We've talked a lot about sleep setbacks (or regressions) in terms of sensitive developmental stages and how those stages can throw to high-hell all previously hard-won sleeping skills. But I left off Part I of this series suggesting that another common cause of sleep setbacks can be a change in the context of going to sleep—often a change that we’re unaware of, or that we don’t see as important, and sometimes a change that we can’t control. Changes in context come in all varieties. Some are obvious: like a change in location. Sleep habits have a tendency to go out the window when you’re on vacation (I know a lot of us are anxious about this now), or sleeping in a hotel room or relative’s guest room. Which is one reason why “vacations” may not be so restful during the early years. (Suffice it to say that our last week's family cottage "vacation" could better be described as one large slumber party badly in need of Super Nanny intervention). Other obvious changes in context are alterations in who is taking care of the child and who is putting him or her to sleep. If mom is always present when baby goes to sleep, then her absence can have a formidable impact on sleeping habits, and dad may be at an utter loss while mom is finally out for her first Margarita with her girlfriends since the baby was born. But these changes are usually temporary and/or avoidable (not that I'm saying that the night out with the girlfriends SHOULD be avoided… not at all).

Other changes in context are not so easy to avoid. When winter turns to spring and spring to summer, your baby may have to get used to going to sleep with light pouring through the curtains. And even the smallest sliver of light may be enough to change her fundamental sense that it’s not bedtime yet. When a new baby comes along, a new sibling, this can also cause a major upheaval to your previously perfect sleeper. Now you’re different in so many ways. You don’t read as many books at bedtime. You’re tired, you’re less patient, you smell funny (fresh spit-up on your t-shirt has such a… specific odour) and so forth. And there are different noises in the house. Things aren’t as quiet as they used to be. These sorts of changes in context are rather hard or impossible to avoid or even dampen, but they may have drastic effects on your child’s sleeping habits regardless. Champion sleepers may suddenly lie awake, chanting, or whining, or rattling the bars of their cribs like little criminals. All because the context of going to sleep has changed in some pivotal way.

One way to think of the solution for sleep setbacks caused by changes in context may sound simplistic: change the context back to whatever worked best or whatever context has been in place until now. If you can. Of course, if the change in context is a change in season, from winter to spring, you won’t have much luck changing it back for another half year or so. But you can, instead, install heavy curtains to block out the light coming through the window. And that’s often the best you can do: approximate the context that’s been in place up until now. If the noise level in the house is the problem, put a white noise generator, or simply a fan, next to the baby’s crib. Sometimes a CD of lullabies does the trick. The key to finding the right solution is pin-pointing what’s different. What’s changed? Often some detective work is required. Whatever has changed in the lighting, atmosphere, sound level, or you may not be the least bit obvious, even though that change is sufficiently potent to make a big difference to your child’s sleep. Babies and toddlers are exquisitely sensitive little beings, and their nervous systems are tuned to many perceptual aspects of their environment that completely escape your attention. And they like familiarity. So, if a sleep setback seems to have no other reason behind it, and a change in context is the likely culprit, try to put yourself in that crib, tune your eyes, ears, nose, and skin to the world around you as sensitively as you can, and you’ll probably figure out the problem in no time. Along these same lines, if you're going on vacation, try to mimic the exact sleep context
you have at home: the same dark room, the same teddy, blanket, soother,
the same stories, the same music, and so on.

Finally, some changes in context are unavoidable and no approximation on your part will bring back what the baby was previously used to (for example, babies grow out of swaddles — even the most "miraculous" of them all — and you're not going to be rolling a 12-month old into a tight blanket; toddlers leap out of cribs and the inevitable move to the "big boy/girl bed" can't be put off until adolescence — despite MY best efforts). When these unavoidable changes in sleep contexts occur, the only thing we can do is rest-assured that children are miraculously adaptive little organisms and they DO learn new sleep habits with our help. 

Part III will cover how PHYSICAL milestones can be considered a fundamental change in the child's context and, of course, why this might spell trouble for already-established healthy sleep habits.

