It's Confirmed: We Make Babies with Bad Sleep Genes (A Story about Six Years of Sleep Deprivation)

Our youngest turned two this summer. The day we had waited for a long time. Because in our experience, that was the moment he would stop waking up at night and throw out his daytime nap. And he didn't disappoint.

Six years of broken nights are (mostly) behind us. We now have full nights at least 60% of the time. This is my story of what these six years have cost us, and brought us.

The Myth of Manageable Baby Sleep

When we became parents six years ago, I remember reading Gina Ford's book. I thought baby sleep was something we could 'manage' by following the book to the letter.

Then we met our first son. The first night he slept, and I was lying wide awake worrying about when he needed to feed (every three hours). We brought him home, and he was contentedly lying in his crib. I remember us looking at each other and saying: "We are so lucky with this easy baby!"

Fast forward a few months. He turned out to be a baby who didn't love sleep. He woke up much more than just every three hours to feed during the night, and also didn't like to sleep unless on a moving body during the day. I spent endless hours walking with him in the carrier to make him sleep. We tried automatic rocking chairs because my body felt so broken (as it was still healing from birth). Sometimes it worked to put him down.

I remember a day where I had managed to get him to sleep and put him down, craving a nap myself. Only to be brutally awakened (both me and baby) by a delivery man knocking on the door like they can only do in China (where we lived at that time). Loud and ongoing, mirroring the haste they always seem to have. I jumped up from the couch and ran after that guy, screaming at him as if he had just murdered my baby instead of 'just' waking him. I think the guy still doesn't dare to deliver something at that house...

It's not something I'm proud of, but it reflects the deep desperation you can feel when you're sleep deprived.

Falling Into the Expert Trap

The first four months of baby's life, we wanted to integrate him into the life we had before kids. We took him to restaurants and coffee places and social events. Because that's what I saw other 'mothers like me' do. I saw them chatting away with mom friends, babies peacefully sleeping in their prams. 'This is how it's done,' I thought.

The more sleep deprived I got, the less energy I had for this. Then I started reading about how for babies to sleep well, they need calm nervous systems, quiet and dark spaces. I started to blame ourselves for having messed up his nervous system and therefore 'creating' these sleeping problems. I became obsessed with nap schedules and 'wake windows'. I tried every conventional piece of advice out there: white noise, dark/not dark rooms, ritual, reading, baby massage, osteopath, not consuming lactose (he indeed is lactose intolerant, but it didn't really help his sleep), a doll that mirrored a mom's heartbeat, more milk/less milk, thickening the breastmilk, holding him upright longer. You name it, I tried it.

When he turned six months, I was at the end of my tether and we thought: time for sleep training. We hired the sleep trainer who had just written a popular baby sleep book in the Netherlands. I thought: this expert is going to fix it.

That didn't happen. Her main advice was: fix the daily naps, then he will start sleeping through the night. As if I hadn't already tried to 'fix' his naps for months. I needed to put him in bed 'drowsy but awake.'

Not this guy. He just refused to sleep, regardless of the tips. Not during the day, not at night. Letting him 'gently cry' (I mean, have you ever heard more contradiction in one sentence!?) turned into so much screaming that he was coughing for hours. After two of the three 'consults' with that sleep trainer I was DONE. I literally threw her book out of the window. Session three never happened.

The result of that investment: me feeling like a bad and lousy mom (and also feeling guilty for having let him cry like that), baby still not sleeping.

Creating Our Own Solutions

We muddled through. In the meantime, we would try to split the nights as well as possible, but living in an apartment meant I would still wake up every single time baby would wake, even though I would pump ahead and my partner would give the night feedings with a bottle.

The biggest problem was that I really needed longer uninterrupted stretches of sleep to stay sane.

So I made a new plan: late at night, I would quietly (we thought every noise could potentially wake up baby) sneak out the door and spend the night at our neighbor's apartment. People still laugh when I say this. But having two extra concrete walls between his apartment and the nursery, and being able to sneak in and out in my pajamas, just across the hallway and come back for the 6am feed saved my life. And yes, my husband was totally fine with this arrangement, because our neighbor is a super friendly guy who had a lovely boyfriend at that time ;) I'm still eternally grateful for this solution.

His sleep got a little better at nine months. We got really excited — was this the beginning of the end of sleep deprivation? One month later I was pregnant with baby #2.

Round Two: Different Approach, Same Results

Baby #1 would still be waking up at least twice a night, and continued to do so for a long time. His daytime nap was luckily reduced to one nap a day, which we could handle.

