KAREN PIERCE, M.D.
The role of parent is the most rewarding job and also the most challenging one. A complex relationship develops when parents devote themselves to meeting a child's needs. Maturation does not proceed as effortlessly as one thinks. The hard work of rearing children gradually improves parents’ competence, which, in turn teaches that same competence to their child.
Why is a child psychiatrist writing a chapter in a book about sleep? When my first child was about five months old, I was in a specialty toy store. A distraught mother came to me, frantically asking, “Do you know a child psychiatrist? My pediatrician just told me to let my five-month-old cry to train him to sleep through the night. Will I damage his self-esteem if I let him cry?” We both had a good laugh when she found out that I was a child psychiatrist. I took the opportunity to commiserate but pointed out that my training was not needed for this task. Setting limits and teaching a child self-soothing are part of every parent's job. Doing this job does not cause psychological harm. Instead, setting limits promotes growth.
Loving our children includes introducing and teaching them to live with frustration. Saying no to a child becomes just as important as loving her unconditionally. There is a popular misunderstanding that loving parenting means unconditional acceptance, without rules. This is not the case. We must start training children in infancy. This is not easy! But early training will help later on, when you try to teach your child in other areas, such as bike riding, homework, and social skills.
Here is a story from a parent of one of Dr. Weissbluth's patients illustrating how difficult it is to set limits even though it is frustrating for both parents and children not to have them. As the mother writes, “We don't want to break her spirit.”
“ONE MORE STORY”
“One more story, Mama,” your two-year-old pleads. What parent doesn't feel conflicted when they hear those words? Books are good, you think; books are educational. And your child is on your lap, and she's warm from her bath and her hair smells sweet, and she's letting me hold her hand!
Can you love your child too much? Never, and yes. If there ever was a question with two answers, that would be it.
I think you can love your child so much that that love prevents you from setting clear limits and boundaries, from establishing effective structures and a sense of routine and order, which I believe children thrive on. The word discipline has harsh connotations for some parents, but in reality the word means “to teach.” And to teach is to love.
My daughter Esme is two years old. The first years of her life have whizzed by and I've learned a lot as a first-time parent, especially about sleeping. Dr. Weissbluth helped me get Esme sleeping through the night by five months or so. Lately, though, our pleasant, orderly, structured bedtime routine seems to be deteriorating. Her bedtime is creeping later and later, and sometimes she's not asleep until nine or ten at night, and then, because she always gets her twelve hours, she'll sleep the next morning until 10:00. My husband jokes that it's like having a two-year-old teenager. I'm lucky to have a sympathetic husband. In fact, maybe he's a little like me—too sympathetic. Lately we find ourselves echoing each other, saying, “We don't want to break her spirit,” even though we intended to set limits and provide healthy discipline.
Self-esteem
How does one's sense of self develop? True self-esteem stems from the experience of competence and appropriate functioning. Self-esteem is a genuine sense of one's self as worthy of nurturing and protection. This allows us the capability of growth and development. As one's self-esteem is reinforced, a sense of competence leads to further increases in self-esteem. This positive spiral starts slowly and reinforces itself. This is a universal process occurring in both parents and baby.
“When do I feed him?” “Is she getting enough milk?” “Do I pick her up?” “How do I stop this crying?” All of these questions are the beginning of creating a dance between parent and child. With the help of experience, innate abilities, and intuition, these questions become easier to answer and parents become more confident. Experience and knowledge often make parenting the second and third child easier. Therefore, as our children grow, our competence as parents increases.
Infants are born with the capacity to organize experience, progressing to higher levels as they mature. Babies’ brains are programmed to work toward competency and efficiency. This ability expands as the child experiences more situations and develops the capacity to tolerate a wide range of stimuli. All exploration must be done in the context of a loving caregiver. Through the regulation of physiological functioning, emotional understanding, and interest in the world, infants grow. A baby who sleeps well and is well fed is more available to explore the world around her.
Babies respond to cause and effect. As the mother or father coos and talks with their baby, he smiles and makes noises back. The parents’ continued responses to vocalization encourage more vocal production. Direct eye contact with your infant also encourages this dialogue.
