Sleep Shaping, the Scenic Route

Our son, Jack was a sleep training prodigy. After my husband and I returned to work we hit a sleep-deprived wall sometime around the 5 month mark. We were tired, we were cranky, we were not the best versions of ourselves for ourselves or for eachother or honestly even for Jack. We decided it was time to rip off the sleep training bandaid. We called friends who had been through it, I did some research and framed it within the context of my understanding of behavioral principles and then amended those strategies to what I felt I could handle emotionally as a mother. We braced for impact. The first nap he cried for 30 minutes, we checked in every ten minutes and rubbed his back and told him we loved him. We sat outside his door while he cycled down and held each other and watched the monitor (essentially listening to his crying in surround sound to make the whole experience extra terrible.) The second nap that day he cycled down within 20 minutes. By bedtime that evening he was asleep within 15 minutes. Within 3 days we were putting on PJs, reading two stories, putting him in the crib and he was just curling up and happily, peacefully falling asleep….and staying asleep….until around 6am the next morning (a totally reasonable time to be awake) and then, get this, he would eat and go BACK to sleep for like 3 more hours. We felt like parenting GODS. We. Had. This. Ish. Down. 

For 18 months we slept blissfully full nights of sleep every night, with the exception of teething nights and full moons (fight me on this, I dare you). We were “those” parents. We had a sucker baby (a baby that is so easy he convinces you to make more babies). We were hateable. I am right this very minute hating the version of us from back then.

Enter miss Lorelei Brigid. Right around the time Lorelei was born Jack transitioned to a toddler bed. BELIEVE me this was not by choice. He was attempting to climb out and we were concerned for his safety and so we decided it was time to let go of the baby cage and deal with the fallout. He did remarkably well...for like 3 weeks...when he realized that Daddy, his favorite person and literal obsession in life, was pulling night shifts with the new baby. He learned that he could get in some sweet bonus Dad hang time late at night because Dad was up anyway with LB. Fast forward a few months and Jack was still getting up throughout the night and coming to find us. Between Lorelei and Jack tag teaming throughout the night we were each sleeping maybe 6 hours of completely interrupted sleep a night. It was literally. All. Night. Long. 

(It wasn’t every 33 minutes but it FELT like it was every 33 minutes. BSG 33 IYKYK)

Lorelei is currently 6.5 months old and a full month and a half older than Jack was when we did sleep training with him. A few weeks back we decided to begin laying the groundwork for the sleep training process with Lorelei because omg was is time. The nap schedule was often incredibly inconvenient, I would finally feel like I had accomplished everything I needed to accomplish before getting outside to play or go for a walk when oh no, it was time to put Lorelei in for a nap because of the schedule. The schedule. The goddamn schedule. When Jack was this age we swore by the schedule, “You gotta stick to a schedule, it’s better for everyone. Blah blah blah.” Except two babies is a different ball game. In fact it’s not even a ball game, it’s like ONE game that involves a ball and then like, swimming. 

After a lot of persistence we did get to that point where she was napping around the same time each day and then we got to the ick part, the letting her cry part and it was brutal. Some days she would cry for upwards of an hour, some days she would cry for 20 minutes, some days it was literal sobbing, some days it was yelling like an angry cab driver, all of the days it was awful. I would put her in her crib and try to console her before leaving the room by rubbing her belly and singing and making shhhhing noises. To no avail. None of this helped, it often made her angrier. We did this 2-3 times a day for upwards of a week and there was no downward trend, she was not learning to “self-soothe” she was just exhausting herself to sleep and then waking up ANGRY and for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour 2 times a day my brain was fried while I listened to our baby cry. I wasn’t able to help Lorelei, I wasn’t able to engage with Jack, I was just sort of shut-down and miserable and it wasn’t getting better.  

My #tiredmom thoughts were these: we got one of those babies that can’t be sleep trained. Our first baby was a sucker baby and this one is a normal baby and everything with this one will be hard or impossible and we will never sleep again. The end.

The BCBA in me had a cup of coffee (or 6) and developed a theory. My behavioral theory here, aside from some babies just being sucker babies, is that second babies are accustomed to crying for longer periods of time. First babies never cry. They make a sad face and a parent or a relative immediately scoops them up and rocks their cares away. Second babies don’t have that luxury because sometimes it just isn’t possible to get to them because you are in the middle of something essential with the other. Sometimes baby number 2 has to just cry for a minute (or 5 (or 10)) until you’ve gotten through whatever you needed to get through and you can get back to them. They are used to crying until they get their needs met because generally those tasks that inhibit your ability to meet that need the second it presents don’t keep you away long enough for the baby to give up entirely on the crying behavior. Through a variable interval schedule of reinforcement (getting to the crying baby to meet her needs after varying lengths of time) you have strengthened increasing durations of crying behavior and created a little anti-sleep monster. 

