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.
Ocean’s sleep story does not follow a clean arc. It is a saga, as his mother called it — full of setbacks, complications, and the particular difficulty of a baby whose early feeding challenges made the usual starting points unavailable. What makes it worth reading is the honesty with which she describes the accumulation of obstacles, and the sentence she arrived at near the end: as parents we must learn how to do hard things.
“I got the book ‘Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child’ as a gift at my baby shower. While pregnant I remember scanning through a few pages and thinking to myself that I really needed to have healthy sleep habits for my baby very early.
When baby was born we had feeding challenges — due to tongue tie he would literally spend hours nursing, some days 12 times a day. It was inevitable that he would fall asleep always during feedings, unintentionally. He has always been a happy baby, no excessive crying, no colic, no witching hour. He did hate the car seat though!
At 3 weeks of age the contact naps started. I remember telling my lactation consultant that I couldn’t get him to sleep anywhere other than on me and she said he might be going through a growth spurt. So I thought this would be just a phase and would pass soon. By 12 weeks we were still in the contact nap situation. I couldn’t do it anymore. When my baby was awake I was able to put him down if he wasn’t nursing, and I felt guilty because that was the time I could really enjoy his company — but instead I used that time to do things around the house, or eat, or use the restroom. Then he would cry, I’d pick him up, and we would start all over again.
I decided to use the nap drill to get him to nap in his crib. Nights were fine — he would sleep in his bassinet beside me. He didn’t have many wakings, just the usual for a newborn. However he would always fall asleep while nursing due to the tongue tie. He didn’t have many chances to learn self-soothing early.
After 4 nights using the nap drill and extinction at night, I was able to get him to sleep in his crib for naps, but naps became short — around 30 to 45 minutes versus the 2 to 3 hours of contact naps. Soon after I started the training we had an international trip where we had to co-sleep due to no other option. During 3 weeks of the trip I nursed him every time he woke up. I believe a bad habit started forming there. He turned 4 months old during this trip. The airplane rides were long and terrible. The country where we were was hot and we didn’t have AC. Funny enough his naps were good — he was able to fall asleep on his own. However the nights started to become a huge problem. I believe this trip backtracked the progress he had made in some ways.
Once we returned to the US his sleep was a mess. We had one or another good nap day and night sleep. When he was 6 months old the nights were really bad — he was waking every 1 to 3 hours and only going back to sleep after nursing. Naps were short and irregular. I contacted Dr. Weissbluth around Thanksgiving. He coached me on how to proceed to get things back on track. I was worried as it was almost time for me to return to work and we all needed to sleep well at night. We had some bumps on the road as there was construction on our street and the baby’s bedroom could get too hot or too cold at night.
Night 1 — 1 hour of crying to fall asleep at bedtime Night 2 — 1 hour of crying to fall asleep at bedtime Night 3 — 15 minutes of crying to fall asleep at bedtime Night 4 — no crying to fall asleep at bedtime
Naps started to get longer, finally. We were still having night waking problems — not as bad. So we had Dad give the baby a bottle of expressed breastmilk to see if he was really hungry at night. He took around 2 to 2.5 ounces each night. On the third night of the experiment he did not wake up crying and was in his crib from 7pm to 7:07am.
It’s Christmas and we are not out of the woods yet. The second nap usually ends too early and by 3:30pm the baby is tired. We are trying to adjust the schedule — it’s a day-by-day thing. There are also some bad night wakings where he still cries for an hour. I only go to him once at night if I think he’s hungry or thirsty. This is taking way longer than I thought, but we hope things keep improving and are trying our best to be consistent. Letting my baby cry is one of the most difficult things I have to do. However, as parents we must learn how to do hard things.”
What Made This Harder Than Most
Ocean’s sleep story was complicated from the beginning by something outside his mother’s control. Tongue tie made feeding slow, effortful, and sleep-inducing — not because she was doing anything wrong, but because a structural problem made it nearly impossible for him to stay awake through a feeding. A baby who always falls asleep at the breast never gets the opportunity to practice falling asleep any other way. The self-soothing skill that other babies begin developing in the first weeks of life was unavailable to Ocean until the feeding situation was addressed.
By the time contact napping had been established for three months, and then reinforced through three weeks of international travel and bedsharing, Ocean had a clear and well-practiced expectation: sleep happens in contact with a person, and night waking ends with nursing. Those are learned associations — not character traits, not permanent features of his biology — but they were deeply ingrained by the time his mother began working to change them.
The Role of Cumulative Disruption
The international trip at 4 months was the inflection point. The progress made with the nap drill before the trip was not erased, but it was significantly set back. Every night of nursing-to-sleep during those three weeks reinforced the association that had been weakening. When the family returned, the nights that followed were the predictable result — not of a new problem, but of an old pattern that had been reinstated and then compounded by the adjustment back to the home time zone and environment.
This is what cumulative disruption looks like in practice. It is not one bad night. It is three weeks of a sleep-reinforcing pattern, layered on top of an already-established feeding association, in a baby who had limited early opportunities for self-soothing. The sleep debt was real, the habits were entrenched, and the correction required patience measured in weeks, not days.
Progress Is Not Linear
The four-night extinction sequence — one hour, one hour, fifteen minutes, nothing — is encouraging and typical. What came after was messier: continued night wakings, temperature disruptions from construction, a baby who still cried for an hour on some nights, and a schedule that required daily recalibration. This is not failure. This is what recovery from significant cumulative sleep disruption actually looks like in a real family, in a real house, in December, with a return to work approaching.
The father’s involvement — taking over the nighttime bottle to test genuine hunger — was a meaningful intervention. A baby who takes only 2 to 2.5 ounces at a nighttime waking is not waking from hunger. He is waking from habit. Separating the two allowed the family to stop responding to one without neglecting the other.
The Sentence That Matters
As parents we must learn how to do hard things.
This is not self-pity. It is an accurate description of what parenting requires at its most demanding moments. Listening to a baby cry — knowing he is safe, knowing the crying will diminish, knowing the skill being built is real and durable — is genuinely difficult. It asks parents to hold discomfort in the present in exchange for a benefit that arrives later. That is the structure of many of the most important things parents do.
Ocean’s mother did it imperfectly, across multiple setbacks, without a clean resolution by the time she wrote this account. She was still in it at Christmas. But she was doing it — consistently, thoughtfully, and with a clear understanding of why it mattered.
That is enough. The biology takes it from there.
— Marc Weissbluth, M.D.
