Is Mommy Brain Real?

As my Mom would say, “You bet your sweet bippy it is!” My Mom was born in the ‘40s. And I have no idea what a bippy is. But it basically means an emphatic yes!

Mommy brain - that fog of not being able to remember simple things or speak clearly or make decisions - isn’t just in your head. Okay, it’s happening in your head, but rest assured, it is a very real, physiological thing with a very real cause:

Sleep deprivation.

Now, just because you don’t feel like you’re in a World War II interrogation with a bright light directed at your face 24-7 doesn’t mean you’re not sleep deprived. Adults need 7-9 hours of sleep per night (I tend to need closer to the higher end of this range). And they need those hours to be uninterrupted.

Enter baby.

Interrupted sleep is a fact of life with a new baby that needs to feed every 3-4 hours. Somehow, with the help of grandparents and friends dropping off the odd meal we can manage to get through those first few months. But if your baby gets into some funny sleep habits and doesn’t start stretching his night sleep out longer, you can find yourself six months later waking up every 2 or 3 hours to feed or rock or bounce him back to sleep. Or pop that soother back in for the 27th time.

So what does interrupted sleep do to a Mom’s brain? When we sleep, our brains don’t shut off; they get very active doing some pretty important jobs that only happen during our nightly snooze.

When we don’t get “consolidated sleep” (7-9 hours straight), we miss out on some sleep phases that help us take in new information and store it in a place where we can retrieve it later (so, we end up forgetting stuff all the time).

We also miss the parts of sleep when our brains do their nightly “clean up” - getting rid of all the fluff and information we don’t need anymore, making room for new, useful information. During this deep, restorative sleep, our brains are also busy doing a literal clean up; the lymphatic system actually flushes away waste products that our brain cells produce when they’re doing normal tasks throughout the day. So that “foggy feeling” is probably an accurate description of what’s going on in there!

By the way, this could be Daddy brain too. If Dad is just as involved in those nightly wake ups and bedtime struggles to get baby to sleep, his brain is missing out on the nightly storage and clean-up action too. As one sleep-reformed Dad put it after his 2-year-old went from waking 5 times a night to sleeping 12 hours straight, “I'm not even sure I knew what a wreck I was until things started improving.”

So how do we get rid of Mommy brain? You guessed it - get enough sleep. Every night. It’s actually not enough to have a catch-up nap once a week when Grandma can take baby out with a couple of bottles for a nice, long walk. We need to be getting that restorative, cleaning-up sleep every night.

And if Mommy (or Daddy) is feeling sluggish, how is baby feeling? Our little ones need that memory-storing and brain-cleaning sleep too. There are countless research studies showing the effects of sleep on a baby or young child’s ability to learn and retain information. And not enough sleep for a young child has also been linked to an increased risk of childhood obesity, poor attention and hyperactivity (the kid version of Mommy brain?).

Why some babies start knocking off 12-hour nights at 3 months old and others still wake 4 times a night a year later is usually (if not always) a result of how they’re falling asleep. If your baby needs a “prop” - something outside of herself to help her fall asleep, like a soother, breastfeeding or Mom or Dad’s shoulder to lie on - then she’s likely going to wake up several times a night looking for that thing that got her to sleep in the first place.

So, get rid of the prop, and baby will develop his or her own, internal method for falling asleep, just like we learned when we were babies. But it’s obviously not as simple as it sounds (or you would have done it already); your baby isn’t going to be too thrilled with this major shake-up in routine (and kids love routine). So it’s important to use a proven method that supports your baby through the process, with or without help from a sleep coach to guide you through the ups and downs of what is usually just a two-week process. (Think about that - in just two weeks you could get your brain back!)

Sounds too good to be true? Don’t believe your child has it in him? Can’t quite get around to making the big move? Of course you can’t - you’ve got Mommy brain! It’s hard to make change and take in new information when you’re just not getting the sleep your brain and body needs.

My advice: be easy on yourself; value your sleep; honour your baby’s need for sleep; and, if you don’t feel like winging it or going it alone, call in some help.

How much sleep is enough for your child?

In case you only have 10 seconds to read, I'll cut right to the answer on this one: children between 6 months and 6 years need 11-12 hours of sleep a night, straight. Every night. 

