and interfered with their sleep in some other way. Sleep is very personal, and where a baby sleeps in a complex decision.

Still, other studies, including across cultures, have found this general pattern that roomsharing or bedsharing is associated with the baby waking more often (or more noticeably) during the night, which in turn is likely to wake the parents (8-11). I also wonder how roomsharing might affect the development of self-soothing and consolidation of sleep, since sleeping separately likely gives babies more opportunities to fall back to sleep on their own after a normal night waking.

Roomsharing is associated with a lower risk of SIDS. But why? And for how long?

Several studies have found that infants are less likely to die of SIDS when they are sleeping in the same room as their parents, and this is the basis of the recommendation to roomshare with your baby.

One of the largest case control studies of SIDS combined data from 20 different regions of Europe, allowing researchers to look at 745 SIDS cases and the risk factors associated with them (12). The authors of this study estimated that 36% of SIDS deaths could have been prevented if infants weren’t placed for sleep in a separate room, and 16% could have been prevented if infants weren’t bedsharing. Together, this means that if all of the infants in this study had slept in the same room as their parents, but not the same bed, more than half of their deaths might have been prevented. (As a side note, I think it is interesting that there seems to be much more angst and controversy over the recommendation to not bedshare than the recommendation to roomshare, even though parents may struggle to follow both.)

This same protective effect of roomsharing has been observed in several other case control studies conducted in Scotland, England, and New Zealand (13-15). The English study found a dramatic 10-fold increased risk of SIDS associated with babies sleeping in their own room. Importantly, at least one study has shown that when infants share a bedroom with other children, it is not protective (15). Instead, the presence of an adult caregiver seems to be important.

It’s important to point out that these case control studies can only show correlations, not causation, and the factors surrounding these unexpected infant deaths are complex. It’s possible that it isn’t sleeping in a separate room that is the true risk factor, but rather that families who tend to move their babies to separate rooms are more likely to have some other unrelated and unidentified risk factor. We just don’t know. Still, this is a consistent finding, and there is a plausible mechanism for protection from SIDS.

How might roomsharing protect infants from SIDS?

SIDS is officially defined as the sudden death of an infant under one year of age when the cause of death remains unexplained after investigation. In other words, we don’t know what causes SIDS, and it may be that there are several different mechanisms. Current hypotheses about causes of SIDS focus on respiratory and cardiovascular control and failure of arousal responses.

Some factors that increase the risk of SIDS are also known to impair infant arousals from sleep. For example, preterm birth, exposure to tobacco smoke during pregnancy or after birth, and infection all decrease an infant’s arousals and increase the risk of SIDS. The same is true for infants who sleep prone (on tummy) or are formula-fed. These babies sleep more deeply and are more difficult to arouse, leaving them more vulnerable to SIDS (16).

Those factors have all been subject to controlled studies of infant arousals, but we know less about roomsharing. Researchers hypothesize that babies sleeping in closer proximity to their mothers have more sensory exchange (from noises, a touch when a parent checks the baby, etc.) and thus spend more time in light sleep and have more short arousals that protect them from SIDS (14, 15, 17). These brief awakenings were probably too short to be captured by the actigraphs (which only recorded awakenings longer than 5 minutes) in the recent Israeli study, but they may have been one reason why the mothers woke more often.

This brings us full circle to the problem of roomsharing sometimes compromising sleep for parents. The very thing about roomsharing that is disruptive to parents might actually be protecting their babies.

How long is roomsharing important? Unfortunately, there aren’t good data on this question. Most studies that find a protective effect of roomsharing haven’t analyzed their data to specifically test if there is an age where the risk of sleeping separately disappears. To my knowledge, the only study to look at this question was published almost 20 years ago in New Zealand (15). It compared the protection of roomsharing in infants aged less than 13 weeks, 13-19 weeks, and 20 weeks and older, and found that roomsharing was equally protective in these three age groups. We don’t have data to tell us if that protection becomes less important at 5 months or 6 months or beyond.

What we do know is that most SIDS cases occur between 1 and 4 months of age, with less than 10% occurring after 6 months of age (18). Any protective effects of roomsharing are probably most important in those first 6 months of life.

Adapted from AAP, Technical Report: SIDS and other sleep-related infant deaths: expansion of recommendations for a safe infant sleeping environment. Pediatrics 128, e1341–67 (2011).

So, what’s a parent to do?

Sometimes roomsharing is the easiest arrangement for both parents and baby for the first 6 months and beyond. In other families, everyone sleeps better with a little space. Sleep deprivation is serious; it can threaten both mental and physical health and even be deadly if it causes a car accident, for example. It’s important to be informed about the protective association of roomsharing but to also recognize that it is reasonable to consider parental sleep and well-being in your choice, given that parents’ well-being is important to infant well-being.

