Category Archives: 2.5 – 3 years

2 1/2 years old Part III: Sleep disruption, sleep setback, sleep regression call it what you will

2.5 - 3 years

As we already talked about in Part I and Part II, the typical 2½-year-old is a terribly cute little rebel, concerned mostly with getting caught, rather than the act itself. But despite their attempts to overthrow the world, or at least YOUR world, these children have one primary weakness: jealousy.

It is a little more difficult to talk about this period of development in definitive terms, because individual differences become more pronounced by this age, and what we might call a typical pattern of development becomes more blurred. In general, the older children get, the more "variability" or differences you'll see among kids in the various stages. Jealousy is a perfect example. Some children are highly sensitive to jealous feelings, and their sensitivity may result from temperament, from the fact of having a younger sibling to compete with, or from a combination of the two. Similarly, the degree of defiance and testing of limits varies hugely from child to child. At 2½  to 3 years of age, some children are more concerned with “being good” than anything else. They love being praised, cuddled, and simply being in the beam of their parents' affection. Others are little hellions bent on breaking every household rule and exploiting them to extremes. Still other kids oscillate back and forth between these two polar extremes (fun times, I tell 'ya).

Because of these growing differences among kids this age, my advice about sleep training can't be as general as it was for earlier ages. It depends on how your own 2.5 year old is fairing through this transition period. If your child is prone to jealousy, if your child is on the defiant end of the spectrum, or if your child tends to wage battles whenever rules and regulations are not carved in stone — wait out any sleep training until he's closer to 3 years old (the next relatively "stable" age). Once your child has pulled through this stage and has given up his world domination strategy everything will get easier—including sleep training. Also, take advantage of familiar routines and nightly rituals, including reading and telling stories, as these often maximize comfort and closeness for children who are emotionally volatile. But if your child is a relatively mellow kid, if he already seems comfortable and relaxed about his role in the family, it might not be necessary to wait any longer if you want to implement your favourite sleep training method. You have to make the call based on your own understanding of your child.

So, let's tackle again the last reader's question about what to do with a child this age who is calling for mommy (and ONLY mommy) 5 times or more during the night, but who falls back asleep quickly once mommy arrives to tuck her back in. All she seems to need is a little reassurance and then she goes back to sleep. Problem is… now YOU'RE awake. Here's my take:  ESPECIALLY if you think that your child has reason to feel heightened levels of jealousy and insecurity (relatively new sibling, moving from a crib to "big bed"), I'd wait this stage out and avoid any real sleep training. We all wake up many times during the night, at least for a second or two. What we are mostly good at is putting ourselves right back to sleep. But have you ever had periods in your life that were, oh, a tad stressful? And during those periods, have you ever had the experience of waking up and then not being able to fall back asleep? FOR. HOURS. What you've probably noticed is a tendency to ruminate during those times. We can't stop thinking about what's worrying us, what's making us insecure, anxious. Now… translate that to your child. She's working stuff out; emotional stuff that is difficult to deal with even for adults (jealousy). A mere month or two ago, she didn't fully comprehend that mom's affection could ever be anything except squarely aimed at her. What a rude awakening (tee hee… pun intended)! The 2 1/2 year old will wake up and feel just a tiny, small pang of anxiety and that little pang may wake her up fully and although she may not realize why, she needs you NOW. And then as soon as she realizes you're there for her, you aren't with someone else, meeting their needs, she feels better and slips back to sleep. Once she gets this out of her system, once she fully masters this stage transition, she will probably, naturally, without much training needed, stop calling out for you. If she doesn't, then 3 might be an easier age to reason with her and to help her learn to self-soothe.