Young children need 11-12 hours of straight sleep each night for optimal health and development.

Now, the long answer:

If your child is still of napping age (younger than 3), this could be less - 10-11 hours at night - as long as they're taking a good, long nap(s) of 2-4 hours during the day. The American Pediatric Association says 11-12 hours of total sleep in a 24-hour period is the minimum.

But in my experience, babies and young children who have good, healthy sleep habits and learn their own strategy for falling asleep (i.e. they don't need to be rocked or fed, or have a soother or a parent lying beside them), will sleep much more than this, simply because they have the ability to sleep as much as their bodies need.

So maybe you’re thinking: “That’s for other people’s kids,” or “My child has never slept well,” or maybe, “He hates being in his crib.”

I’ve heard it all (and used to think all those things too!), and I’ve seen these babies and toddlers completely turn around.  If your child is healthy, well and neurologically normal, then I can say with 99.9 per cent certainty that your child has it in her to sleep through the night. 

But it’s not enough to just add up a child’s bits and pieces of sleep in between bouts of calling out, downing bottles of milk or coming into your room twice a night and call it 11 hours. It’s the straight part in “11-12 hours straight” that matters.

What we all need to feel refreshed, productive and emotionally stable (which is a relative thing for a baby or toddler) is consolidated sleep.

In the beginning, this is impossible; newborn babies need to feed every three to four hours. We can usually manage this in the short term.  But then life goes on, and we have to function.  And we all had a better idea of what kind of parent we wanted to be.

Now it's also possible that you think you're functioning just fine on 7 hours of sleep with a little one waking you up once or twice (or five times?!). That's no mistake either: research on adults has shown that one of the hallmarks of sleep deprivation is that the sleep-deprived person underestimates their impairments and overestimates their abilities. In other words, they do poorly on memory and reaction-time tests, but think they're doing just fine.

And if our children never learn to sleep through the night and have the deep, restorative sleep their brains and bodies need, how must they feel?

Research has shown that children who don't sleep enough have:

• higher risk of obesity
• lower IQ than children who sleep well
• decreased memory or skill retention
• tendency to exhibit hyperactivity (boys in particular)
• lower scores on several areas of school testing including math and literacy.

Some kids weather the blips in regular sleep better than others; there’s a lot that depends on your child’s overall temperament. But there’s just no question that adequate sleep is critical to every child's health and well-being.

Even with a long, consolidated stretch of sleep, my own preschooler is noticeably calmer and more co-operative (and generally nicer to be around) on 12 hours of sleep than on 10-and-a-half.  And on broken or jet-lagged sleep? Forget about it. Let’s face it: parenting is hard enough.

As a sleep coach, my absolute favourite part of the job is hearing parents who have finished a two-to-three-week sleep program talk about the difference a full night’s sleep makes for their child.

Here's one example:

Braeden, a two-and-a-half year old, had been taking an hour or more to fall asleep, waking several times a night (sometimes for a long stretch) and eventually ending up in his parents’ bed.  Every night.  His parents were exhausted and exasperated.

Within a week or two on the plan I created for them that addressed sleep habits, timing, behaviour, and the boundaries around what happens at night versus what happens during the day, Braeden was putting together 12 straight hours every night and napping every afternoon. It was a life changer for his parents.

But one of the most telling pieces of this story was the change they saw in their son: he had been seeing a speech therapist for delayed speech.  Within a few weeks of finally getting adequate sleep, his speech was exploding.  He was counting, singing the alphabet and getting much less frustrated as he could finally start to express his needs. The speech therapist told the parents she had no further need to see their son.

Children need consolidated sleep, just like we do. If they don't get it, it will show up in subtle ways or possibly a big way, like for Braeden. The biggest effects may not even show up until years later, when your child has chronic sleep issues.

The good news is, your child can learn. In fact, they're learning machines; we just have to give them the chance. And when everyone is getting the sleep they need, many other behavioural challenges and parenting problems just melt away.

