Do You Need To Remove Yourself From Your Child's Sleep Routine?

Don’t get “sleep routine” confused with “bedtime routine”. The bedtime routine is the 30 minutes prior to your kiddo falling asleep (bath, lotion, books etc.) and the sleep routine is how your child actually falls asleep.

Parents that have kiddos who don’t sleep through the night make a common mistake (also a mistake I made with not one but TWO kiddos). Can you guess what it is?

Staying with your child until they fall asleep.

It might have started out innocently enough (anyone else out there put your child to bed and wake up in their bed an hour later?) but it can become an issue.

You may have inadvertently become a prop for your child. Remember HERE when I explained props? If your child relies on something to fall asleep at bedtime, there is a very good chance that they will come to rely on that every other time they need to fall asleep. If their prop is something they have control over (thumb sucking, snuggling a stuffy, rubbing a blanket on their face) rather than something they don’t have control over (a bottle, rocking, mom or dads touch) chances are better that they aren’t going to call out for mom or dad when they wake up throughout the night. Remember HERE when I talked about sleep cycles? We all come to the surface of awake/asleep at the end of each sleep cycle – as adults we are generally pretty good at not even noticing and just going right back to sleep. Lots of kids can also do this, but those kiddos that don’t sleep through the night are generally the ones that rely on something external to fall back asleep. Here’s an example:

You’ve gone through the bedtime routine relatively peacefully and now it’s time for bed. Your 3-year-old asks you to lay down with them. You don’t want to rock the boat, so you say “yes, only for 2 minutes”. Then when 2 (ish) minutes is up, you go to leave and your child protests; again, you don’t want to rock the boat, so you lay down again for “another 2 minutes”. Generally, what ends up happening is you just stay until your child falls asleep because that’s easier than listening to them whine/cry when you try to leave. Once they are finally asleep you hold your breath and get out of their bed, do an army crawl to the door, close the door as quietly as you can and pray that they don’t hear you leave. Then in about an hour and a half or 3 hours or 4.5 hours they wake up looking for you and you’re back to square one.

Sound familiar to anyone?  

Let me just say that there is NOTHING wrong with laying down with your kiddos at bedtime; it’s actually my favourite time of the day with my 7-year-old because that’s the only time he tells me stuff. The issue is, however, when your child comes to rely on you being in their bed/room to fall asleep (this can also happen with a child in a crib. In that situation the parents are in the room at the crib rather than lying in the bed with them). If your child relies on you to be in their room/bed to fall asleep, when they come to the surface of awake/asleep at the end of their sleep cycle and realize you are not in their room anymore, chances are very good that they are going to call out for you or pay a visit to your bedroom to find you (and maybe even get to hop into bed with you because at that point it’s survival mode for everyone). They have been conditioned to believe that they cannot fall asleep without you.  

Okay so this sounds familiar but what do you do about it? The most important thing is to teach your child independent sleep skills that they can call on anytime they wake up, in order to get back to sleep on their own. Again, it’s okay for them to have “props”, as long as they can control them (thumb/finger sucking, blanket, stuffy) – in fact, I recommend that parents introduce something like this as it can bring great comfort to kids, especially when they are making the transition into sleep. It might sound like a daunting task to remove these external props (including yourself) but it usually isn’t as bad as parents make it out to be – our kids are so much more resilient than we give them credit for. I promise if you teach them some independent sleep skills your whole household will get more sleep!

Give your children the gift of sleep is one of the best things you can do for them

Until next time,

Kirsten