Anyone going through one of these unavoidable changes in sleep contexts? How are you coping?

I'm going to try to address several emails at once through a series of posts about what psychologists often call "context" or the "environment." If you've emailed me to ask about swaddling (how long do you do it for? when do we transition babies out of swaddles? will the switch out of swaddling make a difference in the baby's sleep?) or about moving a sibling into another child's room or traveling for a long period of time and coming back home to "old" sleep patterns or differences in sleep patterns at your house versus the grandparents' house… these posts are for you! All those issues and many others concern changes in the child's sleeping environment and those changes, indeed, can make a HUGE difference in how children fall asleep and stay that way. For this post, I'll stick to the more general consideration of learning ANYTHING at all, not just sleep habits. Then we'll generalize in the next post to sleep in particular.

One of the reasons sleep training is usually not a one-shot deal for most families is that as the child develops, the world around him also changes.  So far, we've only touched on one of the most important aspects of sleep training. This issue is actually not specific to learning how to go to sleep on one’s own: it is a fundamental aspect of all kinds of learning, especially in the early years of life but also, to some degree, throughout childhood and adulthood. It’s the role of context. When we learn a new skill, we use all the cognitive resources at our disposal, and it seems as though it is these thinking powers alone that either permit learning to occur or are found insufficient to the task. But learning relies on much more than what’s going on inside our heads. It also relies on what’s going on in the environment.

When a child learns to count, he does indeed require a brain that’s mature enough to grasp the way numbers stand for a sequence of objects. He needs the language skills to utter words that stand for numerical placement. He also needs joint attention and social referencing so that he can pay attention to what is being taught by his parent or teacher. These are all the requirements for counting that rest INSIDE the child's head. But he ALSO needs a great deal from outside his skin. He needs a parent or teacher patient enough to repeat numbers while pointing to objects. He needs a set of objects that are the right size and shape, and are lined up in such a way as to highlight their “countability.” He also needs to be well-fed and well-rested so that he can concentrate on the task at hand. And he needs a well-lit room and a learning space where the objects to be counted stand out from their background and make themselves available to be pointed to or manipulated. In other words, learning depends on context. 

Learning ANYTHING in life is helped along a great deal by contexts that are set up to support that learning. We take all this for granted, and we intuitively prepare contexts to help children learn whatever it is we’re trying to teach them. We don’t try to teach a child the names for colours in a dark room, and we don’t try to teach table manners to a child who has the flu, or who is extremely hungry, or who wants nothing more than to be finished eating and go out to play. We adapt the context to the task and the task to the context. The child’s learning of the task depends on the context in which it’s learned. Finally, skills that are not yet completely formed, or that are still easily lost or forgotten, are best maintained when we reproduce the context in which they’re originally learned. In other words, kids (and adults, BTW) learn particular skills better when these skills are taught in the same (or very similar) environment, over and over again. Table manners take a long time to perfect. But if we want to keep them from vanishing, then we practice them again and again in a context that facilitates impulse control and pulls for social routines.

The role of context in learning and maintaining good sleep habits could not be more critical. We don’t teach children to sleep on their own when they’re over-tired, or going to sleep at grandma’s house, or when their stuffed animal has gone AWOL. And we make sure that the lights are dim, the room warm, the belly full, and so on. We intuitively understand the importance of comfort and consistency, and we carefully prepare the child’s environment to maximize the chances of successful sleep-training. Then, once sleep-training has begun to succeed,  we’re careful to set up bedtime practices that will ensure its continued success. We wait until the child is tired, but not over-tired, we calm her down with stories and other peaceful activities, we sing the familiar songs, the ones that will become bedrock routine before long, we set the lights at just the correct dimness, and we make sure that every nuance of our own behaviour conforms to our child’s expectations.

So one of the most common causes of sleep setbacks is, very simply, a change in the context of going to sleep—often a change that we’re unaware of (slowly it becomes lighter and lighter outside at earlier and earlier times in the morning), or that we don’t see as important (change in diet, learning to walk), and sometimes a change that we can’t control (the child grows out of the swaddle, an overnight disaster trip to grandparents' house).