To frame it differently, think of mouse number 1 getting a piece of cheese every single time it pushes a button. One day the button doesn’t work, the mouse pushes the button and nothing. The mouse may push a few more times, maybe it will push harder or faster (we call this the extinction burst) as it tries to figure out why the button stopped working and if there may be some way to make it work again. After those initial attempts the mouse is likely to give up because generally animals will not expend energy with no return on the investment. Meanwhile, mouse number 2 gets a piece of cheese sometimes after 1 press, sometimes after 3 presses, sometimes after 2 presses, sometimes after 5 presses. The mouse isn’t sure how many presses it will take because the equation is always different but it knows if it keeps pressing that button it will hit the right pattern and eventually get that cheese. Now we stop giving the cheese. This mouse is likely to continue pressing that button well past where the first mouse would have given up because THIS mouse is used to that button not always working immediately and is waiting for the correct number of presses before the button works again. We call this intermittent reinforcement, and intermittent reinforcement is the best way to strengthen and maintain a behavior. Our daughter is mouse number two. 

As if that wasn’t enough of a road block, in addition to our daughters increasing durations of crying behavior being intermittently reinforced for the last 6 months she also had some serious sleep associations that our son did not have. If you have children you know that first babies are typically nursed or rocked to sleep and are then transferred to bassinets on their backs with nothing soft within a comfortable mile of where they sleep and second babies, well second babies sleep wherever they will sleep so that you can still get through your day with your first (please tell me I am not alone with this). Where our daughter MOST often landed for naps was in her carseat because it clicked into the stroller and with a two year old you are almost always on the move. She would fall asleep while out for a walk or in the car and then we would just leave her because why on earth would you wake a peacefully sleeping baby? It became so routine that before we knew it we were using the carseat at night to help her fall asleep as well (path of least resistance, self-preservation, get any second of cry free time we could etc. etc. etc.). We would put her in it and walk around the house until she fell asleep, wait an hour, feed her and then transition her to her crib where she would wake up every 2-3 hours the rest of the night. All of my laying next to her, rubbing her belly and shhhhing in the world didn’t matter because I was not a carseat. There is literally nothing about me that is like a carseat and despite all of the things I do know, I do not know how to be more like a carseat. 

Since I couldn’t be a carseat I decided to work on Lorelei being mouse number 1 for a while. This meant that Jack needed to “wait” more. This meant that sometimes Rudy’s food bowl didn’t get filled the second he flipped it over, sometimes Jack needed to have sticky syrup hands and sit in his high chair for an extra 5 minutes. Some days this meant I didn’t get dressed until 2 pm and some days this meant I held Lorelei on one hip while I put together a cold breakfast of yogurt and bananas instead of putting her down so that I could make pancakes on the stove. You see, it’s a slippery slope with the second baby. When you have two children (and three furchildren), literally everything you do from the second you wake up feels essential and when you have to accomplish essential tasks sometimes that means you have to put the baby down even if it means she’s going to cry for a few minutes (and you justify it because you KNOW that she’s fine because you already fed her and changed her diaper and she just wants to be held but you can’t hold her right now because you NEED two hands for a minute, GOD.) I 100% stand by the fact that when accomplishing essential tasks sometimes the baby has to be put down and it ending in tears is sometimes a necessary evil. What I am saying is that not ALL of the tasks I felt were essential were ACTUALLY essential. So my first step was taking inventory of my actual priorities. I needed to make it my absolute top priority to limit Lorelei’s crying, not for forever but definitely for right now.  In tandem with that I began to address Miss Lorelei’s sleep association of the carseat. I did this by introducing a NEW sleep association, myself! I am sure if there are any sleep specialists reading this they probably have a million problems with what I am about to explain but this is what worked for my BCBA brain and this is what is actually working in my life right now soooooo….shrug emoji. Let’s talk shaping. Shaping is a behavioral strategy in which you gradually build on a behavior that is already in the behavioral repertoire in a way that brings you closer to your goal by reinforcing successive approximations to your target behavior. In other words, shaping involves identifying where you are currently, where you are trying to go and then setting up stepping stones to that goal by slowly building onto what you already have. Once you have it all mapped out you focus on the step right in front of you until you get where you’re going. 

My target behavior (where I was trying to go) was getting Lorelei to drift peacefully (without crying, sobbing or tears) to sleep in her crib. Where she was currently drifting peacefully to sleep was upright in her moving carseat. A logical first step in my opinion was getting her to peacefully fall asleep laying literally anywhere that wasn’t a carseat and by any means necessary. Luckily, one thing that had been consistent was that once she was out for the night she slept great with the exception of waking up to nurse every 2-3 hours where she would fall asleep curled in my lap while I sat upright and pumped on the other side. I replaced the sitting up nursing/pumping part with a side-lying feed in our bed. By doing this she started to associate my body next to hers as soothing. She would nurse alongside of my body and fall peacefully to sleep...lying flat...not in her car seat and not curled up in my lap and then I would transition her back to her crib from there. To boil that down for you, where before there was one big nasty sleep association, the car seat, there were now two smaller sleep associations, nursing to sleep and also falling asleep alongside of the mothership. 