Almost the moment baby #2 was born, baby #1 who was then 1.5 started to only wake up once a night. The best gift he could have given us.

We were determined to do things differently with baby #2. We would give him the calmest, most peaceful environment possible, to aid his nervous system and his sleep. Given that we were deep into COVID lockdowns at that time, that wasn't difficult to envision. We stuck to the plan, but baby #2 wasn't interested. Even though we had a quiet calm homebirth and stayed in bed the first two weeks, and close to home the first three months, baby #2 wasn't calm.

The first months my husband would take the evening shift, putting baby in the carrier, going for a long walk to get him to sleep and then bouncing on the exercise ball in the living room until he would wake (sometimes for hours). I was then sleeping my first shift. The problem was: baby #2 couldn't lie flat. He would scream and scream if he would be flat on his back, and after a while his sleeping bag would smell like acid every single night. He had pretty bad reflux, so the night was a struggle. I would sleep with him in our bed in which we created a slightly inclined mattress, so that he wasn't flat on his back, and I could feed him every time he wanted (which was often) while lying down. At first I worried about this being a 'dangerous sleep setup,' but given that I was sleeping so lightly by that time, I woke at the slightest shift or noise.

Fast forward: at three months we went to the GP to ask for a referral to the pediatrician because of the reflux. We were told that it's normal. At month nine, after three more GP visits and a very firm 'I'm not leaving this office without the referral,' we finally got the appointment. I brought his sleeping bag and let her smell it. We walked away with reflux medication and a prescription for the diet-powder milk (which is more expensive than gold in grams) we were supplementing him with after six months.

Turned out, baby #2 did not just have reflux; he was allergic to milk AND eggs. His sleep stayed abysmal, both during the day and during the night. At 1.5 years it got slightly better, and then, without any other interference, when he turned two, he quit his daytime nap and started to sleep through the night (EXACTLY like his brother).

How we survived? By that time we had moved to a house with different floors, and pretty much from day one we slept in different rooms, making sure that either one of us could get a longer stretch without being awakened. The person with the night shift got the morning to catch up on sleep.

We were 3.5 years into parenthood when we got our first real break from sleep deprivation, with both kids sleeping 11 hours for most nights.

Round Three: Accepting Reality

But we felt our family was not 'complete' yet. My husband wanted a third baby; I wanted it after I would feel truly rested. We discussed whether we could handle another non-sleeping baby. The conclusion was: we will expect that he will not sleep, and we will make the investment to create a system to survive those first intense two years. We thought the two-year investment was worth it to have another family member. We think baby #3 agreed with this plan, because I was pregnant with him before we even finished the discussion.

Being pregnant meant interrupted sleep for me, so I got only three months' respite from the deprivation.

Baby #3 arrived, and luckily he didn't have reflux. In fact, he had the calmest pregnancy, the calmest birth — everything was 'ideal.' But he was still not a good sleeper either. We got roughly the same amount of sleep as with the first two kids. But our experience was completely different. We weren't focused on trying to make him sleep better. We accepted that this was the situation, and we only focused on supporting ourselves better through the transition.

This meant my husband took prolonged birth leave (which his company generously provided), and also prolonged parental leave (unpaid). It meant we accepted (and planned for the fact) that our days would start late (after 9:30) because one of us needed the morning hours to catch up on sleep. We organized our lives accordingly. It meant we took in an au pair, to minimize the amount of time we needed to spend in the evenings on cleaning up and could prioritize going to bed early. It also meant that we could spend whatever time was needed to get the baby to sleep (and to stay asleep) during the day, because she could help with looking after the other kids while one parent was on baby duty (the other one working).

Baby #3's pattern stayed the same as his brothers. At six months it got slightly better. At one year a little more. At 1.5 years we knew we were in the last stint of this exhaustion. And the week he turned two, he threw out his day naps and started sleeping through the night. He stuck to the agreed-upon schedule ;)

Understanding the Bigger Picture

What we know now that we didn't know then, is that our kids are neurodivergent, which explains why they don't sleep well when they're little. But regardless of that, there are a lot of babies who are not sleeping through the night until well after their first birthdays, or who need contact naps to be okay. The problem is the society we are expected to parent in, and the 'beliefs' that are promoted about kids — that they are malleable, that good parenting produces compliant children, that there's always a solution if you're just doing it 'right.'

What Six Years of Sleep Deprivation Cost Us

I want to be real about these six years. It has cost us a lot.

