Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

Why do those sleepless nights with a newborn feel like torture? Because they are.

It's the middle of the night and I'm up with Reiley, a crying 5-week-old baby boy. Outside in the Maine woods I can hear coyotes howling — probably scaring away the sheep I wish I was counting. My eyelids feel like they each weigh 50 pounds. There are dirty dishes in the sink, the dog wants to be let out, and a pillow with a dent in it exactly the shape of my head is calling to me. But I have a child to attend to. I pick up Reiley and tiptoe toward the changing table, hoping I don't step on the cat. I'm so tired. I love my son and would do anything for him, but that's just it — my son's name is Jack. Reiley is someone else's baby.

"I'm going to give you guys the best present new parents can get," I had told Reiley's mom and dad, Pete and Tracey. "I'll be the night nurse and do all the doody duties for the whole weekend so you can catch up on your sleep."

Everyone warns you, but no one can prepare you for the reality of postnatal sleep deprivation, a tortured brain-dead zombielike miasma of unrelenting exhaustion. I know, I've been there. And it's all coming back to me. It's no accident, I figure, that sleep loss leads to memory loss — the human species depends on it. If parents remembered how bad it was the first time, they'd never have more than one kid. My word is my bond, but what was I thinking?

Sleep deprivation is often said to be like torture. Sleep deprivation is not like torture. It literally is torture, employed historically to inflict psychological pain and/or extract confessions. Babies probably don't mean to torture us (and couldn't be held accountable if they did since few, if any, are signatories to the Geneva Conventions).

The key word is "deprivation." Unlike insomnia, where you're too wired or stressed to fall or stay asleep, deprivation is a bit like the oft-repeated experiment in which rats are placed on an overturned flowerpot in the middle of a bucket of water. They can balance on the pot, even doze lightly, but as soon as they enter REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and go limp, they fall off the pot and into the water, thus losing sleep's restorative powers. Within days, formerly docile lab animals morph into hyperaggressive psychotic rat-maniacs that fight with each other and bite the kindly lab workers. While after five weeks Pete and Tracey show no signs of disharmony (maybe because as prep-school teachers and dorm parents they're accustomed to disruption and chaos), humans suffering from sleep deprivation don't do much better than rats. When the USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese torpedo during WWII, nearly 900 men spent up to five sleepless days in the water. Because their life jackets didn't support their heads, they nodded face-first into the water when they hit REM. Within 48 hours, survivors were hallucinating, dreaming while wide awake, fighting viciously for a place in the life rafts, and attacking each other with knives.

Most new parents stop short of actual knife attacks, but the marital strain is nevertheless significant.

At 2:45 a.m., I hear Reiley gurgling as he audibly fills his diaper. His spluttering is followed by a clucking sound, sort of like a contented parrot in a darkened pet shop. I rise to change his diaper, then hand him to Tracey, who nurses him for 15 minutes.

Afterward I place Reiley in his bassinet, and for a while he coos, sated and copacetic. When he begins keening again, I pick him up before he wakes my hosts and cradle him in my arms, rocking him gently from side to side, recapitulating the archetypal motions we learned when we still slept in trees, before the bough broke. Reiley glances at me suspiciously for a while, unsure that I can be trusted. Finally his eyes close for good and I lay him down, while the dog snores and moonlight shines through the window and crickets chirp outside. Now it's 4:02. I yawn. I'm so tired.

The next morning, Tracey informs me that during the entire time I was trying to get Reiley to go back down, she was wide awake, listening, her maternal instincts too strong to suppress. This is pretty typical, says Kathryn A. Lee, a registered nurse and professor at the University of California at San Francisco who has studied and written about parenting and sleep deprivation. "When I talk to women about what plans they've made to provide for care at night they'll say, "Oh, I have a contract with my husband where he'll bring the baby to me, and I'll feed him, and he'll put the baby back to sleep." But that rarely works. The mom usually becomes awakened when the baby is fussing, but the husband doesn't hear anything. By the time he does, the baby's screaming and the mom is wide awake, nudging her husband to get up. "It's not that men don't hear the baby cry, as much as that we just don't . . . uh . . . do anything about it." Heh heh.

