If you have not already done so, please read Blog Posts 1 through 5 that describe how sleep is important and beneficial. I will post specific information for parents and children based on my book, “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child.” Please do not be put off by my book’s length. This is a reference book. Read only the topic of interest to you.
2. MOTHERS
Dr. Liat Tikotzky studied maternal sleep-related cognitions (habitual thoughts and beliefs) used a rating instrument describing 14 hypothetical case descriptions of infants who have difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep. Parents were asked to rate on a 6-point scale (from highly agree to highly disagree) their agreement with assertions in 2 categories:
1. Distress (assertions that represent parental belief that infants experience distress or anxiety upon awakening and parents should therefore directly help or soothe them at night).
2. Limits (assertions that emphasize the importance of limiting involvement at night and focus on encouraging infants to learn self-soothing without or with minimal parental assistance).
She also performed assessments of parental soothing patterns at bedtime and during the night, using a scale from low involvement (1) to high involvement (6):
1. In crib, by himself or herself, without caregiver’s help.
2. In crib with parent’s passive presence (without talking, touching, etc.)
3. In crib with brief parental help for less than 2 minutes.
4. In crib with parental extended help
5. While nursing, feeding, drinking or outside the crib with caregiver’s active help
6. Falling asleep in parent’s bed
Objective sleep measures were obtained on the infants at 1, 6, and 12 months. Her results showed that “maternal cognitions related to concerns about the infants’ distress at night [were] associated with more disturbed sleep, as reflected by a higher number of objective and subjective night wakings, while maternal cognitions emphasizing the importance of limiting parental involvement were associated with more consolidated sleep.” Further, “maternal prenatal cognitions that are shaped even before the infant is born predicted the quality of the infant’s sleep at later stages.” Similarly, “mothers who put more emphasis on the infant’s distress reported later greater parental involvement in soothing their infant to sleep at the age of 6 and 12 months.
These findings support the hypothesis that parental soothing methods are not solely dependent on infant’s characteristics. It appears that mothers bring their own perceptions into the interaction and those cognitions seem to shape their behavior toward the infant around bedtime.”
A study by Dr. Douglas Teti investigated the relationship between maternal depressive symptoms and their children’s sleep issues.
In the context of infant sleep, mothers who harbor cognitions [habitual thoughts and beliefs] that their infant will feel abandoned if they are not by the infant’s side during the night or that their infant will go hungry if not fed (even when the infant is not distressed) may be more likely to spend more time with their infants at bedtime and at night and in turn awaken their infant more frequently or keep them awake longer than mothers who do not harbor such cognitions. Mothers reporting higher depressive symptoms [were much more likely to] not have a calming bedtime routine for their infant. Prior to the infants’ bedtime, these mothers had the television on, allowed older children to play rough/make loud noises near the infant, appeared insensitive to the infant’s needs (e.g., hunger), and kept their infants awake after the infant appeared ready for sleep. [They] were observed responding very quickly to nondistressed infant vocalizations.. This behavior was only observed among mothers reporting higher symptoms of depression.
The researchers concluded: “Mothers with elevated depressive symptoms and worries about infant nighttime needs were more likely to be hyperresponsive to nondistressed infant vocalizations (i.e., babbling or cooing that did not appear to function as a signal for parental assistance), to pick up and nurse the infants even when it appeared that the infants were not in need of nursing, to go to their soundly sleeping infants and move them from their cribs to the parents’ bed to sleep (and in the process, wake their infant up), and to poorly structure bedtimes that in turn led to prolonged infant wakefulness. We suspect that mothers who worry excessively about their infants’ well-being at night may be motivated to seek out and intervene with their infants, regardless of whether the infants require intervention or not, in order to alleviate mothers’ anxieties about whether their infants are hungry, thirsty, uncomfortable, and so on. We suspect that mothers with elevated depressive symptoms may be motivated to spend time with their infant at night in order to satisfy mothers’ emotional needs. Among mothers with depressive symptoms, the mothers’ behavior at nighttime was associated with infant night waking because they incorrectly believed (dysfunctional cognition) that they had to attend to their non-distressed infants and feed them even if they had just been fed”
This is so interesting. I wonder if there is also an increased incidence in mothers attending to their child at night if they were separated at birth due to either health issues with the mother or the infant. Like a NICU stay or a prolonged surgery for the mother to save the mother’s life.