10 Sleep Stories from Real Moms

Everyone is different!

I’ve been hard at work interviewing moms about their sleep journeys and here’s what I’ve learned: everyone is different! What works for one mom is another mom’s nightmare. The other thing that was painfully obvious throughout these interviews was that most moms feel enormous pressure to do things a certain way - pressure from their peer group, their partner, from internet “experts,” or consultants - and that this often gets in the way of their own intuition and preferences. In my last post, I reviewed the (limited) evidence on what approach helps moms get the most sleep, but studies are always aggregates and they erase the complexity of individual variation. What the evidence does clearly show is that, if done correctly, any approach can be safe and effective. I wish more mothers knew this and felt empowered to choose for themselves. We need to listen to one another and support one another in our individual choices, rather than pushing what worked for us. I am sharing shortened versions of these 10 stories below, because I bet you will feel seen and understood in at least one of them, and also understand how someone may come to a different decision from yours. (All names have been changed in order to protect the mother’s privacy).

Photos by Vincent Ferrané for The New Yorker

Gabriella

Gabriella was born on a river in Columbia. Her mother’s labor was fast and she was unable to make it home or to a hospital in time. Her father caught the new baby. The area where she was raised is now a red war zone, but when she was a child it was still safe.

Gabriella’s father was indigenous and her mother, although not indigenous, worked in the indigenous community preserving first-nation dialects. “My best memories of my childhood were sleeping with the people I loved,” she told me, “I still have very fond memories of that.” In the community where Gabriella grew up, co-sleeping was the norm. Gabriella’s father left when she was quite young and her mother worked 3 jobs to make ends meet, so they didn’t see a lot of one another during the day, but nighttime was a time to reconnect. “I slept with my mom until I was 12,” she told me, without any shame. When she was 12, her mother immigrated to the United States for work and Gabriella continued co-sleeping with either her aunt or her grandmother. “It was very normal”, she said, “everyone always welcomed me. There were no comments or anything.” Even after she grew up and got married, whenever her mother came home she would kick her husband out so that they could snuggle. “I don’t care if people think it’s weird,” she said, “why should you give up something you love just because it makes someone else uncomfortable?”

Gabriella lives in Switzerland now and has two daughters of her own. Of course she choose to co-sleep with them. “There are always lots of legs and fists flying around,” she said, “but I am used to it. I rarely wake up feeling exhausted. Even after I went back to work, I always felt that I could function just fine. The truth is, I don’t think I could do it any other way. I love sleeping with my girls. It brings me great joy. I would feel very anxious if they were not next to me.” She says that people in Switzerland are generally very accepting of all parenting styles, but she is acutely aware of the fact that her choices are not the norm. “At the hospital, I refused to put my baby in the bassinet and they made me sign a form before taking her home that said I would not sleep with her on the same surface, because I could injure her. Of course, I ignored it.”

Gabriella works clinically with mothers as part of her work and says she is careful not to project what works for her onto others. “Many people prefer to have their children sleep in another room and to go to them when they are upset. That’s fine too!” She told me that she understands many people are more sensitive to touch than she is. “I love touch,” she told me, “Maybe it’s because of how I was brought up.”

Faith

Fait is from Tennessee. She has a one-year-old boy and a four-year-old boy and works part-time as a doula. Before the birth of her first, she hadn’t thought much about sleep. “I was just focused on getting through birth,” she told me. Someone had gifted her the Baby Wise book and so she started browsing it after her son was born. “It wasn’t until later that I learned how controversial that book is,” she said. At the time she thought it sounded well-reasoned and full of good sense. She decided to follow the book’s advice. She was religious about her baby’s feed-wake-sleep schedule and never let him fall asleep on the breast. “Getting him on that kind of a schedule was stressful and felt unnatural,” she told me, “but by 3 months he was sleeping through the night.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to stop her from having postpartum depression.

“When my second was born, I thought, I am just going to do whatever it takes to avoid the depression I had the first time around,” she said. “I hated breastfeeding and I hated the sleep deprivation of early motherhood and I just thought: maybe there is a better way.” She decided to wean very early on and her husband was responsible for all of the night-time feeds and care. “Honestly, it was great,” she said.

Jessica

Jessica is from New Jersey and works as a marketing consultant for a pharmaceutical company. Her son is 7 months old.

“I was obsessed with figuring out how I could get the best possible sleep after my baby was born,” she said, ‘so I bought all the books. I think I own at least seven just on baby sleep. Because my job is stressful, I felt I could not afford to be sleep deprived.” Her plan was to sleep train.

Her birth did not go according to plan and her baby spent some time in the NICU. The nurses in the NICU got him on a schedule early on and in the beginning she slept fairly well, but at about the 12-week mark her son had a major sleep regression. “I was up every hour,” she recalls. “He just refused to settle in the bassinet or crib, but we noticed that as soon as we picked him up, he would instantly fall back asleep.” She said she was surprised when her husband - a very by-the-book, safety-first, evidence-based physicist - suggested they bring him in bed with them. “The very first night we brough him into bed, we slept four hours in a row,” she said. “Sleeping in the C-curl position was not that comfortable for me, but we were all sleeping so much better that it was totally worth it.” Because her son had spent time in the NICU after birth, her milk supply had never been very good, and they had been supplementing with formula from the beginning. “As soon as we started co-sleeping, my supply went way up,” she said. “I was actually really surprised by that, because I had read that by 12 weeks your supply is already established, but I was able to completely stop supplementing.”

