Coping with Sleep Deprivation
Posted In:
Parenting |
Posted On: 9, Feb, 2006
Coping with Sleep Deprivation
Possibly the hardest thing to come to terms with when you have a baby is the chronic sleep deprivation. Friends and well meaning colleagues at work may joke about the sleepless nights, but at 3am when you’ve been pacing around the house with a screaming baby for 2 hours, it just isn’t funny. My daughter, Ella, is now 10 months old and doesn’t sleep through the night. I have done quite a bit of research into why some babies don’t sleep, and wanted to share my experiences on dealing with sleep deprivation.
Ella is my first, and at present only child and although I had been a hands on Auntie to 3 lovely nephews, nothing at all could have prepared me for coping with a new born. I’d heard about the “sleepless nights”, but I had no idea just how draining and exhausting it could be. Sleep deprivation is used in some places as a form of torture, and it’s easy to see why. You become irritable, clumsy, irrational and so desperate you’d probably confess to shooting JFK if it meant you could get some sleep! It becomes a fight for survival and although you begin to feel like you will never feel normal again, there are things you can do to help you get through it.
So how much sleep do children need? The following table is a rough guide: