Can t sleep? Treat yourself like a baby
1 Mar, 2021 06:00 AM
7 minutes to read
Shhhhh. Don t wake the baby (you). Illustration / Marta Sevilla, The New York Times
New York Times
By: Jessica Grose
Can the five S s used to calm fussy babies swaddle, side or stomach position, shush, swing and suck also help grown-ups snooze? A reporter finds out. Last year was when I was finally going to get a good night s sleep. My youngest child was turning 4, and so the post-midnight disruptions for blanket fixes and stuffed-animal retrieval had ebbed. My work and home life were in predictable rhythms. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, I did hot yoga. I had a firm mattress recommended by many respectable online-review websites.
Can t get a good night s sleep? Treat yourself like a baby
SECTIONS
Can t get a good night s sleep? Treat yourself like a babyBy Jessica Grose, New York Times
Last Updated: Feb 25, 2021, 07:37 PM IST
Share
iStock
Related
Last year was when I was finally going to get a good night’s sleep. My youngest child was turning 4, and so the post-midnight disruptions for blanket fixes and stuffed-animal retrieval had ebbed. My work and home life were in predictable rhythms. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, I did hot yoga. I had a firm mattress recommended by many respectable online-review websites.
Instead, a pandemic killed over 2 million people and disrupted the patterns of our days and nights. “COVID insomnia” was a breakout Google search from March to today, as was “Why can’t I sleep during quarantine?” Studies from India to Italy indicate that sleep quality has been negatively impacted by COVID-related life changes.
Can the “five S’s” used to calm fussy babies swaddle, side or stomach position, shush, swing and suck also help grown-ups snooze? A reporter finds out.
Can the Maternal CARE Act fail moms?
37 Shares
In 2018, then-Senator Kamala Harris introduced the Maternal CARE (Care Access and Reducing Emergencies) Act and added the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2020. Collectively, both pieces of legislation would create a task force to study sobering disparities in medical care based on race, combat racial implicit biases in the medical field, and close gaps in access to quality medical care for pregnant African American mothers. The impetus was the alarming data on maternal mortality reported by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in 2018.
Evidence showed that Black mothers’ mortality was 3 to 4 times higher than white mothers and were 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy complications and childbirth complications. Extrapolating the data further, a Black mother’s higher education and socioeconomic status did not protect her from these alarming disparities. Just recently, on October 30, 2020, the medical commun
@takingcarababies/Instagram This story is part of a group of stories called
Finding out that an Instagram influencer you love holds a wildly different worldview than you do can often feel weirdly personal. Take Arielle Charnas, an OG fashion blogger at Something Navy, who just as the pandemic was sweeping New York City, announced to her more than 1 million Instagram followers that she’d pulled strings to get a Covid-19 test, was positive, then moved to the Hamptons with her family and nanny without quarantining first. Predictably, fans were furious.
Now imagine that the disappointing influencer had not only impacted your style or home decor but some of the most intimate decisions of your life, someone who you’d turned to for advice on motherhood, pregnancy, or postpartum depression. That’s what happened to thousands of moms on the internet last week when baby sleep expert Cara Dumaplin, known by her (admittedly brilliant) nom de plume Taking Cara Babies and her Instagr