Tag Archives: infants

Top 10 Things Parents Should Know Before Sleep-Training their Child (Not what you might expect…)

Bedtiming_book_cover

Here are some of the highlights from the book. I'll include more in-depth discussions of each point in separate posts soon. For now, here's a summary:

1. Timing is everything: No matter what method of sleep training you use, it is more likely to succeed at particular developmental stages, and more likely to fail at others. The vast majority of children follow a predictable developmental schedule of emotional and cognitive changes in the first 5 years of life.

2. The best times for sleep training are neither early nor late. Many people assume that getting sleep training over with before the child gets too clever or too entrenched in nighttime habits is the best approach. Others assume that waiting until the attachment bond is strong and/or kids are more independent is important. Both are wrong. The best stages to sleep-train follow a pendulum swing from one age to the next, with difficult periods interspersed between periods of relative ease.

3. Stages that make it harder to sleep-train are those of heightened emotional vulnerability. In these predictable periods, your child will be more dependent, vulnerable, or prone to separation distress, jealousy or shame.

4. Stages that make it easier to sleep-train are when your child is less emotionally sensitive. For an infant, these are periods she is more interested in the nonsocial world of objects, actions, and locomotion, and less concerned with other people. Resilient periods in toddlerhood are when children are not feeling
compelled to assess parents' availability, attention, and affection,
when they don't need to define their own territories or intentions
through defiance, when they are less prone to jealousy and shame and
when they are more concerned with winning approval than testing limits.

5. Most sleep-training methods are equally effective. There are at least half a dozen popular sleep-training methods, ranging from "cry it out" to "gentle no-cry solutions." None have been proven more effective than another so pick something that feels right for you. That means go with a method that seems to match your parenting philosophy or approach in general. Ultimately, you have to live with your parenting choices and you know your child best.

6. There are some ages at which particular methods are likely to work better than others. If you understand the emotional vulnerabilities and strengths that characterize each developmental stage, you will be better equipped to match a sleep-training method with your child’s age.

7. Pick a method you know you can stick with. That means apply the method consistently, and do so for at least a week.

8. Things often get worse before they get better. Children already have sleep habits when we decide to sleep train them. Breaking those habits may involve some disruption, disorganization, or outright rebellion on the part of your baby or toddler. As a result your child may sleep less or wake more frequently before she settles into a new routine.

9. Sleep training is often not a one-shot deal. Even after your child learns to sleep through the night, sleep setbacks can occur at (predictably) difficult ages, requiring parents to think about what's different and how to re-implement effective sleep training.

10. A family that is getting enough sleep, is a happy, healthy family. Mothers in particular often feel guilty about sleep training because of messages from the media, friends and family (including fellow mothers, unfortunately) that their first and only priority should be their child’s happiness. Parents who are considering sleep training for reasons beyond just the well-being of their child (gasp!) are not only perfectly normal, but are doing the right thing. A sleep-deprived child is a cranky, inattentive one who will have a tougher time learning and socializing. A sleep-deprived parent is often irritable, angry, depressed and ineffective. A well-rested mother and a well-rested child will both be happier, healthier, more alert and more affectionate.

About Child of Mind

Family pic

About Us

Hi, my name is Isabela Granic. My husband (Marc Lewis) and I wrote Bed Timing: The “when-to” guide to helping your child to sleep. We both got our PhDs in developmental psychology — he’s a Professor at University of Toronto and I’m a research scientist at the Hosptial for Sick Children in Toronto. We’re also parents of 3-year old twin boys.  We wrote Bed Timing while trying to figure out the ins and outs of our own children’s sleep habits and how to ultimately change those crazy habits so that we could regain our sanity. This blog was first developed as a place to talk about the issues raised in Bed Timing, to highlight particular research findings that form the basis of the book and, most importantly, to provide readers a space to ask questions and trouble-shoot through their own sleep-training highs and lows. We’ve been on several call-in radio shows as part of the book promotion tour and my favorite part of this process has been connecting with real moms who are in the trenches, trying to solve their own young children’s sleep problems. I was hoping to do more of that through this blog.

After about 6 months of focusing on sleep issues in babies and toddlers, I decided to broaden the topics of the blog to any developmental questions and concerns that parents may have about their children. So… this “new and improved” blog is meant to cover almost any developmental topic: discipline, potty training, cognitive milestones, early friendships, literacy, aggression, early fears, school-readiness, separation distress and so on and so on.

Tracy's pic And I have a comrade in arms now to help me write and keep up with comments. Her name is Tracy Solomon. She too has a PhD in developmental psychology. Whereas my expertise are generally in social and emotional development, hers are in cognitive development. Read more about her here. Tracy has a 5-year-old son. He is a child of passionate interests and
some unusual abilities that really keep her on her toes. Tracy’s key
interests are in symbolic reasoning (for example, how children learn to understand different forms of media, from t.v., to videos and so on) and spatial reasoning (how children learn to navigate)
and also at the intersection of these; children’s comprehension of
maps, scale models, graphs, rulers etc. All of this is, of course,
related to more formal learning which is how she came to her current
research in early mathematics education. On top of all that, she’s basically incredibly knowledgeable about just about anything that’s related to how children think and how that thinking changes over time.

We’d like this online space to serve several functions:

(1) To provide a Q & A forum in which readers can send their parenting questions or questions about development that simply interest them. We’ll try to provide some advice, based on our developmental training (and some personal experience!).  Please, feel free to email us any questions you may have; we’ll try to get to as many as possible as quickly as possible. If you’re worried about something, there’s sure to be many, many other parents in the same boat. We’ll post questions and answers several times per week. 

(2) To highlight the latest research findings about children’s development on all sorts of topics — the latest neurscience studies, the latest work on school-readiness, and so on. Between the two of us, Tracy and I have tons and tons of research that we’ve compiled, summarized, and critiqued. We’d like to post relevant studies, articles, and new research findings on a weekly basis and have you comment about the usefulness and relevance of that material.

(3) To develop a supportive community for parents and caregivers that can help parents help each other through some of the most harrowing developmental challenges. The extent to which this goal will be realized is all about you.