According to one study, men are as responsive as women to the stimulus of a crying baby, but while maternal responsiveness engages the endorphin systems to induce caregiving behaviors, in fathers crying babies evoke a temporary increase in testosterone levels. This could mean that moms instinctively think first to nurture but men instinctively think first to protect their progeny from threats, like charging mastodons and saber-toothed tigers — problems we took care of a long time ago, thank you very much, which is why we now roll over and go back to sleep.

The child is father of the man, they say, and to understand how children sleep, one needs to understand human chronobiology. We are regulated by two separate mechanisms: A homeostatic system makes sure we rest when our resources are depleted (think fuel gauge), while a circadian system directs us to sleep at night and not during the day (think light-powered alarm clock). If we were regulated solely by the homeostatic system, we'd probably fall asleep in the late afternoon and wake a few hours before sunup, sort of like Keith Richards in reverse. The circadian system, which is regulated by light striking photoreceptive ganglia in the retina that connect to the pineal gland in the brain, keeps us awake longer and asleep longer. We often feel irresistibly sleepy in the late afternoon, when the homeostatic pressure is high but before the circadian system gets onboard. It's a natural time to take a nap — but try explaining that to your boss.

Rather than sleeping in shorter stints around the clock, like cats or dogs, humans consolidate our sleeping and waking periods. During that consolidated sleep, we pass back and forth through four stages, moving from stage one, basic drowsiness, into stage two, light sleep, when we lose consciousness of our surroundings. Light sleep represents about half of our total time asleep. Stage three, slow-wave sleep, transitions to stage four, the deepest kind, which takes up about 10 to 15 percent of our total sleep.

REM sleep, marked by an active brain and vivid reality-distorting dreams, is not a stage; it can interrupt or intersect with other stages. This four-step cycle repeats in adults every 90 minutes on average, with four to six cycles nightly. We also wake up, usually without knowing it, for a minute or two between cycles, at which time we might come to full consciousness if we need to urinate, check on the baby, or sneak downstairs to have the last piece of chocolate cake. Not that I've ever done that.

Infants have the same sleep stages as adults, but can consolidate their sleep only for three to four hours, about half of which is REM sleep, with cycles only 50 minutes long. Babies are generally born without jobs or hobbies and have little to do other than grow, an effort that wears them out and makes them sleep for 16 to 18 hours a day. "Newborns have a lot of what's called indeterminate sleep," says Amy Wolfson, professor of psychology at the College of the Holy Cross and author of The Woman's Book of Sleep. "Their early sleeping brain waves show no clear patterns. Gradually it begins to differentiate."

Perhaps infants experience more REM than adults because we reprocess what we've learned during the day, and babies have a lot to process, including the difference between night and day, a distinction parents reinforce through a process called "entrainment." Says Wolfson, "Parents entrain their children by putting them down when it gets dark or pulling the shades when they nap or waking them when it's light."

In other words, babies gradually combine all that catlike sleep into big blocks of nighttime sleep through a combination of brain development, exposure to day-night patterns, and parental training. But it takes time. When they can't find the pattern (or when they're hungry, uncomfortable, scared, or lonely), they cry out, creating the vocabulary they need to survive, all of which can be translated as "Hey, you — come here!" And they don't much care if you're sleeping.

On my second night, Reiley begins to cluck at around 2:05 a.m. I take him to Tracey, who dons a camping headlamp and prepares to nurse. (Did I mention that the cabin has no electricity?) While she does, I step outside. The Maine skies have clouded over (goodnight moon, goodnight stars) and the world is hushed, save for the hoot of an owl in the nearby woods. I'm still tired but also struck by the beauty of this, the privilege of being up at this hour, taking care of a brand-new human being. Back inside the cabin, Pete is holding the headlamp while Tracey finishes, mother and child illuminated in a white-blue halo like those Renaissance paintings of the Holy Family caught in the light of heaven.

