Bringing Up Bebe (5 page)

I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do with this information. I’m not looking for a meta-theory on how to think about Bean’s nights. I just want her to sleep. How can I figure out why French babies sleep so well if their own parents can’t explain it and their sleep books read like cryptic poetry? What does a mother have to do for a good night’s rest?

Oddly enough,
my epiphany about the French sleep rules happens while I’m visiting New York. I’ve come to the United States to visit family and friends, and also to get a hands-on feel for one corner of American parenting. For part of the trip I stay in Tribeca, the neighborhood in lower Manhattan where industrial buildings have been converted into tony loft apartments. I hang out at a local playground, chatting with the other mothers.

I thought I knew my parenting literature. But these women make it clear that I’m just a dilettante. Not only have they read everything, they’ve also assembled their own parenting styles like eclectic designer outfits, following separate gurus for sleep, discipline, and food. When I naively mention “attachment parenting” to one Tribeca mother, she immediately corrects me.

“I don’t like that term, because who’s not attached to their child?” she says.

When talk turns to how their kids sleep, I expect these women to cite lots of theories, then to give the usual American complaints about one-year-olds waking up twice per night. But they don’t. Instead, they say that lots of babies in Tribeca do their nights à la
française at about two months old. One mother, a photographer, mentions that she and many others bring their kids to a local pediatrician named Michel Cohen. She pronounces his first name “me-shell,” like the Beatles’ song.

“Is he French?” I venture.

“Yeah,” she says.

“French from France?” I ask.

“French from France,” she says.

I immediately make an appointment to meet Cohen. When I walk into his waiting room, there’s no doubt that I’m in Tribeca and not in Paris. There’s an Eames lounge chair, retro seventies wallpaper, and a lesbian mother in a fedora. A receptionist in a black tank top is calling out the names of the next patients: “Ella? Benjamin?”

When Cohen comes out, I immediately see why he’s such a hit with mothers. He has tousled brown hair, doelike eyes, and a deep tan. He wears his designer shirts untucked, with sandals and Bermuda shorts. Despite two decades in the United States, he has hung onto a charming French accent and parlance (“When I give my advices to parents . . .”). He’s done for the day, so he suggests that we sit outside at a local café. I readily agree.

Cohen clearly loves America, in part because America venerates its mavericks and entrepreneurs. In the land of managed care, he’s fashioned himself into a neighborhood doctor. (He greets a dozen passersby by name as we sip our beers.) His practice, Tribeca Pediatrics, has expanded to five locations. And he’s published a pithy parenting book called
The New Basics
with his picture on the cover.

Cohen is reluctant to credit France for the innovations he’s brought to lower Manhattan. He left France in the late 1980s and remembers it as a country where newborn babies were left to cry it out in the hospital. Even now, he says, “You can’t go to a park without seeing a kid take a beating.” (Perhaps this used to be true. However, in the scores of hours I’ve clocked in Parisian parks recently, I witnessed a spanking only once.)

But some of Cohen’s “advices” are exactly what today’s Parisian parents do. Like the French, he starts babies off on vegetables and fruits rather than bland cereals. He’s not obsessed with allergies. He talks about “rhythm” and teaching kids to handle frustration. He values calm. And he gives real weight to the parents’ own quality of life, not just to the child’s welfare.

So how does Cohen get the babies of Tribeca to do their nights?

“My first intervention is to say, when your baby is born, just don’t jump on your kid at night,” Cohen says. “Give your baby a chance to self-soothe, don’t automatically respond, even from birth.”

Maybe it’s the beer (or Cohen’s doe eyes), but I get a little jolt when he says this. I realize that I’ve seen French mothers and nannies pausing exactly this little bit before tending to their babies during the day. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was deliberate or that it was at all significant. In fact, it had bothered me. I didn’t think that you were supposed to make babies wait. Could this explain why French babies do their nights so early on, supposedly with few tears?

Cohen’s advic Shen wait. Coe to pause a little bit does seem like a natural extension of “observing” a baby. A mother isn’t strictly “observing” if she jumps up and holds the baby the moment he cries.

For Cohen, this pause—I’m tempted to call it “
La Pause
”—is crucial. He says that using it very early on makes a big difference in how babies sleep. “The parents who were a little less responsive to late-night fussing always had kids who were good sleepers, while the jumpy folks had kids who would wake up repeatedly at night until it became unbearable,” he writes. Most of the babies Cohen sees are breast-fed. That doesn’t seem to make a difference.

One reason for pausing is that young babies make a lot of movements and noise while they’re sleeping. This is normal and fine. If parents rush in and pick the baby up every time he makes a peep, they’ll sometimes wake him up.

Another reason for pausing is that babies wake up between their sleep cycles, which last about two hours. It’s normal for them to cry a bit when they’re first learning to connect these cycles. If a parent automatically interprets this cry as a demand for food or a sign of distress and rushes in to soothe the baby, the baby will have a hard time learning to connect the cycles on his own. That is, he’ll need an adult to come in and soothe him back to sleep at the end of each cycle.

Newborns typically can’t connect sleep cycles on their own. But from about two or three months they usually can, if given a chance to learn how. And according to Cohen, connecting sleep cycles is like riding a bike: if a baby manages to fall back to sleep on his own even once, he’ll have an easier time doing it again the next time. (Adults wake up between their sleep cycles, too, but typically don’t remember this because they’ve learned to plunge right into the next one.)

Cohen says that sometimes babies do need to be fed or picked up. But unless we pause and observe them, we can’t be sure. “Of course, if [the baby’s] requests become more persistent, you’ll have to feed her,” Cohen writes. “I’m not saying let your baby wail.” What he’s saying is, just give your baby a chance to learn.

