Getting Your Child To Sleep

The following suggestions come from T. Berry Brazelton's Touchpoints: The Essential Reference to Your Child's Emotional and Behavioral Development (published in 1992 by Addison-Wesley). He is careful to say that helping your child develop self-comforting rituals for sleep will be a long and possibly difficult process. Although he offers guidelines, he is also careful to say that each situation is different and you as the parent should bear this in mind when implementing his guidelines.

Brazelton's guidelines include:

* Look at the child's day. Is she sleeping too long or too late in the afternoon? Babies older than a year should sleep one to two hours at most, beginning at approximately 1:00.

* Establish a relaxing, nurturing bedtime routine. Roughhousing is OUT, story time is IN.

* Get the child quiet, put him in his bed, and sit by him to assist with learning a comforting pattern. Pat, assure, and encourage with a "you can do it yourself" type of voice.

* Encourage her use of a particular "lovey" (Brazelton's word for special soft toy or blanket) as part of her self-comforting routine. A single special toy is better than many.

* Expect him to rouse and cry out every 3 to 4 hours. Greet this waking with as little stimulating intervention as possible. Don't take him out of bed to rock him. Instead, soothe and rub his back (side, legs, etc.) with your hand, but leave him in the bed. Stand by the bed, and tell him in an encouraging voice that he can fall asleep again himself, and that he will learn to do it.

* After doing this for a period of time, begin to stay out of the room when the child calls, calling to the child instead, saying that you are there and you care, but suggest she use her lovey.

* If the child doesn't settle down after 15 minutes of waiting for him to use the lovey (or any self-comforting behaviors the child may develop such as rocking), you may enter the room. But be brief! Pat and reassure the child verbally that he can fall back asleep. Encourage him to use the lovey.

Brazelton is careful to say this will be a difficult process, but that it will be rewarding for both child and parents in the end. He also says to give the child lots of credit during the day for her nighttime accomplishments.

He also believes that 9- to 11-month-old babies will start wakening at night with each new motor task (standing, cruising, walking) because the excitement associated with the tasks carries over and surfaces during light sleep. You may find the child will repeatedly stand right after you lay him down, just because he now knows how to pull himself up! It is a great new skill for him and he wants to do it again and again!

During the periods when new skills are developing that will have an impact on light sleep periods, it is especially important to be consistent with bedtime rituals. The American Academy of Pediatrics published a book in 1993 called Caring for Your Baby and Young Child: Birth to Age 5, The Complete and Authoritative Guide (Shelov, 1993). The suggestions for getting children to sleep are much like those offered by Brazelton, with the difference that they suggest waiting 5 minutes (rather than 15) before you go back into the child's room. Here are some additional ideas on various approaches to sleep problems in young children taken from Barbara Huntley's The Sleep Book for Tired Parents: Help for Solving Children's Sleep Problems (Huntley, 1991).

Moving from general to specific in terms of identifying sleep problems, Huntley's book begins with a chapter called "Sleepless Nights" in which she helps parents determine if they do, indeed, have a sleep problem. In the next two chapters, Huntley discusses the basics of sleep and trouble spots that may interrupt sleep. Chapter 4 is devoted to four approaches to dealing with sleep difficulties: "The Family Bed Approach," the "Cry It Out Approach," "The Teaching in Small Steps Approach," and "The Living with It Approach." Each approach has many pros and cons, and each approach is workable.

* The Family Bed Approach: This is the practice in which parent(s) and child all sleep together in the same bed. This term is used to describe a range of patterns, from sleeping in the same bed for the entire night, to sleeping together only until the child falls asleep, to allowing the child to come to the parents' bed during the night and remaining until morning.

* The Cry It Out Approach: This method is driven by the idea that children will learn desired sleep patterns as long as undesirable patterns are not reinforced. Basically, the child is left to cry until he falls asleep.

* The Teaching in Small Steps Approach: In this method, Huntley says the child will learn the new sleep behavior best when it is presented gradually over a long period of time. Given time and support, the child will develop his own resources and style for getting to sleep.

* The Living with It Approach: Parents make a conscious decision that the situation as it exists is the most appropriate solution for the time being, and they make the best of that situation.

The fifth chapter in Huntley's book provides tips on how to implement an approach once you have decided which is best for your situation.

Other resources that may be helpful for this concern include:

Becoming Better Parents by Maurice Balson (Camberwell, Melbourne, Australia: Acer, 1994).

The Difficult Child by Stanley Turecki (New York: Bantam Books, 1985).

Sources:

Brazelton, T. Berry. (1992). Touchpoints: The essential reference to your child's emotional and behavioral development. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Huntley, Rebecca. (1991). The sleep book for tired parents: Help for solving children's sleep problems. Seattle, WA: Parenting Press.

Shelov, Steven P. (Ed.). (1994). Caring for your baby and young child: Birth to age 5. New York: Bantam Books.