MANAGEMENT OF SLEEP PROBLEMS: GENERAL PRINCIPLES
All parents wish for a child with an easy temperament, who is easy to manage, always agreeable, and especially one who, from a very early stage, sleeps through the night. Of course, this is not the reality. Just as there is great variation in the temperaments and personalities of different children, so is there great variation in children’s sleep habits. Often these are due to intrinsic elements in the child’s makeup. After a while, however, what is far more striking than these biological differences in children with sleep problems are the behaviours that the parents of these children have in common. Virtually without exception, parents of children with sleep problems will themselves have slipped into habits which serve to encourage and reinforce the problems in the children.
Many of a child’s ongoing problems are actually contributed to by parental intervention. For example, a child who is rocked to sleep every night will come to depend on this, and will not go to sleep without it. The child also soon learns that the rocking will cease as soon as he falls asleep, and will therefore fight to stay awake, thus making him even more irritable and difficult. Similarly, a child who is used to parents coming into the room if he wakes and cries or calls out during the night will come very quickly to depend on this. Many young children have thus never learnr how to get themselves off to sleep, either at the time of going to bed or else when they wake up during the night.
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