For my part, I had planned to roomshare with BabyM for the first 6 months. It worked very well for the first few months, but between about 4 and 5 months, we went through a rough patch with sleep. He seemed to wake more often in response to our noises, and I was waking more listening to his noises. I had been coping well with sleep so far, but at that stage, I think I really hit a wall of cumulative sleep debt where I felt like I wasn’t functioning well during the day at all. Around 5 months, we moved BabyM out of our room. It was clear that this gave him space to do more self-soothing during the night, and he had fewer wakings that required our help. I also slept better, and it felt like our whole family functioned better.

All else being equal, I knew that BabyM would have been safer sleeping in our room for longer, night wakings and all. But all else is never equal in parenting, and there could be some real risks associated with my sleep deprivation. And while there might have been a slight risk to moving him to his own room, his overall risk of SIDS at that age was very, very low, considering that he was breastfed, sleeping in a safe crib, and living in a non-smoking family.

The choice of where your baby should sleep at night is personal, and every family has to balance their individual factors influencing sleep, safety, and sanity. What worked for you?

REFERENCES

1. Moon, R. Y. & Fu, L. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: An Update. Pediatr. Rev. 33, 314–320 (2012).
2. Nelson, E. A. et al. International child care practices study: infant sleeping environment. Early Hum. Dev. 62, 43–55 (2001).
3. Mindell, J. A., Sadeh, A., Wiegand, B., How, T. H. & Goh, D. Y. Cross-cultural differences in infant and toddler sleep. Sleep Med. 11, 274–80 (2010).
4. American Academy of Pediatrics – Task Force on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Policy Statement: SIDS and other sleep-related infant deaths: expansion of recommendations for a safe infant sleeping environment. Pediatrics 128, 1030–9 (2011).
5. Volkovich, E., Ben-Zion, H., Karny, D., Meiri, G. & Tikotzky, L. Sleep patterns of co-sleeping and solitary sleeping infants and mothers: a longitudinal study. Sleep Med. 16, 1305–1312 (2015).
6. Countermine, M. S. & Teti, D. M. Sleep arrangements and maternal adaptation in infancy. Infant Ment. Health J. 31, 647–663 (2010).
7. Teti, D. M., Crosby, B., McDaniel, B. T., Shimizu, M. & Whitesell, C. J. Marital and emotional adjustment in mothers and infant sleep arrangements during the first six months. Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Dev. 80, 160–176 (2015).
8. DeLeon, C. W. & Karraker, K. H. Intrinsic and extrinsic factors associated with night waking in 9-month-old infants. Infant Behav Dev 30, 596–605 (2007).
9. Mindell, J. A., Sadeh, A., Kohyama, J. & How, T. H. Parental behaviors and sleep outcomes in infants and toddlers: a cross-cultural comparison. Sleep Med. 11, 393–9 (2010).
10. Touchette, É. et al. Factors associated with fragmented sleep at night across early childhood. Arch. Pediatr. Adolesc. Med. 159, 242 (2005).
11. Mao, A., Burnham, M. M., Goodlin-Jones, B. L., Gaylor, E. E. & Anders, T. F. A comparison of the sleep-wake patterns of cosleeping and solitary-sleeping infants. Child Psychiatry Hum. Dev. 35, 95–105 (2004).
12. Carpenter, R. G. et al. Sudden unexplained infant death in 20 regions in Europe: case control study. Lancet 363, 185–191 (2004).
13. Tappin, D., Ecob, R. & Brooke, H. Bedsharing, Roomsharing, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Scotland: A Case-control Study. J. Pediatr. 147, 32–37 (2005).
14. Blair, P. S. et al. Babies sleeping with parents: case-control study of factors influencing the risk of the sudden infant death syndrome. Br. Med. J. 319, 1457–1462 (1999).
15. Scragg, R. K. et al. Infant room-sharing and prone sleep position in sudden infant death syndrome. New Zealand Cot Death Study Group. Lancet Lond. Engl. 347, 7–12 (1996).
16. Franco, P. et al. Arousal from sleep mechanisms in infants. Sleep Med. 11, 603–614 (2010).
17. McKenna, J. J., Ball, H. L. & Gettler, L. T. Mother-infant cosleeping, breastfeeding and sudden infant death syndrome: what biological anthropology has discovered about normal infant sleep and pediatric sleep medicine. Am J Phys Anthr. Suppl 45, 133–61 (2007).
18. American Academy of Pediatrics – Task Force on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Technical Report: SIDS and other sleep-related infant deaths: expansion of recommendations for a safe infant sleeping environment. Pediatrics 128, e1341–67 (2011).