This idea isn’t entirely new to me. It sounds familiar from some of my American sleep books. But it’s usually mentioned among lots of other advice. I may have tried it once or twice with Bean but never with particular conviction. No one ever pointed it out to me as the one, crucial, most important thing to do and to stick with.

Cohen’s singular instruction could solve the mystery of why French parents claim they never let their babies cry for long periods. If parents do The Pause in a baby’s first two months, the baby can learn to fall back to sleep on his own. So his parents won’t need to resort to “crying it out” later on.

The Pause doesn’t have the brutal feeling of sleep training. It’s more like sleep teaching. But the window for it is pretty small. According to Cohen, it’s only until the baby is four months old. After that, bad sleep habits are formed.

Cohen says his sleep methods are an easy sell for the res Sl fht=ults-oriented parents in his Tribeca practice. But elsewhere, he says, parents often need more coaxing. They’re opposed to letting their babies cry even a little. Cohen says he eventually persuades almost all the parents of newborns in his practice to try his methods. “I try to explain the roots of things,” he says. That is, he teaches them about sleep.

When I get back
to Paris, I immediately ask French mothers whether they do The Pause. Every single one says that, yes, of course they do. They say this is so obvious they hadn’t thought to mention it. Most say they started doing The Pause when their babies were a few weeks old.

Alexandra, whose daughters slept through the night while they were still in the hospital, says that of course she didn’t rush over to them the second they cried. She sometimes waited five or ten minutes before picking them up. She wanted to see whether they needed to fall back to sleep between sleep cycles or whether something else was bothering them: hunger, a dirty diaper, or just anxiety.

Alexandra—who wears her curly blond hair in a ponytail—looks like a cross between an earth mother and a high school cheerleader. She’s extremely warm. She wasn’t ignoring her newborn babies. To the contrary, she was carefully
observing
them. She trusted that when they cried, they were telling her something. During The Pause, she watched and listened. (She adds that there’s another reason for The Pause: “to teach them patience.”)

French parents don’t have a name for The Pause; they just consider it common sense. (It’s the American in me who needs to brand it.) But they all seem to do it and to remind each other that it’s critical. It’s such a simple thing. It strikes me that the French genius isn’t coming up with a novel, mind-blowing sleep trick. It’s clearing out the clutter of competing ideas and focusing on one thing that truly makes a difference.

Now that I’m attuned to The Pause, I start to notice that it’s mentioned a lot in France. “Before responding to an interrogation, common sense tells us to listen to the question,” says an article on Doctissimo, a popular French Web site. “It’s exactly the same thing with a crying baby: the first thing to do is to listen to him.”

Once you get past the philosophical sections, the authors of
Sleep, Dreams and the Child
write that intervening between sleep cycles “indisputably” leads to sleep problems, such as a baby who fully wakes up after every ninety-minute or two-hour cycle.

It’s suddenly clear to me that Alison, the marketing expert whose son fed every two hours for six months, wasn’t handed a baby with weird sleep needs. She unwittingly taught him to need a feed at the end of every two-hour sleep cycle. Alison wasn’t just catering to her son’s demands. Despite her best intentions, she was creating those demands.

I never hear of a single case like Alison’s in France. The French treat The Pause as sleep solution number one, and something to wheel out when the baby is only a few weeks old. An article in
Maman!
magazine points out that in the first six months of a baby’s life, 50 percent to 60 percent of his sleep is
sommeil
agit S/emts é
(agitated sleep). In this state, a sleeping baby suddenly yawns, stretches, and even opens and closes his eyes. “The error would be to interpret this as a call, and thus derail our baby’s sleep train by picking him up,” the article says.

The Pause isn’t the only thing that French parents do. But it’s a critical ingredient. When I visit Hélène De Leersnyder, the Proust-quoting sleep doctor, she immediately mentions The Pause, without any prompting. “Sometimes when babies sleep their eyes move, they make noise, they suck, they move around a bit. But in reality, they’re sleeping. So you mustn’t go in all the time and disturb him while he’s sleeping. You have to learn how the baby sleeps.”

“What if he wakes up?” I ask.

“If he wakes up completely, you pick him up, of course.”

When I talk to American parents about sleep, science rarely comes up. Faced with so many different and seemingly valid sleep philosophies, the one they ultimately choose seems like a matter of taste. But once I get French parents talking, they mention sleep cycles, circadian rhythms, and
sommeil paradoxal
. They know that one reason babies cry in the night is that they’re in between sleep cycles or they’re in
sommeil agité
. When these parents said that they “observed” their babies, they meant that they were training themselves to recognize these stages. When French parents pause, they do it consistently and confidently. They’re making informed decisions based on their understanding of how babies sleep.

Behind this is an important philosophical difference. French parents believe it’s their job to gently teach babies how to sleep well, the same way they’ll later teach them to have good hygiene, eat balanced meals, and ride a bike. They don’t view being up half the night with an eight-month-old as a sign of parental commitment. They view it as a sign that the child has a sleep problem and that his family is wildly out of balance. When I describe Alison’s case to Frenchwomen, they say it’s “impossible”—both for the child and for his mother.

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

Armed with my revelation
about the The Pause, I decide to look at some of the scientific literature on babies and sleep. What I find shocks me: American parents may be fighting the “baby sleep wars,” but American sleep researchers aren’t. The researchers mostly agree about the best way to get kids to sleep. And their recommendations sound remarkably French.

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

A meta-study of dozens of peer-reviewed sleep papers