2 1/2 years old Part II: Reader’s question about the child’s mind

2.5 - 3 years, Readers' Questions

You know, sometimes it seems like I make these questions up myself just to provide the right springboard. Here's a recent email I received:

My daughter is 28.5 months old and it looks like she is approaching the
2.5 year developmental spurt.  She has been particularly fussy,
throwing more tantrums than usual and has started waking 4-5 times a
night. At night she will call out to ME to be covered usually.  She
falls asleep immediately after but this repeats itself a number of
times thru the course of the night.  I don't even rouse myself when I
go to her, but still it does interfere with a decent night's sleep.  My
question is what is happening in the head of a child this age and is
there anything I can do about being called repetitively throughout the
night?  I worry that if I don't respond to her calls, she will start
crying and then EVERYONE will be woken up ( especially her brother who
she sleeps with). I'm guessing during this regression there isn't much
I can do, right?

Let's tackle the first part here and the second part (about what, if anything, there is to do about multiple wakings) I'll get to in Part III (but yeah, unfortunately, there's no magic bullet during this age). So, what's going on in the child's head at 2.5 years old? I mentioned in Part I some of the highlights of the cognitive changes that are happening. Let's look at the emotional domain in more detail. Most of the following section was pulled from various parts of the book, but I had to add some extra commentary (and youtube clips) to pick things up a bit…

"According to Judy Dunn, a prolific researcher into the social side of early childhood, children this age begin to coordinate their newfound knowledge of people’s goals with their growing awareness of household rules. At about 28 months, the child can now understand how accepting or breaking rules asserts his own power over your goals, and hence your emotional states—no small advance in the diplomatic halls of family life. In fact, this understanding provides the child with a new level of social sophistication, social influence, and capacity for manipulation. When I'm talking about manipulation, I'm not saying they're these Dr. Evils in the making… But they ARE trying to figure out how far they can go in breaking the rules and what consequences will ensue; and the only real way to learn these things is to keep pushing up against their parents, the keepers of all that is good, safe, and powerful.

Toddlers will now test the limits, not only to see what they can get away with, not only to satisfy their basic need to assert independence, but to go a step further, to see how much social influence they really have. They will find a way to touch and eventually ruin or ingest whatever you least want them to handle: the kitchen knives, the computer, the bottles of detergent beneath the sink. With great concentration they will find a way to engage in the forbidden behaviour as soon as you enter the room. Why waste this potentially hazardous action on a parent who isn’t paying attention? And you know when they look at you with that glint in their eye? And say "NO way!" Or completely ignore your plea for compliance? Or… scream "SILENCE! you silly parent!" (forgive me… it's been a long day and these Dr. Evil references are cracking me up). But why do they do it? What could possibly motivate this obnoxious testing? It isn’t because they are truly evil—although we sometimes wonder. It isn’t because they really want to wreck your day, or be rushed to the hospital. It’s because they need to know how much control they have over the thing that matters most: how other people are feeling. And they need to understand what lies behind bad emotions as well as good ones. What they are exploring is the background logic of the emotional lives of those they love and depend on. If you suddenly had access to that kind of information, for the first time in your life, wouldn’t you dive in?

This is also the age that jealousy comes on line full force. Jealousy is certainly one of the most painful of emotions. Once it is let loose in the child’s mind, it seems to have the capacity to infect his thoughts and feelings, like a virus that self-replicates and makes the person sick. Nobody knows why it is so powerful, but we have all felt its sting. Nancy Friday, a brilliant writer who combines psychoanalytic and feminist principles in her work, shows how jealousy is inextricably coupled with feelings of shame and self-doubt. If the child feels that somebody else is more worthy of a parent’s attention, care, even love, then she cannot help but see herself as somehow inferior. Why her and not me? Am I ugly? Am I bad? Don’t you love me anymore? Not all children feel jealousy, and corresponding emotions of shame and self-doubt, with the same intensity. Not at all. Some children are just more sensitive to the loss of affection, or even the outright rejection, that all children feel from time to time. Those children will certainly be more prone to jealousy. Nevertheless, even the most sensitive child is less likely to feel jealousy if there is no sibling with whom to compete.

