The first day we brought our one-year-old daughter home from Korea, we were pleased that she fell asleep at 8 p.m., just like our three-year-old son. “This is great,” we thought in our ignorance.
Then a couple of hours later, my husband and I were just getting into bed when she screamed, panicked from waking in an unfamiliar place.
“Oh, no,” we said as it slowly dawned on us. “That was her afternoon nap!”
Sure enough, she was awake until five o’clock in the morning.
You’d think that having just returned from Korea ourselves we would have remembered that we’d all just crossed eight time zones. (Maybe that fact is why we weren’t thinking clearly about much of anything at the moment.)
One of my major memories of Meg’s early days with us is how long it took her to reverse her days and nights from Korean time to our time—a good two months. Probably this is because she was an older baby who had already been sleeping through the night. Our younger daughter arrived at the age of eight months. Her foster mother reported that she had been waking up two or three times a night in Korea, one of those times for a feeding. I do not remember it being nearly as traumatic an adjustment in terms of the timing. Perhaps because she was still waking and sleeping in two to three hour blocks of time like a younger infant, it was easier to stretch those blocks gradually in the direction that we wanted.
Because I wanted Meg to associate the nighttime hours with sleeping, I kept the lights low (except for the first couple of hours in the first week) and didn’t talk to her much. This was the strategy we had used for teaching our son that nighttime was for sleeping, not playing—responding to his cries with comforting touch and fulfilling basic needs, but not making it too fun to be awake. (Note: most doctors and counselors recommend not employing “sleep training” or “cry-it-out” strategies with an adopted child. The most important factor is building the child’s trust in the new caretaker—that means parents responding to his needs.
The primary lesson I want to impart here is that adoptive parents need to plan ahead for the issue of sleep, especially if they have other children. Our daughter was staying awake until five a.m., while our son who had not gone with us to Korea was awakening at seven a.m. every morning as usual. We would have been up the proverbial creek if my husband had not taken four weeks of parental leave, enabling him to get up at seven to care for our son while I stayed up late and slept late with our daughter.
Charles would tie Meg onto my back with her Korean-style quilt carrier before he went to bed, and Meg and I would walk, and walk, and walk. I remember these quiet hours as long, but also almost holy—a physical bonding time when all the world was quiet, much as I had experienced while breastfeeding my birth son. Gradually we moved Meg’s sleep time back, an hour at a time, from her starting point of 5 am to 1 pm, to 4 am to noon, 3 am to 11, and so on. She plateaued for a while at 1 am to 9 am (which, truthfully, would have been fine for this night owl mom if it weren’t for the three year old getting up earlier). Eventually she came to have a normal sleep cycle.
I have heard some people recommend melatonin. I would definitely consult a physician before giving this hormone to children. If Charles hadn’t had the time off, I definitely would have been feeling pressure to try more options. I know of single parents who’ve adopted two or three children from China—I don’t know how they do it. I would definitely plan on having someone to get up with the older child while you sleep after being up with the newcomer.
“Good night and good luck…”
Please see these related blogs:
Ease Your Child’s Transition: Learn Cultural Child Care Practices
Babywearing and the Adopted Toddler