At 7 months, they have no plans to stop bed-sharing in the immediate future. “It really works for us. Even my husband enjoys it,” she said.

Tina

Tina lives in Burlington, Vermont. Her daughter is 16 months old and she is home with her full-time for now. “My plan was always to bed-share,” she said. “Burlington is very progressive and all of my friends bed-shared. I actually felt quite a lot of pressure to bed-share with my daughter.” It did not work for her. He daughter had reflux so it was not possible to breastfeed in the side-lying position. “I had to hold her up and burp her or she would not go back to sleep.” Nevertheless, she stuck with it for 5 months. “It was horrible,” she said. Some nights she would spend all night in a sort of twilight sleep without ever getting any kind of deep, restorative rest. “I was part of this natural baby group and I was asking for help and alternatives and everyone was just in total denial of the fact that there was another way of doing things,” she said, “everyone kept saying, ‘oh, yeah, that’s just what it’s like to have a newborn.’”

She was so sleep deprived that she ran a stop-sign with her baby in the car and totaled the car. Fortunately, no one was hurt. “After that,” she said, “I decided we needed to make a change.” At 6 months, they switched her daughter to sleeping in her own room and she immediately started sleeping 6 hours at a time, no sleep training needed. “It turns out, my daughter also sleeps better alone,” she said, “everyone sleeps better and we are all so much happier.” Tina makes a point of still going to her natural baby parenting circle and telling the new moms that co-sleeping doesn’t work for everyone.

Jenna

Jenna lives in a self-described “crunchy community” outside of Boulder. Her plan was to co-sleep and breastfeed since that was the norm among her friends, but breastfeeding turned out to be a huge struggle. She hired a lactation consultant who was very knowledgeable but who wanted her to continue breastfeeding at all costs. “It was really bad for my mental health,” she told me. The consultant taught her about sleeping in the C-curl and side-lying breastfeeding, but because of her son’s bad latch, it never worked very well. Eventually they moved him to a crib in their room and at 11 weeks they put him in his own room. “He turned out to be a really good sleeper,” she told me. By 11 weeks, he was able to sleep through the night with just one “dream feed” around 11 PM.

She learned from her experience with her first that if she didn’t get 5 hours straight of consolidated sleep, she just didn’t feel like herself. When her second was born, her and her husband made a plan to sleep in shifts. “We had one room with an adult bed and a crib,” she said, “and another with just an adult bed. My husband and I would split the nights, so each of us would get half of the night in the room without the baby. Whoever was on-call with the baby did everything, from diapering to feeding to soothing. I did have to wake up to pump sometimes when I was off-duty but pumping was always easier for me than breastfeeding, so it worked really well for us.” Jenna says that if she got those first 5 hours of consolidated sleep, it didn’t matter what the rest of the night was like, she would feel fine. “It was a game changer.”

Marina

Marina lives in New York City and worked in marketing before her baby was born. They had a traumatic birth and she said her anxiety was off the charts, even before they left the hospital. When they got back home, she had her son sleeping next to her in a side-car crib, but she couldn’t sleep no matter how much she tried. “I just felt instinctively that I wanted my baby against my body,” she told me, “but everyone told me not to do it.” Even her mother, who was from Russia and who had bed-shared with Marina and her siblings (at the time in Russia it was not disadvised) told her that if she had known about the risks she would not have done it. “The whole mood around me was very alarmist,” she says, “which was not helpful given how anxious I was already feeling.”

All of the healthcare professionals around her, including the lactation nurse, obstetrician, and psychologist were all creating an expectation that if she did not sleep she would go into psychosis and hurt her baby. Eventually, when her sleep did not get better, they said she needed to stop breastfeeding immediately and start taking medication. “But I just wasn’t ready to give up on breastfeeding,” she said. Eventually she started pulling her son into bed. “We bed-shared for one month and I got pretty good at side-lying breastfeeding, “ she recalls, “and that was when I got the best sleep.” But with her maternity leave coming to a close, she was worried she would still be too tired to function at work, so she decided to hire a night nurse. “I expected I would just get a solid 8 hours of sleep once she started,” she said. Instead, on the first night with the night nurse she got the worst sleep she had gotten in months. She kept at it for a couple of weeks, but since she was sleeping apart from her baby, her hormones started to shift. “My supply just plummeted and so did my mood,” she told me.

She gave up on breastfeeding and started taking antidepressants. They didn’t work. Finally, she found a resource called the Sleep Coach School that talked about how sleep is a passive process, how different people sleep in different ways, and how letting go of expectations is actually the first step towards getting a better night’s sleep. “It saved my life,” she says. There were lots of other moms in the program, all of whom had been told that if they did not sleep they would be a danger to their baby, that they had to sleep when baby sleeps, and that lack of sleep would turn into psychosis. The professionals around them were putting so much pressure on them to sleep that it ended up having the opposite effect. “If I could do it all again,” she said, “I would have bed-shared with him from day one and, most importantly, I would have accepted that sleep deprivation is just a normal part of the postpartum journey.”