Hi everyone! I’ve been quiet these last few weeks as we’ve celebrated Cee’s 5th birthday (I know! I can’t believe it! Amazing girl…), had house guests, and already celebrated Thanksgiving on Sunday. My husband is working on Thursday, so we made some adjustments this year so we could all be together. We’re already on to turkey soup in our house!

A quick post today to get the word out about a free online parenting summit, featuring video interviews with 21 parenting writers and educators – including me! I recorded my interview with Jeanne-Marie Paynel of Voila Montessori this morning, and I enjoyed chatting with her about the challenge of sorting through overwhelming parenting information, as well as what science tells us about how newborn babies sense the world and how we can best care for them. Other speakers in the summit will discuss child behavior, development, mindful parenting, nutrition, and sleep. The summit includes a closed Facebook group for discussion about the interviews. It starts on December 1, and my interview is scheduled to be the first released. If you sign up, you’ll have access to a new interview each day of the summit. You can join the Be the Best Parent You Can Be summit HERE. I hope to see you there!

More science, coming soon!

This time last year, I had a week-old baby, and my New Year’s resolutions were simple: Be present with my family, find gratitude in each day, and take care of myself. These goals were simple but not always easy. Still, it helped me to come back to these intentions for the year when I started to feel overwhelmed. I’m reaffirming those resolutions for the coming year, but I’m also feeling more ambitious and inspired about bringing more creativity, fun, and learning into each day with my kids.

I love books for inspiration, especially for projects with Cee. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I get too easily side-tracked or overwhelmed on Pinterest. I like to find great books and work my way through them. So for each of my resolutions, I’ve found a book or two as a jumping-off point for the year. (All of the Amazon links in this post are affiliate links, so I receive a tiny commission if you buy through a link, at no extra cost to you. More here. I received no compensation for this post, and unless otherwise noted, I purchased these books myself.)

1. Do more art together.

I think everyone needs to make space in their life for creating something, and kids naturally want and need to explore different ways of doing that every day, whether it’s through building a fort, making music, cooking, or painting. This year, I want to do more creative art with Cee. We often need a quiet activity in the afternoon while BabyM naps, and this feels like a special way to spend time together.

Inspiring this resolution is the beautiful book, The Artful Parent, by Jean Van’t Hul. This book immediately drew me in and kept me up late for a couple of nights of reading and scribbling notes about how to set up a great space for doing art, supplies that I want to add to our collection, and projects I’d like to try. But before I even got my hands on this book, Cee intercepted it and thumbed through it carefully, leaving sticky notes on every page that showed something she wanted to try.

Our copy of The Artful Parent, with Cee’s color-coded sticky notes marking projects of interest. (Light pink indicates two inspiring projects, dark pink one.)

Cee’s major Christmas present was a new art table with plenty of storage so that she can have a comfortable work space that is out of reach of her brother (for now) and that doesn’t need to be cleared for every meal. I also had fun choosing some new art supplies as stocking stuffers for her. The art space is still evolving, but Cee spent most of Christmas day (and the days that followed) working at her new table.

The first half of this book is about how to set your life up for inspiring creativity through the space, supplies, and process. It discusses things like how to talk to your kids about their art in ways that let them lead the conversation. (“Tell me about your painting,” instead of, “What is it?” or “That looks like a house.”) The second half provides 60 art projects for ages 1 through 8. These projects are meant to inspire creativity, not necessarily give a certain product. I love that they’re generally simple, most using supplies that we already have, and many of them integrate cooking, science, outdoor play, and observation of the natural world. We’ve started playing with a few simple projects, and I can’t wait to dig into more in 2016.

Jean Van’t Hul published a second book in 2015 called The Artful Year. Her first has enough to keep us busy for a while, but maybe I’ll add this one for next year.

2. Do more science together.

Through the toddler years, kids organically conduct their own science experiments every day, and I don’t think they need a lot of guidance on structured experiments. When Cee turned 4 last year, we got her this science kit. It gives you some nice basic supplies like tubes and a pipette, and it had a few good experiments in it, but I think that at 5, Cee has already outgrown it. She’s starting to ask more complex questions about science, and she’s enthusiastic about doing more interesting and surprising experiments. Enter our next book: Kitchen Science Lab for Kids by Liz Lee Heinecke. I learned about this book from Tara Haelle’s list of Five Science-Based Parenting Books, which also included my book.

With this book, you can skip the kit, because you have most of the supplies in your own kitchen. (Also, a recent post on Heinecke’s blog, The Kitchen Pantry Scientist, gives a list of supplies for a homemade science kit with way more potential than most you’ll find for sale these days.) The book includes 52 experiments, many of which are perfect for Cee right now and others that will be more suitable in a few years.

