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American Morning
Sleeping Like a Baby
Aired January 24, 2003 - 08:42 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: We're paging Dr. Gupta this morning with some eye-opening advice. All you new parents will want to hear, it will help you, your baby sleep through the night. Sanjay joins us from Atlanta. Being the veteran of three newborns cycles, Sanjay, I am still sleep deprived. We never figured out how to get our kids to sleep.
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hopefully, this will be some eye-closing advice actually. There is so much research done on this, trying to get your babies to sleep a study to throw into it, this one out of Britain. They actually provided some interesting statistics, the sort of beginning of the study. They found that two- thirds of babies actually do sleep through the night by the age of 12 weeks.
Sleeping through the night, incidentally, defined sleeping five hours in a row at nighttime. What they wanted to find out who were the babies that weren't sleeping through the night, and why weren't they doing it? They sort of came up with some interesting findings here related to babies and feeding. Take a look at the graphic there. Feeding 11 times or more in a 24-hour time period, if you did that, three times more likely to wake later on in life and also have more fussing and crying at night.
So they actually looked at all sorts of different behaviors. This is what they came up with was the feeding schedule. They note, as most parents do, a lot of babies need to be fed every two to three hours.
What they said is by the age of three weeks, if the baby is putting on weight well and is otherwise healthy, and if the baby wakes up at night, instead of feeding immediately, delay feeding so that waking up at night is not associated with an immediate reward of feeding, and that should translate better later on into sleeping through the night.
ZAHN: So you have to torture yourself and listen to them scream for a half an hour before they stop?
GUPTA: Well, actually, they say you don't have to actually ignore the child, which is what the Ferber method is, to let them cry. You will not sleep well during those few weeks, but if you don't feed the baby during that time period, later on, months later on, the baby will actually sleep better through the night.
ZAHN: I hope this helps someone out there, Sanjay, because I think collectively, we have lost thousands of hours of sleep with newborns, I'm telling you.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired January 24, 2003 - 08:42 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: We're paging Dr. Gupta this morning with some eye-opening advice. All you new parents will want to hear, it will help you, your baby sleep through the night. Sanjay joins us from Atlanta. Being the veteran of three newborns cycles, Sanjay, I am still sleep deprived. We never figured out how to get our kids to sleep.
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hopefully, this will be some eye-closing advice actually. There is so much research done on this, trying to get your babies to sleep a study to throw into it, this one out of Britain. They actually provided some interesting statistics, the sort of beginning of the study. They found that two- thirds of babies actually do sleep through the night by the age of 12 weeks.
Sleeping through the night, incidentally, defined sleeping five hours in a row at nighttime. What they wanted to find out who were the babies that weren't sleeping through the night, and why weren't they doing it? They sort of came up with some interesting findings here related to babies and feeding. Take a look at the graphic there. Feeding 11 times or more in a 24-hour time period, if you did that, three times more likely to wake later on in life and also have more fussing and crying at night.
So they actually looked at all sorts of different behaviors. This is what they came up with was the feeding schedule. They note, as most parents do, a lot of babies need to be fed every two to three hours.
What they said is by the age of three weeks, if the baby is putting on weight well and is otherwise healthy, and if the baby wakes up at night, instead of feeding immediately, delay feeding so that waking up at night is not associated with an immediate reward of feeding, and that should translate better later on into sleeping through the night.
ZAHN: So you have to torture yourself and listen to them scream for a half an hour before they stop?
GUPTA: Well, actually, they say you don't have to actually ignore the child, which is what the Ferber method is, to let them cry. You will not sleep well during those few weeks, but if you don't feed the baby during that time period, later on, months later on, the baby will actually sleep better through the night.
ZAHN: I hope this helps someone out there, Sanjay, because I think collectively, we have lost thousands of hours of sleep with newborns, I'm telling you.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