We'll talk more about how this basic learning principle — context matters — impacts on sleep issues in the next couple of posts. But I think you see where I'm going… What changes in the environment disrupts your child's sleep patterns? How have you adjusted to those changes?

Call it what you will, they SUCK. But I did want to clarify my thinking about what many folks call "sleep regressions." I realize it's not that important to many people what you call them: they're bad and they mean that yet again you are getting no sleep for some seemingly inexplicable reason. You may have had a child who was a glorious sleeper since she was born.  Or you found the most appropriate sleep-training method to suit your and your child’s needs and you applied this method at precisely the right developmental window. Your child was sleeping beautifully through the night, taking regular naps, you were getting 7 hours STRAIGHT yourself. Your child was a bright, bubbly, joyful child who was a delight to be with most of the time. Your depression lifted, you began to socialize again with friends. You even considered renewing your affection for your partner! Sex was potentially on the horizon! And then Bam!  One day your perfect sleeper goes from sleeping 12 hours through the night to waking up every hour and a half. She’s screaming again, crying for something, waking up and unable to fall back asleep. She is suddenly refusing to nap. The same routines are no longer working to calm her. The same music isn’t soothing anymore, the same bounce loses its hypnotic impact, the same bedtime story is slapped out of your hand in toddler disgust. Maybe it’s just a bad day or night? No, it goes on for days and sometimes weeks or even months.

We’ve heard this account from many parents and have experienced it firsthand. I like to refer to these times as "sleep setbacks", but they are more often talked about as “sleep regressions.” I'm not terribly fond of this phrase because regression implies a return to old patterns, old habits, more infantile forms of behaviour. And these “regressions” are actually the precise opposite: leaps forward, not backward—corresponding to a shift in the child’s stage of cognitive and emotional development.  (As an aside, I was thrilled to read in a Moxie post from more than 3 years ago that she thinks of these "regressions" the same way). However, to parents, they can definitely feel like regressions. After finally getting yourself a stretch of 6, 8 or even more hours of sleep per night, going back to 1 or 2 hour bursts of sleep feels like, well, GOING BACK.  To that dark and dreary place of sleep deprivation that you once thought only little, teeny, tiny newborns inflicted on their parents. And it was bearable in that newborn stage. But by now, most parents no longer have the support of friends and family who were there to commiserate when the baby was brought home from the hospital. Some parents perhaps joyfully announced, maybe even boasted, about their child’s hard-won sleeping skills. And suddenly, with seemingly no rhyme or reason, all those sleeping skills seem to have vanished overnight. What’s happened to your perfect little sleeper?

The short answer is that your child has probably hit one of the big developmental transition periods. (There are also other reasons, like teething, getting a cold, moving to a new house/room, the birth of a sibling, and so on). It's nothing you've done wrong and there's probably not all that much you can do about it.  These more vulnerable stages are the ones more difficult for sleep-training to begin with. These periods are created by cognitive advances and the emotional challenges they engender, and they are particularly troublesome periods for teaching an infant or toddler to sleep on his or her own. In the same way, entry into these stages may be what’s causing the psychological upheavals your child is going through now, and these may be responsible for sleep disruptions when none were present before. So, if your child has suddenly stopped sleeping through the night and/or begun to have napping strikes and she is between 4 and 5.5 months, 8 and 11 months, 18 and 22 months, 2.5 and 3 years, or 3.5 and 4 years, she's probably in one of these "sensitive windows" of development. The good news is that most kids who were good sleepers before these transitions usually become good sleepers again. This may require a little more "re-training," but generally once the transition is over, it's a relatively smooth process. So, again, it DOES pass and just knowing it's temporary may help you get through it with less stress and heart ache. For those kids who were never good sleepers to begin with, the next window of sleep-training opportunity could be just the cognitive-emotional stage your child was waiting for to show his magic sleep-awesomeness.