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Article:The Capital January 13, 2000 By Mary Grace Gallagher, Staff Writer Photography by Jay Henson "Severna Park social worker gets infants and their families sleeping like a baby" "Long nights can become good nights with the help of Kim West" Call her the Lullaby Lady or call her counselor. Her clients call Kim West a godsend and credit her with dreams come true. The Severna Park clinical social worker, however, just calls herself a mom when she makes her morning rounds. "Good morning," says Mrs. West, who begins making phone calls from her Arnold office, her home or car at 7:30 a.m. "How was your night?" How indeed? Mrs. West's clients have seen some rough nights. Sleepless nights with yowling babies; restless nights spent with toddlers thrashing in their parent's bed; weary nights that drag into exhausting days. In excruciating detail, Mrs. West learns of these tortures and then prescribes her own formula for sweet slumber. And, according to Annapolis mom, Sharon Olson, who paid $XXX an hour for Mrs. West's expertise, it's a knockout. "Kim is a lifesaver," says Mrs. Olson, who called Mrs. West back in October when she was getting up at 4 and 5 a.m. each morning with her then 9 month-old twins, Connor and Kelsey. By 5 p.m. each day, the babies, who refused to nap, were so tired and miserable she would snap them into their car seats and chauffeur them on a sleeping tour of the county. "You wouldn't believe the roads I discovered. I found developments I didn't know existed," Mrs. Olson recalled. "Those were some brutal, brutal days." Of course, Mrs. Olson was not the only one going down that road. When she was pregnant with her first child, Kim West watched with horror as friends struggled to get their 2-year old to sleep through the night. While they seemed to grudgingly accept their plight with bags under their eyes, Mrs. West hit the books. "I am a person who needs sleep, so I read everything I could about kids and sleep. I talked with every parent, every educator, doctors, anyone," Mrs. West said. The result: the Wests' 5-year old Carleigh slept through the night within eight weeks of her birth and 2-year old Gretchen slept through the night within 10 weeks. In parenting circles, where babies often have more active nightlives than college students, word spread quickly. Friends of friends were calling for wisdom. "They were going to their doctors and looking through their books and they all seemed to get the same advice: 'Let them scream'" Mrs. West said. Screaming, however, is less popular with parents than sleep deprivation. "Parents will always say, 'I can't do that. I can't let my baby cry to sleep,'" said Julie Venuti, a Crofton-based pediatric nurse practitioner. Usually, by a child's 4-month checkup, she said, parents begin to ask when they might expect to sleep through the night. According to information from the American Academy of Pediatrics, more than 90 percent of babies sleep six to eight hours without waking by 3 months of age. Shortly after that, around 4 months, Mrs. Venuti said babies respond to schedules and can learn to comfort themselves. It is at this point that parents generally split into two camps: the "Ferber method" camp, to which Mrs. Venuti subscribes, and the "family-bedders." "Ferberites," fans of Dr. Richard Ferber's "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems," believe that putting children to bed drowsy but awake helps them learn to fall asleep alone. The drawback: Babies may cry for hours before falling asleep. Family bed proponents, on the other hand, contend that sleeping with children- commonly practiced in other cultures- is the best way for everyone to get a good night's sleep. The drawback: It may be more difficult to get an older child to sleep alone later than it is to put an infant down now. Mrs. West, a former family mediator, falls somewhere in between the two. "I teach parents to read their babie's cues," said Mrs. West, who will be speaking about sleep at Monday's Annapolis Mothers of Multiples meeting. "I apply knowledge from child development, parenting and various sleep theories. I do not solely subscribe to letting the child 'cry it out.' " Despite the constant advice she heard from friends and family, Mrs. Olson couldn't stand to hear her babies cry. Under Mrs. West's tutelage, except for a few five-minute jags, Kelsey and Connor didn't cry. After taking a history of the children over the phone and making sure that sleeplessness was not a sign of a medical problem, Mrs. West prepared a plan for the Olsons. "It involved some minor crying," Mrs. Olson said. "But I could go in and stay for five to six minutes and talk in a calm voice and let them know I was there. Before, I thought that would only make things worse, because I didn't know they were capable of resettling themselves." In addition to changes in bedtime routine- which now involves a bath, story and prayer before the 1-year-olds quietly go down at 7:30 p.m.- Mrs. West recommended changes in the babies' nursing, feeding and napping schedules. After three weeks of fine-tuning during those morning phone calls, the sleep tours were over. The twins' personalities changed from chronic crankiness to their current pleasant selves, and Mrs. Olson and her husband, Brad, were seeing parenting in a whole new light. "At the time, I thought, 'Oh it's 4 a.m. in the morning; that's not too bad.' " Mrs. Olson recalled. "Within a week, it was a different world around here. Our lives improved significantly."
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