So, if your child is already falling asleep independently, but continues to wake in the night, how you respond to this waking will make all the difference. If you know they've been well fed and aren't in any discomfort, your first step is to wait. Ten minutes is the magic number for giving your baby or toddler the chance to put themselves back to sleep without your intervention; that will go a long way to seeing those sporadic wakings stop altogether. 

If your little one is still struggling after the 10 minutes, then go in and soothe them in some way that doesn't develop an association - one they will learn to associate with getting back to sleep (like an 18-month old learning to need a bottle in the middle of the night). Keep it quick and keep it simple. Having a 20-minute playtime with their favourite person might be enough to entice them to keep the midnight-waking habit going.

If your child is old enough to get out of bed and pop into your room for a nightly visit (or two or three), again, your response will dictate whether this goes on for years (yes, years) or stops now.  I always recommend as a first-line defence to gently, quietly lead them back to bed, tuck them in and leave again. You may have to do this a lot on night one, but keep your poker face and persevere for a few nights; the fun should be over for your little one soon. 

There is plenty of time for fun during daylight hours, and you will have a lot more energy for it.

3 Steps to a Better Sex Life

This was my family doctor's idea for a marketing slogan when I told him about my sleep-coaching business. He's a funny dude (and thankfully a top-notch doctor).

He was speaking from experience of course. 

There's nothing like a little person in your house waking up every few hours, or a not-so-little person insisting you lie down with them in order to fall asleep twice a night, to send your libido into the basement and totally kill your marital sex life. 

I remember feeling like I finally understood what it was like to be a man, thinking about sex every 10 seconds; in the initial post-partum months, all I ever thought about was sleep. It became an obsessive, invasive thought that would cast a glaze over my eyes whenever someone spoke to me. I would nod and say an appropriate number of "mm-hmm's", but would be really thinking, "When can I sleep? When's the next nap time? I hope she sleeps in her crib so I can nap.... I need more sleep. I'm soooooo tired. Mm-hmm."

Now, there's no avoiding this bleary-eyed sleep obsession in the earliest stage of your baby's life. Your sex life will (and probably should) take a hit; there is a pretty significant physical recovery that has to happen for Mom, not to mention your top priority is keeping a new little human alive.  But often months and even years can go by without that shift back; couples can drift apart in the absence of intimacy when their child isn't sleeping through the night.

Those precious hours between 7 and 10 p.m., when a healthy, happy baby or young child is fast asleep, give Mom and Dad time both for themselves and each other, and that time can save a marriage.

I've had more than a few moms who've called to ask for my help tell me they haven't shared a bed with their partner in months or years. One mom of three said the extent of the quality time she and her husband have is "high-fiving each other" when they meet in the hallway. Another mom told me she finally understood why so many of her friends got divorced when their kids were two and three years old (at the time, she and her husband were in marriage counselling).

Intimacy isn't a luxury. And it isn't something we can afford to sacrifice after having children. Yes, our children need us and sometimes their needs outweigh everything else, but a wise friend told me years ago (several years after her own divorce), that children need parents who love each other. I would add that they also need parents in love with each other. A healthy, happy relationship between a child's parents gives them security and a happy home environment, not to mention a shining example for their own future relationships - these little people are modelling us in every moment and will continue to throughout their lives.

Now I'm not talking about neglecting your baby's needs for your own or your spouse's. This is about keeping your whole family thriving. There's just no question that a healthy sex life is one of the cornerstones of a healthy, happy marriage. (If in doubt, ask your spouse.) When we're too tired and too busy and we let intimacy slip - the same intimacy that brought you together to create this beautiful family in the first place - everyone suffers: one or both partners aren't feeling happy or fulfilled, tension builds and dissatisfaction seeps in.

And your children will pick up on the tension; they always do.

Now, back to my doctor's idea: so what are the three steps to a better sex life?  I'm fumbling through the early parenting years with two kids myself, but let me take a stab at it:

1. Decide that your marriage / partnership is a priority and a critical part of your whole family's happiness.

2. Help everyone in the family develop healthy, independent sleep habits so you actually have the time, privacy and energy for sex.

3. Once your child is consistently, happily fast asleep at 7:30 p.m., carve out time for each other, and bring back those connections that brought you together in the first place. Then settle down for your own 8 hours of sleep.