The 2 1/2 year old is particularly prone to jealousy if a new baby has shown up in the last 6-12 months (or if mom is pregnant). After all, there was no competition up until now. And the little baby is so…cute. And you spend an awful lot of time with her, you carry her around everywhere, you seem entranced by her, over the top with all your cooing and gooing. What’s that all about?! We don’t know of a cure for jealousy, but as parenting books and common sense will advise you, the best approach may be to make time for your older child, to reassure him about his specialness, to show him, as well as tell him, how much you love him, and to explain to him that babies need a lot of help because they are so…helpless. You can also enlist your toddler’s help with the baby, while commenting on how big, how cool, how ABLE he is. This will ease the sting. And then you can try to enlist a regular babysitter for the next 6 months to get you through the roughest patch. It is indeed going to be all about YOU (as the reader's question emphasizes) and kids this age will be the WORST behaved with mom in particular, and their parents in general. It's a rough patch to get through, but they DO get through it.

2.5 years old Part I: Just when you thought you could relax

2.5 - 3 years

So, piggy-backing on the last reader's question, let's talk about the next major developmental transition: two and a half years old. Dude. This is a doozy. And it can last up until the child is around three. I'll stick to the more "cognitive" changes for this post and tomorrow I'll add the emotional level.

So, here's a small excerpt from our book on the cognitive changes that come online around 2.5.  The implications for sleep training will start becoming obvious to you, but we can get more specific in Part II (and please feel free to leave comments about your thoughts).

From Bedtiming: "Findings from a broad range of studies point to several fascinating changes in how toddlers think and act.  The transition from Stage 5 to 6, at about 28–30 months (2.5 years), spells major advances in the complexity of the sentences, stories, and rule relationships children can understand and manipulate. For example, children can knowingly either follow or violate rules well before 2 years. They know that throwing food is frowned upon, but they do it anyway, with a maddening glint in their eye, and they know that cleaning up toys is a good thing in some vague way. Two-year olds can also be aware of people’s goals, and the feelings that arise when they are satisfied or obstructed. Mommy is happy when I eat my carrots. My sister is sad when I hit her. BUT!  And here's the big change: they don’t see rules and goal-seeking in relation to each other. Which means that they don’t really get the purpose behind rules. By 2.5, however, children come to understand that parents’ goals and feelings have everything to do with rules. Rules are a recipe for making parents happy or angry. Breaking rules now involves more than just a display of selfhood: it marks a true rebellion, and that’s an expression of real power. We believe this is one reason why the “terrible twos” often get worse, not better, at the age of 2 and a half.  But kids this age can also follow rules to make parents happy or to keep Grandma from scolding them. In sum, children can now follow rules or break them in order to influence other people’s feelings. This is why we call this stage, "Social Maneuvering." This level of social understanding, and its use for good, not evil, so to speak, may be an important start on the path of moral development, the ability to know what's right and wrong and make choices accordingly…

The other social acquisition we emphasize for this period is a different animal, and one often seen as a monster: jealousy! Now is the time when true jealousy first rears its ugly head, because jealousy involves the comparison of two social relationships: you and me versus you and him, that other fellow over there who you seem to be quite taken with! That little threat in mummy's belly, waiting to pop out and take all mummy's attention and love from me (unfortunately for so many little 2.5 year olds, many parents have their second child right around this time). The more attention you give to him, the less you have for me. That’s the cognitive computation underlying real jealousy. This level of cognitive processing is exactly the same as that required to understand and manipulate others’ feelings by obeying or disobeying the rules, and that is why it emerges at roughly the same age…"

I'll write more about jealousy in Part II, because of its intimate connection with shame, feelings of inferiority, and other negative emotional states. But you can already see why bedtime issues get a lot more complicated. It turns out that the success or failure of sleep training at this age may depend a lot on whether there is another sibling around to bring the green monster out of its closet. Being attuned to these potentially painful, confusing emotional upheavals in our children at the very least helps us understand them; it may also help us consider structuring sleep transitions in more sensitive ways (as well as helping us to help them with so many other challenges they might be facing at this age).

For those of you out there with kids this age (or kids who have already gone through it), does this description resonate with you? Does it make sense? Can you give "real life" examples of this newfound obsession with understanding (and breaking) rules explicitly? Anyone else seeing jealousy really flare up at this age?