Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. We've had a really wonderful response to our sleep series and lots of comments and questions have come up through various social networking. People have spoken to me directly about it as well.
And so there's been a request to actually, you know, can we address some specific issues around bedtime? And I thought, well, absolutely. So we're extending this just for one more podcast. One of the common questions comes up around toddlers and bedtime and separation anxieties.
And I'll try and make my responses, because there's been a lot of questions actually as crisp as I can and as direct. With toddlers, they're right at a time when there's at the height of their learning to separate from mom or dad. And a lot of what we've covered in these podcasts will be of real value.
I want to really emphasize these points that we've talked about, which will help a child feel safe around bedtime. Because separation largely is a security and safety issue, of course. So suggestions like giving them, you know, a t-shirt or something that reminds them of mommy or daddy, a photograph on their bedside table of them with mom or dad.
My children had an old bear that I had as myself as a child. And they would take it in terms of who got to sleep with the bear. And if anyone couldn't sleep very well, then they got to have the bear.
Trying to understand that the children at this age do naturally go through, they're learning to separate. And if we can smooth out the environment visually in all the different ways we talked about in the first podcast, and then have those rituals, have that decompression, and then not overwhelm them with information. What I've found over the years is that toddlers who most directly respond to that, most quickly respond to that.
There's also comments and questions, of course, about how to get a child back into their own room. Like how, if they're going to bed and they're getting up and they're coming back into your room, it can be exhausting, right? It just can be because you're being woken up. And here are just a few suggestions for that.
One is to really make very clear boundaries and an arrangement and say to a child, here is the way we're doing this. To have clarity about it, because what can sometimes happen is that it gets very wobbly and a child gets, first of all, put in a parent's bed and when they're asleep, transferred into their own. Not a good idea, because when they wake up, they'll boomerang right back into your bed.
Or if a child wakes up in the early morning hours and asks for something, it's another real mistake to get up and get that for her. Now, I know we know that, but our heart sometimes goes out to a child and so that's just signaling again to a child. They are semi-awake and then they'll fully wake themselves up in order to make a request for us to do something.
Another one is just to extend story time and just another story, another story, another story and have a child in that sense feel that not only they can extend things, but actually they're in charge and not a good signal to give to a child at all. I've mentioned quietening things down before bedtime as being crucial as well, but another aspect that some parents have had to relearn or address is they will let children know particularly in daytime naps and so on, be in charge and put the mummy to bed. They'll say, well you can put me to bed and then I'll put you to bed.
And we're bringing children onto our level of nighttime authority and again, really not a good idea at all. Another thing that can often get in the way of children coming in and disturbing you is as soon as they wake up, we pick them up within seconds of first hearing a little cry from them and that's also not helpful. I know it may sound, I hope it doesn't sound harsh, not in any way meant to be, but when a child is crying at night, it's harder because in the daytime, many of us are now willing to let a child cry.
It's okay. If a child cries at night though, how do we handle that? It seems a little bit different, right? And so we know that just coming in and picking up a child within seconds of them crying is going to actually set up a whole cycle where they get us back by crying, right? And a cycle gets set up. One of the ways to start to address that is when a child cries at night, before they go to bed, let them know that it's okay sometimes.
It really is okay sometimes to be upset at night. Every little child sometimes can feel like crying at night and you and mummy and daddy did it when they were little and that it's okay. As much as you can, normalize it.
Secondly, if a child cries or gets out of bed and comes in with you, let them know that if they do that, you'll tell them exactly what you're going to do. You'll get out of bed, I mean you've got to often do this with little ones. You'll take them back into the room, you'll put them back into their bed, you'll pull the covers up, you'll give them a little kiss and then you will be going back to your bed.
The reason for doing this is that it gives them then an expectation of what's going to happen. They don't get up out of bed, come into your room and then expect that you'll come back in and sleep with them or that you will sing to them or that you'll tell a story with them. They're not left wondering.