Molly

Molly is from Minnesota and has three kids who are now 3, 5 and 8 years old. When Molly was a kid, she and her brother co-slept with her mom, even though it was definitely not the norm where she grew up. “My Dad worked the night shift,” she said, “so my brother and I would pile into the queen bed with my mom. When my Dad got home, early in the morning, he would transfer us to our own rooms and get in bed with my mom.” She recalls having very fond memories of sleeping her mom. “I don’t think we stopped until I was maybe 10 or older,” she said, “and it made traveling really easy. We would go visit my grandmother and just sleep in a heap of blankets on the floor together: hunter-gatherer style!”

When Molly had her own kids, her plan was to co-sleep, but her son was (in her words) “the loudest, most annoying sleeper on the planet.” Even at age 8, he is still the worst sleeper in the family. “I think it’s just his sleep personality,” she said. He has night terrors. He talks. He moves. His feet end up where his head was. “If I put a tracker on him, I bet he’d have 3000 steps in by the morning,” she jokes. She was never able to figure out side-lying breastfeeding, and even after a good nurse, he would not settle. “My husband and I spent a lot of time bouncing him on the yoga ball,” she said. At 6 months she couldn’t take it anymore and they decided to try sleep training. They tried every method out there, but nothing worked. “He was just a terrible sleeper,” she said. “It really made me question whether we should have another. I didn’t have the courage to even think about it until he was 4.”

Eventually, they ended up having two more, and luckily, they were better sleepers this time. Now - at 3, 5 and 8 - they all sleep together in a queen bunk bed in their own room. “I think it’s nice having them all in one room,” she said, “because they are not scared when they are together, and sometimes they will comfort one another.”

Hannah

Hannah is from Kentucky and has a 2-year-old boy. In the beginning, she had her son sleeping in a bassinet next to the bed. “We slept okay,” she said, “but not great.” Her husband was gone for work a lot and one night, when her husband was away and she had the bed to herself, she decided to bring her son into bed with her. “It wasn’t a strategy or anything,” she told me, “I just did it instinctively.” That night, she got the best night’s sleep she had gotten since bringing him home. “I realized that even the little movement required to lift him out of the bassinet next to the bed wrecked my sleep,” she said, “whereas just lying next to each other made a huge difference.” She started following some co-sleeping accounts on social media and learned how to sleep in the C-curl and breastfeed without getting up. When her husband came back, he decided he would just start sleeping separately from the two of them, and that was fine. She got so good at breastfeeding while lying down that the feeds hardly woke her up anymore. “I feel like my son and I are totally in sync with the timing of our sleep cycles,” she told me. “I usually fall back asleep before he is even done with the feed. I actually feel better rested most nights than before I had a baby.” She likes to keep toys by the bed so they can wake up slowly together in the early morning. He plays while she sleeps a bit longer and then eventually they get up together. “It’s worked really well for us,” she said.

Laura

Laura lives in Salt Lake City and has a 2.5-year-old and a 6-month-old. She and her husband both work full-time outside the home. She struggled with breastfeeding with both children and had to supplement with formula from the beginning. “Both of my kids were very good sleepers,” she said, “and part of that could be due to formula feeding, since I’ve heard that kids who formula-feed sleep better.” They were also very diligent in developing “healthy sleep habits” for both children from the start. “We followed the Taking Cara Babies playbook,” she said. “We would watch for when they were drowsy and put them in the crib right away so that they learned to fall asleep in the crib on their own.” Both of her children were sleeping in six-hour stretches starting at 8 weeks old. “I definitely think that getting them in the habit of falling asleep unassisted helped with that,” she told me, “but then again, maybe I just got lucky.”

Emelia

Emelia is from Michigan and has a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, both girls. “It was the era of Emily Oster and Taking Cara Babies,” she recalls, “and everyone in my community was doing things that way. I didn’t even think that there were other options. I just thought: I need to get my girls to learn healthy sleep habits and then we will sleep train.” Things went according to plan for Emelia. They sleep trained both girls around 6 months and it worked extremely well. “It only took a couple of nights of gentle crying,” she told me, “and now they both sleep through the night in their own rooms.” She said she really enjoyed getting that evening time with her husband to relax and watch TV, without worrying about tending to a crying baby. On the other hand, she told me she occasionally has regrets. “Sleep training was effective but it was extremely emotionally difficult for me,” she said, “Sometimes I wish I had not repressed my own intuition so much. I actually think they would have been good sleepers either way. But I continued, because of the pressures of all these other outside influences and the sense that if I didn’t sleep train I was somehow weak and depriving my baby of developing a vital skill.” Looking back, she says she kind of misses all of the extra cuddles and closeness that would have come from sleeping with her girls. On the other hand, she does not feel like the sleep training had any negative effect on her girls, on their behavior or attachment, or on their relationships with one another.