Simultaneous to these side-lying night time feeds I had been laying alongside of Lorelei during nap times in our bed during the day because it felt less horrible than dumping her in the crib and walking away while she wailed. I knew we had to ditch the car seat process (and not JUST because of the look our pediatrician gave me when I told him about it) so instead I had been laying next to her while she swatted at me and wailed and eventually fell asleep. With the addition of the side-lying feeds throughout the night I started to notice that she was no longer getting mad at my presence during naptime, she was actually curling in toward me. I had become a positive sleep association for her even without the nursing step and she was beginning to fall asleep quicker and with few to no tears. She was actually cooing and touching my face and smiling. We were snuggling and it was blissful. Now a minimum of two times a day she was falling asleep peacefully alongside of me (once in the middle of the night while nursing and once at naptime, independent of nursing). 

(Once she was out Rudy often acted as stand-in)

The next steps I took are listed here and represented graphically below:

1. Fade proximity in bed by moving my body away but keeping a hand on her belly or back

2. Put her in the crib with one hand on her belly or back and one hand near her nose so she can see and smell that the mothership is close by

I spent enough time on each step to see a clear downward trend in any crying, yelling, general fussiness before moving on. You may notice some backtracking on the graph. Following a round of vaccines simultaneous with 2 teeth popping through we had a lot of crying and fussiness. I decided that I would rather take a few steps back and start fresh than have Lorelei crying excessively in the crib. I want her to feel calm and peaceful in the crib and allowing crying in that space was seeming more and more counterintuitive. I also want to note that there are often two or three data points per day, these represent naps and bedtime as the process was the same regardless. Not all naps and bedtimes are represented because some days things just came up, some days we had to be in the car and she napped there, some days we had people visiting and our routines were off, some days life just happened and I didn’t collect any data. 

As of today Lorelei is falling asleep in her crib with one hand on her back with light pressure and one hand near her face so she can see (and smell) that she is not alone. She is also sleeping for longer stretches at night (4.5-5.5 hours where previously there had been 2-3 hour stretches) indicating that she is beginning to fall back to sleep independent of external influence as she moves through sleep cycles during the evening hours. Our work is not done. From here we will have to fade our touch and smell entirely while she falls to sleep and from there we will have to finally get to the whole point of this insanity which is to be able to eliminate the rest of those middle of the night nursing sessions. This however feels a lot more attainable as Lorelei continues to demonstrate the ability to fall asleep peacefully in her crib without external influence.

Using a shaping procedure within the context of sleep training meant that rather than working through one giant, emotionally exhausting (and possibly traumatic) extinction burst trying to go directly from point A to point B we worked through a few smaller and much more manageable extinction bursts at each substep along the way from point A to point B. This gradual approach to sleep training is completely different than the by-the-book method we used with Jack. Jack was 100% sleep trained within a week, a literal stranger could have put Jack to bed without an issue as long as they followed the routine correctly (please note we did not test this theory). I stand by the approach we took with our son and would change nothing. Lorelei is a different baby and Lorelei’s starting point was in a different place than Jack’s due to our behaviors as parents and some tools we were using out of self-preservation that ultimately made our lives a whole lot harder. Because Lorelei was starting from a different place the methods we used with Jack were not appropriate for her and I honestly believe all of the stress centered around the crib and sleeping was causing more harm than good. We needed to add some stepping stones (or honestly like a whole damn bridge) to get where we needed to go but we are on our way now and I believe we will get there. I do not believe we are going to get there this week, maybe we won’t get there this month, but we have our map and I am certain we will get there.  

This is not my personal guide to sleep training your baby. I am not a sleep specialist, if you are having specific sleep concerns I highly recommend seeking one out. Like my last post, these exact changes I made will almost definitely not help you because your baby’s sleep associations are most likely not the same as our baby’s sleep associations. This is not an anti-cry it out agenda or a pro co-sleeping agenda or really any kind of agenda at all. I wrote this to give you an understanding of how books and internet advice can fall short without considering the nuance of your own unique situation and where you are starting from. I wrote this to demonstrate the utility in a shaping procedure if you find yourself setting goals and not meeting them because sometimes the best way to get where you’re going is not the most direct way. By using a shaping procedure we started out on a step that looked nothing like our end goal and initially this strategy felt a whole lot like going backwards (it maybe WAS going backwards) but it was going backwards to get on a path with a clear way forward rather than trying to machete our way through a forest.

-Carrie-Anne McQuade

If you enjoyed this piece continue along with me on my journey to behavior analyze my own life. I truly do not know how this story ends but I am going to be brave and honest and vulnerable and I am going to try my absolute hardest to continue to identify and shift my own patterns because life, especially one as blessed and beautiful as mine, should feel like living, not surviving.