By 3:00 we're all asleep. I'm awakened three more times during the night, but not by Reiley — by Tracey. Apparently I snore, and I'm keeping everybody, except Reiley, awake. My wife has been telling me for years that I snore; now there is independent confirmation. She'll be thrilled. Whether it's snoring, a baby, or a pea under the mattress, anything that keeps us awake takes its toll. "This country does a poor job of educating new parents about sleep," says Wolfson. "And a lot of times, new parents think they don't need any advice." In part, the problem isn't what new parents are told about sleep but when they're told. It helps to educate yourself preemptively, because if you wait until after you're sleep deprived, it's a bit like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it. That's because sleep deprivation makes you stupid, and once you're stupid, it's harder to tell just how stupid you are, as suggested by an experiment done at the University of Pennsylvania's sleep lab. In tests over a 14-day period, researchers asked four groups of volunteers to observe a computer screen and match certain numbers to symbols as quickly as possible. One group slept eight hours a night, one six, the third four, and a fourth group experienced three nights of acute sleep deprivation. Subjects sleeping four hours performed worse than those sleeping six, and both performed worse than those sleeping eight.

Surprisingly, though, the four-hour and six-hour groups performed almost as poorly as the acutely deprived group, with slower reaction times and complete lapses of attention. And here's the scary part: When volunteers rated their own levels of fatigue and performance, the deprived groups said they felt lousy but failed to notice just how far down the mental drain they were.

I watch Pete and Tracey for signs of cognitive malfunction. They tell me they're doing fine, no problems, a little sleepy. That's what we all say, and we're all mostly wrong, because the first thing that goes is our judgment. Sleeping gives the brain downtime to encode and shift information to more efficient long-term storage areas, effectively clearing the loading dock for tomorrow's shipment of fresh data. Sleep restriction inhibits those functions and makes it hard to integrate facts or solve complex problems. We make errors of both commission and omission. We have slower response times, attention lapses, give up on tasks prematurely, or foolishly persist even though we know we're going to fail. We make bad decisions, including that we can get by on six hours of sleep a night. We minimize the costs and write them off as minor mistakes.

Minor mistakes, however, can have major consequences. Experts believe the disasters involving the Challenger, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the gas leak at Bhopal were all partly attributable to sleep-deprived workers. You could argue that raising a child isn't as important as running a nuclear power plant; just don't try arguing that with a parent, because you'll lose. On the third day I say good-bye to Pete, Tracey, and Reiley. As I drive off, Tracey lifts Reiley's hand to help him wave farewell. I'm glad this return to the world of sleep deprivation is ending. I fill my tank before getting on the road and buy a large coffee to keep me awake for the drive home. Before I arrive at my door, however, I stop at the supermarket for groceries and realize that something is wrong. Seriously wrong.

I feel as exhausted and stupid as a stoned chicken. That said, I have an epiphany. It occurs to me, standing in the produce aisle, that I haven't returned from the world of sleep deprivation. I never left it. I haven't been in my right mind for years — I'm one of those people unable to self-assess. Until now.

I realize this because I've lost my shopping cart full of food. I spend about 10 minutes canvassing every aisle and corner of the store, but it's simply gone. Fortunately I haven't paid for anything yet, so I grab a new cart and start over. I add this to the list of things I screwed up even before heading for Maine. I forgot my checkbook. I forgot my cell phone recharger. I took the wrong credit card. Et cetera. I also can't remember where the list started. I've been a one-man train wreck since...well, precisely. I recall a morning two years ago when it was my turn to drop off my son at preschool. I was parking the car near my office when a little voice from the back asked, "Daddy, where are we going?" I'd completely forgotten he was in the car seat and drove right past the turn.

In the past five years, I have not once slept for 8 hours out of 24. I've probably averaged 6, and whatever other baseline attention-deficit problems I might have, this has been like throwing gasoline on a fire. In short, I still have "baby-head". Chronic baby-head. And I hadn't realized how much it has affected me.

Fortunately even a 20-minute nap can recover lost IQ points for a while, and the technology exists to more permanently correct the problem. This device can, after about two or three weeks of regular use, for about eight hours a day, restore us to our former optimal cognitive functioning. You probably already have one in your own home. It's called a bed.