Margaret Watkinson

Many people struggle getting a good night’s sleep. The nights we have affect our days. Patience, concentration, physical stamina, physical and mental health and much more is affected by the duration and quality of our sleep. Do you know how you slept as a young child? Children who struggle with sleep throughout their childhood very often become adults who struggle with insomnia. Sleep is essential to long term good health. Getting good sleep, or feeling like you never get enough are both learned behaviors for which their is help.

Rest assured (pun intended!), your little one requires quality sleep for their physical and cognitive health. Short fuses are not the standard issue of young children. Yes, temperamentally and developmentally speaking 2 year olds and preschoolers can tantrum, cry, be unruly or difficult to manage. However, do young children get up every morning with the notion that they are going to be difficult? Ruin your day or plans? Not at all, they want to succeed, work out their goals and experience pleasant interactions just like their grownups. They need sleep to be able to achieve this.

Infants must have quality sleep to organized their little systems, develop muscle control and attend to their environment and loved ones. Newborn sleep appears to be unpredictable, but it has very clear stages and purposes as older children and adults do. Learning to understand how their little bodies cycle through sleep helps support their growth and development.

Sleep struggles can begin at any time, but often they start as very young children. Little ones struggle for a variety of reasons and what begins as a sorting out of our hormones, biology, physical needs in the first few months can transition to behaviors that seem to require the help of our grownups to assist our bodies to relax, fall asleep and return to sleep every time we wake up. (and we all wake up, even us grown ups, throughout the night).

When their adults don’t understand the transitions that their little ones sleep and behavior go through, we inadvertently support the formation of poor sleep habits. We may find ourselves throwing darts, night after night, nap after nap to get our kids to sleep which ultimately affects our own sleep. The quality of family sleep affects the entire family!

Hiring a sleep coach is a way to understand various ways of supporting sleep that will work for YOUR child. A good sleep coach understands how the sleep cycles and hormones affect sleep; how children of various ages and temperaments might respond to specific, consistent behavior and support from their grownups. We meld the goals, concerns of the adults while supporting them through the process of teaching their young ones how to go and return to sleep independently.

Choosing to use a sleep coach is just one other way to add parenting tools to your toolbox and no reason to feel or cast shame on. Parents can have very strong feelings around sleep, let’s sort out the issues together so everyone can feel confident and good about their parenting choices around sleep. We put the adults in charge of meeting their child and family sleep needs!