Foregone income: We basically had one parent heavily part-time or on leave for the whole six years. This means a lot of foregone income and huge opportunity cost. We didn't see another way because we had months and months of not just having interrupted sleep at night, but having to spend (no joke) around five hours a day to get babies to sleep and to keep them asleep. This meant having to make other tradeoffs that were less important then our sanity (e.g no house remodels, spending on cars/clothes/stuff etc.)

Extra costs: We paid for childcare and house help costs, and we didn't spend that time working but catching up on sleep to stay afloat. (and lowered the standards quite a bit, e.g. no ironing or folding laundry in our home, we throw it in baskets in the cupboards)

Minimum partner quality time: We have been sleeping in different rooms for YEARS, and that does have an impact on your relationship. We're reunited in our bedroom now (most nights), but we really need to catch up on those years lost.

Deprioritized social activities with others: We've put social time with others to a minimum, because we just didn't have the energy for it. It does mean that after six years, there are people we're not seeing anymore, not because we dislike them, but because there's just no time to keep the relationship going.

Health impacts: The first years of not sleeping and fighting it have also been stressful and took a toll on health. Besides the huge 'sleep debt' that we have been accumulating, as my dear friend and sleep expert Dr. Els always says. At my lowest point with baby #2's reflux, I was so exhausted I couldn't function at my usual work capacity. As a business owner, I pay substantial fees for disability insurance that should protect me when I can't work. But when I went for assessment, the insurance doctor told me: "Sleep deprivation is not an illness, it's an individual problem you need to fix at home." I received no support, despite paying high premiums and being genuinely unable to work my insured hours. The system sees exhausted parents as personal failures, not as people deserving of support during a challenging but temporary phase.

What We Gained: Three Life-Changing Insights

Regardless of all this, this is not a post to complain about how hard parenting is. I share this story because there is also a lot of value in the hard patches of parenting, whether they happen during birth, during postpartum, when you're navigating life with a special needs child or something else. They have the opportunity to actually guide you to become the type of parent you want (and need to be) for your kids, and how you want YOUR family life to look like.

1. Do not ever think that any expert knows better what works for you and your child than you do yourself (leveraging the expertise but critically assessing what works for you)

The experience of wanting to rely on the experts and the 'standard advice' but that not working for us meant that very early in my mothering journey I was forced to shape my own path. And as you have read, that wasn't easy. It came with a lot of moments of doubt. But we kept coming back to the question: what will work for us? Even though it might be regarded as weird, or not necessary, or weak, or whatever.

We stopped doing things because that's 'just how they are done.' We started thinking critically. Because the society we are parenting in is not set up for our wellbeing (and I dare to doubt if it is for our children's). We are expected to contribute to the economic sphere in exactly the same way as before we were parents. We're told that we are 'good' parents if we do what is expected of us. Society doesn't value caregiving, and still, after decades of equality work, society does not treat mothers and fathers the same way (creating issues for both sides), keeping inequality intact.

2. Not everything in parenting can be changed. Sometimes the game-changer is changing your mindset: there's nothing to fix here, just something to accept (and adapt the surroundings to)

3. The only way to be a happy and satisfied parent is to create a life that is on YOUR terms. And for some, those terms might mirror the more 'standard path' because that is what works for your family. And for others, YOUR terms might look completely crazy and foreign to others, but they work for you, your family and your specific kids.

Parenthood is the invitation to critically reassess what you want YOUR life to be about. And that's the beauty of it.

So, do I wish we were spared the six years of sleep deprivation? I could have done with a slightly shorter period, but overall I'm really grateful for the path we are on now, because it works. For my relationship, for my kids and for ME.

In part 3 of this blog, I'll share how this experience is not a standalone one, but part of a bigger opportunity of parenthood.

How are you allowing your parenting journey to bring you closer to your best version of life?

This is Part 1 of a 3-part series. In Part 2, I'll explore why sharing these stories matters — not just for individual parents, but for creating the systemic change we desperately need to support families in this crucial phase of life. In part 3 - I place this experience in a meta perspective through the lenses of 2 writers that I have come to be a huge fan of. Our experience is not incidental, it's a pattern that we all need to understand.

This blog is written by Babette Lockefeer, mom of 3 and founder of Matermorphosis. Through Mother on MY Terms, Babette helps ambitious mothers have a career that matters without compromising how they want to raise their children — no self-erasure or powering through required. This transformational program guides women through the identity shift of matrescence using evidence-based tools, helping them create the life they REALLY want. 80% of participants get promoted or make successful career transitions.

Ready to mother on YOUR terms?

Not a mother yet but pregnant? Get prepared instead of overwhelmed by what becoming a mother will do for you as a women. Check out my pregnancy course (Dutch, English subs)