Trying to get a kid to sleep is the worst. Not only is it difficult to get a child to sleep but there are apparently like 48 stages in the development of a child’s sleep. First, you’ve got to try to get them to go to sleep AT ALL.
When my son was a baby, sleep was not something he did. We worked very hard to try to find a situation where you could get him to sleep. You know back when you had TV antennas, and you’d have to hold it at a 36-degree angle while yodeling into a glass half full of mayonnaise while tapping your left foot to the beat of Flashdance to get the reception to come in clearly?
That was us trying to get my son to sleep.
We eventually figured out that my son really like the sound of our bathroom fan. One day after rocking him to sleep while sitting on the toilet, I put him in the bassinet, in the bathtub, with the fan on and laid down myself for a nap. I awoke to him crying and me thinking, “Well, that wasn’t very long.”
And it wasn’t. It had been 11 and a half minutes since I’d put him down.
So, when my daughter was born, we didn’t even bother trying. For several months, she slept on me in the living room while I cruised through season after season of The West Wing and didn’t sleep.
When we finally did put her in her crib, the inevitable screaming never came. She just went to sleep. That’s when we really realized that every child is different.
And now we’re at the next stage of sleep: the big girl bed transition.
When we put my son in a “big boy bed,” I don’t think he figured out that he could get out. He would call to us to go get him in the morning. If he dropped a stuffy, we’d have to go pick it up. And that seemed annoying… until we realized that meant he wasn’t getting out of bed.
Our daughter has no such disillusions.
We arrived at a remote cottage a few weeks ago, assured that there was a playpen for our daughter. There was not. The family that we were staying with said, “oh, she can just sleep in that bed there.” This resulted in about 90 minutes of me lying in bed with my daughter trying to convince her that sleep is awesome.
And now we’re starting the same thing at home. We decided that we would put the kids in one room together. This did not work. My son is very tired come bedtime and was very frustrated with our daughter who is… not exactly quiet.
I don’t know how it happens, but every night, when we put our daughter to bed, she wakes up. She can be collapsed on the couch, tiny peephole eyes barely open, saying out loud that she’s really tired. But the second you put her in bed, there’s singing and dancing and playing. And when we had the two of them in the same room, this did not fly with my son.
He repeatedly came out of his room complaining that his sister would not be quiet. I think he wanted to say that she wouldn’t shut the f up but I marveled at his self-control.
We resorted to co-sleeping her to sleep, something we’ve always rallied against. We’ve established a very short bedtime routine. Once the kids go to their rooms, it’s bedtime. We leave. They sleep. Sort of. So, the idea of lying beside my daughter telling her to go to sleep was not high on my list of things to do.
And yet, there we were, because in the end you do what works.
The next weekend at our cottage, we put her in a different room so that she wouldn’t keep her brother up, and while she was still awake for almost 2 hours after we put her down, there was only one trip out of bed (her nightly “I need to pee even though I swore to you 15 minutes ago that I didn’t need to pee” excursion). She slept through the night. Next up: we’ll be converting her crib at home into a bed.
So, what did we learn from trying to get our kids to sleep?
First, every kid is different and they could care less about what strategies you’ve decided to put in place. That’s not to say that you don’t make a plan, but as our Doula suggested: “Make a plan and then understand that your kid couldn’t care less about your plan.”
Second, try to establish a routine. While I’ve passed on some not-so-fun OCD type behaviors to my children through my insistence on habit, habits also work. If you want to get your kids to start sleeping like normal humans (presuming normal humans require 17 stuffies bigger than their body and get up well before anyone on the planet would ever want to) then make a plan and (wherever possible) stick with it.
It may seem like an eternity when you first get started, but soon enough everyone will be sleeping soundly.
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