Does Your Child Need Help to Fall Asleep?
By Elizabeth Pantley
Only
at Natural Family Online!
Another Exclusive Excerpt from Elizabeth Pantley’s New
Book:
The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers
I’d like to set the record
straight. That television scene we know so well: parent tucks
blanket around child, parent kisses child’s forehead and
says goodnight, shuts the light and leaves the room. Child smiles,
closes eyes and goes to sleep.
You know that scene? Pure fantasy.
Unrealistic, inconceivable. It just ain’t gonna happen in
real life.
More than two-thirds of children
experience one or more sleep problems. Two of the most common
issues cited include difficulty falling asleep and resisting going
to bed. Among parents of toddlers and preschoolers, almost half
report having to be present in the room while their child falls
asleep. (For those of you with a baby in the house, 68 percent
of you are staying with your baby until he is asleep.) Interestingly,
by the time children are school age, more than a quarter of parents
are still staying in the room at least once a week until their
child is asleep.
Motherspeak
Even now, at 9 years old, she needs one of us to walk with
her to bed, tuck her in and spend a few minutes closing the
day, rubbing her back and saying good-night. She cannot fall
asleep without this ritual. It used to bother us, but as she
is growing up we find that this special time keeps us connected
to her every day, no matter how busy the day was. —
Pia, mother of 9-year-old Gracie
So what does this mean?
First, if you stay in the room until your child is asleep you
are not alone — and as a matter of fact, you are clearly
in the majority. Second, and most importantly, this tells us that
this “problem” isn’t really a “problem”
at all but normal childhood behavior.
Why your child wants you
there
There are a number of reasons your child wants you beside him
until he falls asleep.
He
loves you. You represent security, safety and
love. Falling asleep brings the vast unknown. If a big, strong
parent is in the room, then all is well, and a child can relax
enough to sleep.
She’s
scared. The dark brings frightening shadows. The
quiet invites mysterious noises. The stillness brings scary thoughts.
A parent in the bed, or beside the bed, is the ultimate protection
from all things scary.
He’s
worried. When the activity of the day grinds to
a halt, your child’s unoccupied mind begins to sort through
the day’s events. Worries enter your child’s thoughts
— things that have happened (“Oh, no! Where did I
put my red truck?”) and worries about upcoming events (“Did
Daddy say we have to go to the doctor’s tomorrow?”).
Preschoolers worry about bigger things (“Will my dog run
away?”, “Will our house burn down?”, “Will
Mommy or Daddy die?”). These worries loom large when a child
is alone in the quiet and dark. Having a parent nearby is the
ultimate protection against scary thoughts.
He’s
not sleepy. If you put your child to bed when
he’s not tired or when he’s overtired, he won’t
willingly stay put. He’s wide awake and would rather be
doing anything else than lying in bed, so your company is the
only thing that keeps him there.
She nurses to sleep. Almost
90 percent of breastfeeding toddlers fall asleep nursing at least
once a week, and almost 70 percent do this almost every night!
Let me repeat that amazing information for you: Almost 90
percent of breastfeeding toddlers fall asleep nursing.
The sucking-to-sleep association
is the most difficult and complex sleep association to change,
and so this obviously becomes a key component to your child needing
you with her as she falls asleep.
She
wants Mommy – and nobody but Mommy will do!
No matter how wonderful and loving that Daddy, your partner, the
baby-sitter or Grandma are, nature and biology take a role in
causing your little one to prefer Mommy above everyone and everything
else in the world — especially when it comes to bedtime!
And while we may instinctually understand this, it can be a challenge
when Mommy is also dealing with younger or older siblings or when
she’s just all “Mommied out” from a long day
of child-tending.
When it comes to bedtime, many
mothers have conflicting emotions: they want to be a loving, comforting
mother, but they also just want a moment – just one! –
to themselves. This conflict can be conveyed to your child through
both your conscious and unconscious acts and words. If your loving
partner offers to take over the bedtime routine, your child inevitable
rebels with tears or tantrums, it hurts everyone’s feelings
and complicates the already stressful evening, dragging on an
already too-long process.
It’s
a routine. We’ve talked a lot about bedtime
routines and how critical they are to a peaceful process. Believe
it or not, you are demonstrating just how powerful these rituals
are. You have a bedtime routine now — and it involves staying
with your child until she is asleep. Remember that it takes about
a month for a new routine to be formed. Whether you’ve been
staying with your child until sleep from the day she was born
or you starting doing it after her sibling was born three months
ago or after your move six weeks ago, you’ve likely been
reinforcing this routine, night after night, for a long, long
time. It will take patience and a plan to create a new routine.