We got started last week with two simple experiments about surface tension, Tie Dye Milk and Zooming Fish (both can also be found on the author’s blog). I like having the physical book, because I think the experiments are more clearly presented in book form (with great photos), and it’s nice to have the book in front of us in our “lab.”

Cee making Tie Dye Milk. The instructions very clearly stated not to stir, because it makes it harder to see the effect of soap breaking surface tension. Cee said, “But it’s fun to stir!” She was right, and this experiment merged both art and science. She repeated it a few times.

3. Keep talking to Cee about the value of money and how we – and she – can choose to use it.

One of the most useful parenting books I read last year was The Opposite of Spoiled by Ron Leiber. Cee asked for an allowance about a year ago, when we read A Baby Sister for Francis in preparation for the arrival of BabyM. Francis gets an allowance, and Cee wanted one, too. I was totally lost about how to do that until I read Leiber’s book. Now Cee gets $3.00 every Saturday (well, when we remember), and she puts one in each of three jars: Save, Spend, and Give.

This simple exercise has opened up all kinds of interesting conversations and choices. For example, Cee decided that she wanted to buy her own band-aids with her spending money, because she was fed up with me saying no to band-aids for every invisible bump and bruise. We spent a long time looking at all of the band-aid choices and comparing prices. She had to choose between a box of 100 plain band-aids in various sizes or 20 princess band-aids, each for about $4.00 – a full month’s worth of spending money.

Talking about and practicing with money has encompassed so much more than how we spend it. It’s given us lots of math lessons, for one. It’s also given us a little context for how we talk about privilege and helping others. Homelessness is a very visible problem in our town, and we discussed the pros and cons of Cee giving her Give jar money to people she sees on the street. That opened up conversations about how else we can help those in need and inspired us to start volunteering with the Burrito Brigade, a local group that makes and distributes about 500 burritos every Sunday. It’s rewarding and tangible work for both of us, and Cee ultimately decided to donate her Give jar money to the Burrito Brigade. She was assured that it would buy a whole lot of beans, and we both felt proud of that.

Lieber’s book digs into topics that I haven’t even begun to think through yet, like why all kids should work and the materialism that will no doubt hit us by middle school. That’s why I’ll be rereading this book and continuing these conversations with Cee this year and likely, in the years to come.

4. Stay on track with happy, healthy eating and cooking as a family in 2016.

I feel like eating is one thing my family does consistently well, but it’s also always hard work and a work in progress. We’re pretty good about cooking balanced meals and eating together. Mealtimes with both of my kids are pleasant right now, as Cee is branching out to become more adventurous with her eating and BabyM, who just turned one year old, is in that wonderful period where he’ll try anything and has a big appetite to support his rapid growth. Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility for feeding kids has been my guide from the start. I love its simplicity, and I always recommend Satter’s books, Child of Mine and Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family, to other parents.

I’m including this as a resolution because I think we all need a bit of a reset after the holidays. We relax our usual routines and structure with treats over the holidays, and as we head into the new year, our daily candy intake is still higher than normal. It’s time to get back to a healthier balance, but I don’t want the focus of that shift to be on limiting treats, although that is part of it. Instead, I want some new inspiration for having fun trying new (non-dessert) foods and getting Cee more involved with cooking.

I just received a review copy of a new book that might help with this: Raising a Healthy, Happy Eater by Nimali Fernando and Melanie Potock. I’ve only read sections of it so far, but it looks like a great resource. Potock is a pediatric feeding therapist and wrote a guest post for Science of Mom last year on getting your baby off to a good start with solids by ensuring he has a comfortable and stable seat at the table. I think it’s also Potock’s perspective and background in feeding therapy and as a speech-language pathologist that sets this book apart. I find the developmental and cognitive aspects of learning to eat fascinating, so I love that this book describes these at each stage. If your child has special challenges with eating, you might find this book particularly helpful. I’m looking forward to reading more of this book as BabyM’s eating develops, knowing that he’ll likely become more selective about foods in the next year or so, as most babies do. With Cee, I’ll be trying out some of the recipes in this book and using its tips on school lunches when she starts kindergarten next fall.

Beyond those books, I’m excited to do more reading this year. I’m currently reading and enjoying Eula Biss’s On Immunity: An Inoculation. Up next is a book with a similar title but quite different content: Immunity by William E. Paul. I’m thrilled to have found a local science nonfiction book club, and that’s the book we’re discussing next. Finally, I’m giving myself NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman for my birthday. I’ve heard wonderful things about it, so I’m looking forward to reading and learning from it.

What are your parenting resolutions for this year? And what are you reading these days?