we are really loving Captain Bogg & Salty’s new album, and it was so fun to see them recently.
“Hey Sol, what do the pirates say?”
“YAR!!”
and the video they made for “pieces of 8ight” has been on their site for a while, but if you’ve not see it, GO NOW!
EAT A LIME!!
given that i like this so much:
and while we are at it, hint, hint… fathers day is coming up and here’s some ideas.
i’ve not blogged much about the ankle-biter, i think there’s more than enough “what cute thing our kid did today” blogs, and there’s always the photos.
but i was moved to quote a passage from a book that has made a huge impact on our life lately. Sol was having trouble getting to sleep and waking up a lot in the middle of the night. we recently moved, and this didn’t help matters. it had been hard for many months. teething, of course, made it harder too. various people (my sister, parents, pals) had tried to explain some version of this method to me without success. then we read these two pages in Penelope Leach’s Your Baby & Child: From Birth to Age Five. wow.
She talks about how the letting-them-cry-it-out practice worked for some, but only until the next time they were sick, teething, or in a strange place. She goes into some detail about…
Making your toddler let you go: If you look at it from the toddler’s point of view it is difficult to see why it should work. Your toddler cries because, for the moment, he cannot bear you to go away. So what messages do you send him by going away and staying away despite his howls? “It’s no good you’re crying because I have gone away forever / nobody’s listening / I’m not going to come back no matter how sad you are…” None of those is likey to make him feel safer about bedtime tomorrow; in fact, they are surely likely to increase his unease about letting you go at all.
Most of the experts who advocated this plan have softened their recommendations and it’s just as well. A determined toddler can keep himself awake and crying for much longer than most parents (or thier neighbors) can stand. And if you are going to have to go to him in two or three hours’ time, when he is convinced that you have abandoned him forever, you had much better go now.
Letting your toddler make you stay: The opposite approach is to give the toddler what she wants, by staying with her or taking her back downstairs [or to your room]. Although it is kinder that leaving her to cry, it is not realy any more sensible if you think again about the message your behavior will convey to her. “You’re scared of being left and you’re right, it is worrying to be left all alone so I’ll stay with you/take you with me…” One again this is not a message likey to make for easier bedtimes later on. How can the child come to believe that it is perfectly all right to be left to go to sleep if you suggest otherwise? And how can she accept that bedtime is the end of her day if she has nightly proof that crying will get her an extension?
The middle path: The approach recommend for older babies can serve as a compromise that will actually solve the conflict of interests between you and your toddler and help avert a power struggle. After all, you don’t really want to win a battle that leaves your child desperately alone, and you certainly don’t want him to win some more daytime. What you want is for him to settle happily. The message you have to try to convey is something like this: “there is no need to cry; nothing to be sad about. We are right here and will always come if you need us. But it is the end of today and time for you to go to sleep.”
Settle the child down cheerfully, going through your usual “good night” rituals. Leave confidently, and if he cries, wait a few seconds to see if it’s just a protest statement. If it’s not, and the crying starts to build up, go back into the room, reassure him: “It’s all right, off to sleep now.” Repeat just that last “goodnight” and leave again. Repeat this perfomance (allowing for the burning veggies) for as long as it takes the toddler to settle down. As long as he is unhappy enough alone to cry, one of you visits every few minutes. But however angrily or pathetically he cries, each visit consists only of that brief reassurance and reiterated “goodnight.” “I am still here,” you are saying, “but there’s no more of today.”
Don’t stay away for more than three minutes at a time (which is longer than it sounds!) or stay in the room for more than 30 seconds, or get cross, or above all, get the toddler out of his crib.
Do try to get the toddler to realize that you are always around, but that at this time of day you are completely boring.
It sometimes takes as much as a week for this approach to work. If it takes longer that that it will probably be bacause you weakened. If you get so fed up one night that you decide to leave your toddler craying alone after all, you have to do all over again the whole job of convincing her that it’s safe to let you go. Equally, if you cannot stand going back and forth to her any onger and decide to take the toddler back to the living room, you’ll have to start again on convincing her that once she’s in bed for the night she stays there.
Of course your mileage may vary. For us the first night was about 30 minutes of back and forth at bedtime, and almost an hour in the middle of the night. But progressively after that, it was less and less time. Now he generally goes to sleep at bedtime and sleeps through the night, or if he does get up, goes right back with a quick visit to reassure him.
I guess for me the reason (or one reason) it didn’t work for me to try this before when others tried to advise me/us, was that i wasn’t hearing the reasons behind it. What Leach says about the messages you are sending just makes so much sense to me, and in fact, has profound meaning for the rest of my life with Sol. As i’ve been coming to understand reading Alicia Lieberman’s The Emotional Life of the Toddler, toddlerhood is all about exploring the world and returning to safety and security. Exploration, returning to safety and back again. Kind of like the rest of life!