What is it that bothers
you?
When I interviewed parents about what exactly it is that bothers
them about having to stay with their children until they fell
asleep, the five most common answers were these (and many included
a combination of all five).
• “It takes a long
time for her to fall asleep, and I have things I need to do,
so I get very antsy about lying there.”
• “Sometimes I even fall asleep before he does,
so I’m in bed too early.”
• “She gets used to my staying beside her so if
she wakes up she wants me back.”
• “I have a baby and a husband that needs me too,
so I feel pulled in all directions.”
•“At the end of the day I just don’t have
the energy to deal with bedtime. I want to just tuck him in
and get on with it.”
Before we proceed with the solutions,
take some time to figure out what it is that bothers you about
having to stay with your child until the sandman arrives. When
you can understand your own feelings, it will help you choose
the correct plan of action to take as you make begin to make changes
to your current bedtime practices.
Choose a path
You may have never looked at it this way, but there are two paths
you can follow. Either choice can work beautifully. But you need
to make a decision and follow it up with a plan.
• Continue to stay with
your child until he or she falls asleep – but do so in
a way that encourages your child to fall asleep quickly.
• Take steps to help your child learn how to fall asleep
on his own.
Stay or don’t stay
– but don’t whiffle-waffle
Very often, parents feel “stuck.” They don’t
want to stay, but they do it to prevent tears or a tantrum. So
some nights it works fine: their child falls asleep peacefully
and quickly. Other nights parents have pressing issues to get
to, so they try to rush the process or their child is too wired
up to sleep. Either way, their child reacts by staying wide awake
for far too long. The lying-with/staying-with ritual drags on
for an hour or more, often with the parent becoming angry and
the child resorting to tears. So, in the end, parents get stuck
with both: they get to stay and they get the tantrum too.
This aspect can be further complicated
when parents disagree about how to handle bedtime, each pulling
in opposite directions, with a tired child in the middle. Parents
tend to avoid talking about the situation during the day, but
the stress and anger about the routine rears its ugly head every
night at bedtime. This situation can also become confusing when
a child lives in two households and each home carries with it
a completely different bedtime ritual, with no communication about
bedtime rituals. If you waver between the two choices, or if different
caregivers use different approaches, your child will never know
what to expect, so bedtime will remain tense and perhaps even
a struggle of wills. Two different plans can work, but only if
both are intentional plans, not haphazard, whatever-happens confusion.
There is not a “correct”
answer here. Either approach works for many families. So decide
which path you are going to follow — stay or don’t
stay — and have everyone involved be consistent with whatever
choice you make. When you maintain a pattern and apply a complete
plan that includes other sleep-inducing ideas from this book,
you will end up with a more peaceful bedtime hour.
Deciding to stay
Like the majority of your fellow parents, you may decide that
when your child falls asleep quickly it’s not an inconvenience
to stay in the room with him and if you knew he’d always
fall asleep promptly, you wouldn’t mind the stay. If this
is what you decide to do, let your child know and he’ll
relax into the new routine. Tell him in a very pleasant tone of
voice, as if offering a gift, “From now on I will stay with
you until you fall asleep. Then I will go to my own bed. We both
sleep all night, and then we can cuddle in the morning.”
What about night waking?
Many children are able to go to sleep with a parent’s company
and then sleep all night without further help. Some, though, continue
to depend on a parent’s company any time they wake up throughout
the night. Remember that all human beings have night wakings —
it’s how your child falls back to sleep that can create
problems for you. As you work through the various solutions in
all the appropriate chapters of this book (The
No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers),
you’ll learn what category your child falls into. This will
help you as your organize your own approach to your child’s
sleep.
Also, your sleep routines can change
and modify over time. Just because you choose one path doesn’t
mean you can’t change approaches over time.
How to stay and promote
sleep
The key to staying and making it a pleasant routine for everyone
involved is to set a plan that works. The plan should involve
a specific bedtime routine that ends in quiet, peaceful darkness.
The finale to your bedtime routine should be your quiet presence
as your child nods off. If you continue to talk and interact with
your child, you may be actually keeping him awake!
So do all your usual things —
reading, storytelling, nursing, back-rubbing — and then
turn off the lights and be quiet. The only noise you should make
is a quiet “Shhh, shhh” in response to any movement
or noise from your little one.
