Shifting Perspective
“How do we get our children to go to sleep?” This is one of the most common questions I’ve heard from parents with young children. With children who have transitioned out of the crib, parent’s frustration can come from several failed attempts to keep their children calm in their beds, or at a minimum to simply stay in their bedrooms. For some parents, this leads to line drawing and upping the ante with increased threats of consequences that seldom result in children going to sleep in a timely manner. By the time a family gets to my office they’ve tried taking everything out of the bedroom, increased consequences, and sometimes even tried holding their child’s door shut. At this point the bedtime routine has taken on a life of its own. Each person in the family can feel their stress increasing as bedtime gets closer. Mom might start to feel tightness in her neck as her body prepares for the conflict on the horizon. Dad starts to feel anxious and finds things to do away from the battle zone hoping that he doesn’t get drug in, while leaving mom all alone which increases her stress and the likelihood of another bedtime meltdown. The child also starts to exhibit behaviors that seem out of the norm. Running away when it's time to brush teeth. Jumping on the bed when they had been calm all day. Sometimes it feels like they save up all their energy just to fight going to sleep.
This can also be a desperate time for many parents with children who are not yet out of the crib. All day you respond to the constant demands of parenting. Feeding, changing, cleaning, entertaining, bathing, cooking, cleaning, changing, entertaining, feeding...and at the end of the night, all you’re asking for is one hour alone. This desire for our personal time is healthy, yet when this desire gets in the way of attunement to our child's emotional world it can work against us. The main area of the brain that is developing between the ages of 0-2 years old is keenly tuned in to the parents’ inner experience. The more anxious, frustrated or distracted we are as parents will often result in our child’s emotional discomfort and struggles to fall asleep.
For each developmental stage there are helpful strategies for turning around this bedtime battle but for this blog I want to focus on what I believe is the foundation for any successful strategy and that is a change in perspective.
Early on our first son taught me this valuable lesson about the bedtime routine. We had long since learned that letting him “cry it out” was not an effective strategy for him. This resulted in wailing for five minutes followed by projectile vomit. It wasn’t a fit for me either as every attachment nerve in my body lit up with his cries of protest and distress. So we tried other ways to sooth him. My routine was to make a nest on my lap with his pillow and favorite blanket, sing songs, and rock him until he drifted off to sleep. Typically this would take about twenty five minutes. This worked well most of the time but when it didn’t work I would start to feel anxious while anticipating that my alone time was shrinking away. Through this lens of desperation I started viewing his difficulty falling asleep as a negative behavior rather than just what it was...an indication that he was not feeling soothed and needed something different.
One night, when he was around two, I was rocking him to sleep as he was stretched out across his pillow on my lap. The past two nights had been marathon rocking sessions and tonight, forty minutes in, he seemed to be fighting sleep again. As I envisioned my one-hour to myself beginning to fade from my current reality, I started to feel resentful. In my head I was far away from the room, staring at the wall and avoiding eye contact with him. In my body I was tense and rocking a pace more reflective of frustration than the desire to sooth. I had stopped singing because the tone of my voice was conveying the stress that was present in my body and, though his eyes were shut, his body appeared rigid and uneasy.
At some point in my spinning thoughts of exasperation I felt this simple truth like a voice in my head. “This is it. This is all that you have. You are not promised tomorrow. You are not promised another hour. This moment with your son is what you have.” I slowed down my rocking. Took my eyes off the wall and looked down at my son’s beautiful face. I realized I was tense and not really breathing, so I took a long deep breath and gradually exhaled. As I did, so did he. My gaze followed the curve of his eyes down to the valley just above his cute little nose. I bent down and lightly kissed him right there between his eyes, a perfect fit for my lips. His breathing slowed and he slipped off to sleep.
For the previous twenty-five minutes I had been annoyingly trying to get him to relax and fall asleep so I could watch Netflix and be alone. Now he was asleep and I had no desire to leave. I just wanted to soak it all in. I could feel on my forearms his body gently breathing through the pillow above. I could feel the shift of weight from that of a board to a bag of flour. I thought of all the years I had dreamed of this moment and felt so much gratitude that I was right here living in it. The moment was thick with awareness, awareness of every touch, sound, and smell but also awareness that this moment would soon be gone. Before I know it he will grow up and move on, as he should, and I will never have this moment back again.
That was a turning point for me to begin to embrace the bedtime routine as something far more than a necessary evil to get through. Sometimes it really is that easy. Like the old saying…the best way to get what you want is to want what you got. Other times it is not as easy as just shifting perspective. In my next blog I will focus on specific strategies for times when it is more complicated. However, even if the strategies become more complex, the starting point will always be with the perspective you bring and how attuned you are to your child.