You tell them exactly the way you're going to deal with it and by the way it means you get back to bed and back to sleep before you become overly awake yourself. You can kind of in a semi-stupor get up and take a child into their bed, covers, kiss on the cheek, back to your bed and you can be asleep. We parents can be asleep much, much quicker than being fully awake.
But it's helpful to tell a child the parameters of what will happen if they do come in. You can't stop them coming in, right, short of locking the door or whatever and that's not going to work, they'll just kick on it and cry and howl. There's no point in saying you will not do this.
Of course you can say to them that's not what you wish to have happen but you don't want to be getting into a power struggle with it that you're going to lose because they can get out of bed. But what you can do, what's within your circle of control is to let them know exactly what will happen and it's quite minimalistic. You know you're really going to do the minimum and put them back into bed and you may have to repeat that two or three or four times the first night you do it, second night you do it, third night, fourth night you do it, you're repeating it once or twice, usually within a relatively short period of time.
The kids get the message that you love them, you care for them but you are not going to have a 4th of July party at 3 in the morning. It's not going to happen. Another way, another very common question comes up with what I've mentioned, what I call the hostage taking, the night time hostage taking where a child will demand through their emotional reactions that you lay beside them for 1, 2, 3, 4 hours.
Where that really came home to me is when my first child was born and I would lay down beside her. I think that is a mistake really and I made that mistake and we live in a very, very old house and one day I found myself on my abdomen, on my tummy, worming out of the room in case any of the floorboards creaked, right? Because if the floorboard would creak, you know, you'd hear the cry and that, oh no. And my wife was coming up the stairs and I was worming out of the room and we met kind of eye to eye and in that moment I just realized this is ridiculous, this is not okay, I should know better.
So what we, we talked about it and what we did was brought in a simple plan and a simple plan and it seemed to be quite successful actually is that toddler in bed, this was when she was a toddler, toddler in bed, chair beside. I've mentioned that before in these podcasts, no, no laying on the bed, chair beside, increase the rhythms and rituals around the getting to bed because that needed strengthening. But the key point here is that I would take my chair and sit beside her for a little while while the story and prayers happened and then I'd move my chair, the chair, the chair that represented safety and security to her, I would move it to the doorway and I would sit in the doorway.
And then I'd get up and I'd say, oh I'll be back in a moment love and I would get up and I would walk down the corridor, make some little noises of doing something or other and then come right back. Really within, initially it was within sort of 5 or 10 seconds, then 20 seconds, then 30 seconds until eventually the chair was outside the door and I was going away for longer minutes until, you can see where this is going right, until she would then be asleep and there was no more need to do that. It took a couple of weeks to actually establish that but occasionally there'd be regressions because toddlers will regress back in their sleep and get all whingy and whiny and frightened and that's usually because they're at a little bit of a developmental milestone and then we just repeated the process again.
But this time it was much quicker, it was just a matter of a week or so of the same sort of pattern of getting up, assuring her, letting her know, Daddy is just going out to, you know, tidy up the lounge room. And she would know, Daddy is just going to get a drink, I would let her know what I was doing but then extend it, extend it, extend it until asleep and didn't have to do it anymore at all, there was just a sitting in the chair and then up and leave. This is a way to help a child, it's almost like an attachment theory of these waves where you come, you go out, you come back, you go out, you come back.
Now in normal, you know, daily life the going out is a child, they'll go out a little bit to a friend a little bit and they'll come back, they'll go out a little further until they get, and eventually they'll be more confident and then they'll get out, go out and they'll be there, they'll be playing with their friends. At night time, it's interesting how this is reversed, the mummy or daddy can go out a little bit and come back and then go out a little further and come back. It's almost like a reversal of what happens in terms of this, a child moving a little bit away from a mummy and coming back to feel safe.
Now in this case, the parent is moving out and coming back. It's a beautiful echo of a very, very natural securing instinct and it speaks to the child beautifully. All sorts of other questions that sort of had echoes in the ones that we're just talking about have come up, but there, those, I've tried to cluster that in the main types of questions that come up around sleep.
Okay, I sure hope that was helpful as always, okay, bye bye for now.