The exception to this is a child
who falls asleep easily to a parent’s quiet singing, humming
or story telling, under one condition: Do this only if you enjoy
it too. Don’t get into a habit of doing something to please
your child if you hate it! You’ll just resent the process
and your emotions will prevent bedtime from being the peaceful,
loving time it should be.
Invite tiredness
When bedtime arrives you want your child to be perfectly tired.
If he isn’t tired or if he is overtired, he’ll struggle
against your desire for him to go to sleep. Re-visit the sleep
hours chart and determine if your little one is getting the right
amount of nighttime and nap time sleep. Take a look at your child’s
daily nap schedule and make sure that naps aren’t too long
or too late in the day.
Look at your child’s daily
flow of activity and bursts of energy. You should be encouraging
lots of energetic play between morning and dinner time and planning
quiet time from dinner time until bedtime. You’ll want him
to get plenty of fresh air and exercise during the day and provide
enough time to wind-down before sleep time.
Have an early enough bedtime so
that your child doesn’t become over-tired. Make sure the
time is consistent — try to stick with the set bedtime seven
days a week — so that your child’s biological clock
is ticking in tune to his scheduled bedtime.
Have a long-enough bedtime
routine
More than half of preschoolers and toddlers take 15 minutes or
longer to fall asleep once the lights are turned out. Add this
to the time it takes to prepare for bed (bath, pajamas, book reading
and so on) and you’ll need at least an hour dedicated to
putting your child to bed.
If you rush through this process,
your child won’t fall asleep easily or more quickly. The
steps to bed are very important to a peaceful falling asleep process.
Of course, there are exceptions. On any given night, if your little
one is truly tired, then a very short routine is in order. Don’t
keep a tired child awake just to make it through your traditional
getting-ready-for-bed routine. You may find it helpful to stick
with your usual sequence of events, but shorten each step as much
as possible, for example, by picking one brief book rather than
the usual three.
It helps to remember that it will
likely take your child 10 to 20 minutes to fall asleep once the
lights are turned out. These 20 minutes seem like 60 when you’re
anxious to get up and get on to other things you need or want
to do. Ironically, if you are quiet and peaceful yourself, your
child will fall asleep much more quickly. So when you begin your
new routine, glance at the clock when you turn the light off and
look again when your child is asleep, and notice how long it takes.
Think of your needs, too
As you wait for your child to fall asleep, what do you do with
the time? Do you tap your toe impatiently waiting while you tell
yourself that you’re wasting valuable time or that you wish
you didn’t have to stay? This is a common response and part
of the reason parents so dread this little nighttime ritual.
Once your sleep plan is ticking
perfectly, it’s likely that your child will take much less
than 15 minutes to fall asleep every night. While you are waiting
for your child to fall asleep, you may want to do one of these
things:
• Think about the highlights
of your day, and enjoy your memories.
• Plan tomorrow’s calendar.
• Watch your child and enjoy the beauty. They grow up
so fast, you know.
• Daydream about an upcoming event or something fun.
• Put on headphones and listen to music or an audio book.
• Meditate or pray.
No-cry solutions for the
“don’t stay” option
You may decide that you really do want your child to fall asleep
independently, and you don’t want to stay in the room as
he falls asleep. You can achieve this goal, but as with most sleep
situations, there is not one right method that works for every
family, nor is there a quick-fix, easy solution. Merely leaving
the room and letting your child cry to sleep isn’t easy,
and for the vast majority of families it is not quick, either.
In addition, new research is showing that such cry-it-out approaches
may be a temporary solution, because in many cases sleep problems
resurface and new ones appear.
© Elizabeth Pantley; excerpted
with permission by McGraw-Hill Publishing from The
No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers & Preschoolers
Read more excerpts
from The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers:
Eight
Sleep Tips for Every Child
Nightmares,
Night Terrors and Fears
Moving
From Crib to Bed
The
Night Visitor: Trips to the Parent’s Bed
Parenting educator
Elizabeth Pantley is the author of numerous parenting books, including
the widely cited The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to
Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night and the brand-new
The
No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers.
Buy her books at Powells.com.
She is a regular radio show
guest and is quoted frequently on the web and in national family
and women’s publications. Elizabeth lives in Washington
state with her husband, their four children and her mother. Visit
her at www.pantley.com/elizabeth.
