Is your baby, toddler or child taking hours to go to sleep, waking up multiple times a night, or waking up really early? Are you exhausted, frustrated, and desperate for sleep?
Have you done everything you can to calm them down before bed, including warm baths, muted lights, turning off wifi, comfy sheets and pjs, and even checking out that there’s nothing going on with them physically (gut health, allergies, etc.), and yet they’re still not sleeping in a way that’s conducive to you getting any sleep?
And perhaps you’re needing to do a lot to even get them to go to bed? Perhaps they want to keep on playing, or they ask for one thing after the next, or they insist on one more book after another?
Are you looking for a different way to understand sleep and to help your child be able to sleep more easily and restfully?
Aware Parenting has a really different way of looking at sleep compared to many other parenting paradigms. It has a deep trust that babies and children have an innate and inbuilt relaxation response to help them be able to sleep restfully and restoratively.
If that’s the case, why do so many children seem to fight sleep? Why aren’t they using this natural relaxation response?
Unfortunately, it’s often because of our own cultural conditioning. We are often taught to override that natural relaxation response. So we could even say that it’s more likely to be us who is fighting their natural relaxation response!
Because our children are designed to fit in and function in the culture they’re born into, they eventually learn to override that response too. However, the human body needs restorative sleep so much that despite this, the relaxation response keeps on trying and trying to come out.
What on earth is this relaxation response, you might ask?
There are two main elements of it:
One is play and laughter – particularly if we join in and play in particular ways;
The other is crying and raging – with our loving support (with babies this always means crying in arms).
I wonder how you feel when you read this?
Are these things the opposite of what you’re trying to encourage before bed?
Remember what I said about us being taught to work against those natural relaxation responses? Most of us are told that our role as parents is to ‘calm down’ children so they can go to sleep.
This means, if they’re playing, we stop them from playing so we can calm them down.
This means, if they’re crying or raging, we distract them because we’re trying to calm them down.
See what I mean about us working against the responses?
What if calming them down when they’re getting playful or starting to cry is actually preventing them from feeling relaxed enough to sleep?
That turns everything about children and sleep on its head, doesn’t it?
If any of this is resonating with you, you might be wondering why and how laughter/play and crying/raging help children feel relaxed.
Well, they are both ways that children express accumulated feelings that have become pent-up from past painful experiences.
Another way of putting it is they help children release tension from the fight/flight response that otherwise makes it hard from them to feel relaxed enough to sleep deeply.
Let’s dive into this a bit more.
Have you ever had a really fun evening with friends, laughing and joking, or perhaps went to see a comedian, or watched a funny movie and laughed a lot, and then found that you slept really peacefully at night? Laughter actually helps us feel more relaxed. It literally releases stress from our bodies. For children, play added into that laughter creates even more relaxation. But for those to really work, they need us to join in. Ir’s the connection they receive from us that helps the play become deeply healing.
In Aware Parenting, in addition to trusting children and their innate relaxation response, and so following their lead with play, we can also add in extra forms of play to create even more healing and relaxation. This is called attachment play and there are 9 types of it.
I’d love to give you an example.
If your 5 year old suddenly wants to run all around the house in the evening, you could maximise the effectiveness of the play by letting yourself be chased by them and then pretending that they keep on catching you and being mock-surprised each time they do, “Oh HOW did you catch me? You won’t do it again, will you?”
One that my children and their dad and I loved to play was “the laughter police game.” This was when they would run from one end of the house to the other, laughing uproariously, and their dad and I would say, “Didn’t you know there’s no laughing around here? We will need to call the laughter police!” And then would run past us, laughing and laughing.
I’d also love to share something that happened a decade ago that gave me firsthand experience with this. My daughter was a tween, and we’d been given tickets for the boy band One Direction for the next day at a special very small concert. It would involve getting up really early to catch a 90 minute flight to Sydney. My daughter was really into 1D at the time, and for the whole evening, she expressed her excitement! She literally jumped up and down for joy, talked excitedly, and ran around joyfully! I felt excited too, but I didn’t do any of those things.
We went to bed, and she slept like a log. In comparison, I hardly slept a wink, I was so full of excitement in my body.
That was such a clear first hand experience of how hard it is to sleep with pent-up feelings (even enjoyable ones like excitement) and was such a contrast with how my daughter used part of her natural relaxation response and felt so relaxed and was able to easily sleep!
So, that’s a bit about the laughter and play.
But what about the crying and raging. Are those really natural relaxation responses, you may ask?
Like everything I write, I will always invite you to listen in to yourself to see if it resonates.
Has your child ever had a big reaction over a small thing and have cried and raged with you, and afterwards, they came out the other side actually a lot calmer?Perhaps you noticed that they were happier for the rest of the day, and more cooperative, and perhaps they even slept more peacefully that night?
In Aware Parenting, we hold that alongside our survival wisdom of the flight/flight/freeze response, we also have homeostatic wisdom, to return to a state of calm again afterwards. And that is through crying and raging whilst knowing that we are now safe.
Let’s explore this a bit more to see if it makes sense.
In the fight/flight response, energy is mobilised to the arms and legs for us to be able to fight or flee. However, living in the modern world, that fight/flight response is going to get mobilised a lot of times, and we won’t be fighting or fleeing. So what do we do naturally after such an event? Crying or raging. When children know that they are safe with our loving presence, they cry and rage with big vigorous movements – think about a child having a classic tantrum – their arms and legs moving vigorously is them releasing that stored energy. The loud noises that accompany crying and raging are them releasing the sounds created to fight off something dangerous.
In Aware Parenting, we see that when a baby or child is tired, their natural wise bodies do what they know how to do to feel deeply relaxed, which is utilising this healing process. I call it the relaxation response. When they are tired, they are less able to repress their feelings, which means it’s much easier for any stored up stress or tension, ie. feelings such as overwhelm, fear, sadness, frustration or rage, to be expressed and released.
This is why babies tend to try to cry before sleep, and young children often try to find a pretext to have a big cry.
All the things we are taught to do – the jiggling, bouncing, distracting, shushing, reading books etc. can at times actually be distracting babies and children from the natural expression of their feelings. In other words, we are working against what they’re trying to do to feel deeply relaxed. And although many of those things we do bring about a pleasant sense of mild dissociation which mean a baby or child can go to sleep, it’s temporary (unlike the deep relaxation that comes with their natural relaxation response). This temporary nature means that when babies or children enter light sleep, those feelings and stored stress can bubble up again to be expressed, and can often wake them up.
The more stress and trauma a baby or child has experienced, and the less laughter/play and crying/raging with our loving support they have done, the more tension they have in their bodies, which leads to taking longer to go to sleep, being more restless during sleep, waking up more often at night, and waking earlier in the morning.
The more we understand what’s going on, the more we can cooperate with these natural relaxation responses.
Aware Parenting is all about doing exactly that!
If you want to learn more about sleep from an Aware Parenting perspective, my new course is coming soon!
I also have a more concise online workshop. Email me at lovingbeing@iinet.net.au for details.