A child psychiatrist described how each infant needs a care-giver who can “attune” to the infant. Emotional attunement is a three-step process done by the baby's caregiver. First, the caregiver matches, labels, or identifies the infant's internal feeling state: The baby is hungry, tired, or sad. Then there is a recognition that the internal feeling state is different from the overt behavior, crying. Last, the caregiver responds to convey emotional resonance: “You are upset because you are hungry.” Attunement is not like looking in a mirror, imitating the behavior (“You're crying”); rather, it is reading the cues of the internal feeling state: Yes, the infant is crying and this is what it means. A mother of a six-week-old hears her son's cry knowing it is a hunger cry. When her baby smells her and feels that his mother is about to start breast-feeding, he quickly settles down, knowing that his dinner is coming. This rhythm was created by a repetition of a sequence that mom and baby learned. A wet-diaper cry can be differentiated from a hunger cry. As the caregiver responds to the baby's signal, babies become more organized, learn cause and effect, and feel more competent.
Babies will respond differently to their fathers, mothers, siblings, and baby-sitters. Infants grow in the context of parents who try the best they can to be empathetic and to help develop their child's strengths and ideals. Early in life a child soaks up praise. “My child is the prettiest, smartest, cleverest, or strongest” can be choruses sung to our children. Tending to their needs with warm smiles is all part of this loving attitude.
Your baby brings much to this equation, for she is born with her own innate level of tolerance and range for stimulation and arousal. Babies vary in endowment and maturation rates. This variability creates differences in how they experience initial and subsequent events. A mother or father each comes with his or her own endowments. How the baby-caregiver unit is formed varies greatly and creates the social environment of the child. This powerful unit brings changes to all parties.
Let's return to Esme's request for one more story at night.
“ONE MORE STORY” (CONTINUED)
I needed to examine who was really having trouble sticking to our bedtime routine—daughter or mother. Could it be that I was having more trouble putting her down than she was having going down? Could it be that I was holding on, clinging to her at the very time when I most needed to encourage an easy transition from day to night, from play to rest, from being together to being alone, for both of us, for the purposes of healthy rest and healthy separation? It hit me with a jolt that I was the one who didn't want to put that warm cuddly bundle down into her crib, to let go, say good night, shut her door, and leave her; that / was the one suffering from separation anxiety. My mind raced. When had I made this leap from viewing bedtime as a useful, necessary, peaceful break in the time I spent with my daughter to a rockier separation?
Once I realized that much, everything tumbled out. There were a million reasons—some very simple, some more complex. Since she's been older, she's been so much fun to be with. Every day she understands a new concept; every second there's something new to learn, look at, point to, pronounce. She adores her books—she'll throw aside any toy if she can read instead, and I'm as excited and stimulated by all of this growth as she is. Because I'm proud of how much she's absorbing, “One more story, Mama” secretly pleases me.
Good-Enough Parenting
Parental confidence can make the parenting job much easier, even despite the inevitable problems and pitfalls of child rearing. We all make mistakes. This is why a prominent pediatrician called parenting “good enough,” meaning that there is no one style of parenting that is perfect. The first time the parent misses a messy diaper does not “damage” a child. However, repeated failures of misreading the child's signal will have an impact. The emotional microenvironment is growth-promoting or growth-inhibiting, depending on the caregiver's ability to read her child's affective state. It is the pattern of daily response, not the moment-to-moment response, that a baby internalizes and forms memories of. Missing one signal in an infant's life will not cause permanent damage as long as the parent learns and does not repeat the same mistakes. Good-enough parenting includes maintaining a child's arousal within a moderate range that is high enough to maintain interactions but not so intense as to cause avoidance or distress. Optimal stimulation produces a balance between positive feelings and awareness and internal tension. Too much stimulation, like tickling, can quickly become unpleasantly intense if not properly dosed. Lack of proper regulation by parents prevents the emergence of a system to cope with heightened levels of arousal and discomfort. Sleep is just one example where a child needs to develop internal regulation.
A child must have the conviction that her surroundings are secure, providing pleasure and satisfaction while preventing or balancing anxiety. This includes both bodily needs and emotional needs. With mother as a secure base, the baby is free to explore the world. Babies who are securely attached to their caregivers respond more positively to peers and teachers later in life. A baby's security manifests itself by a balance of interest, curiosity, pleasure, and exploration of the environment.
The protective response, innate to most caregivers, is sometimes interpreted as “Never frustrate your child.” This is virtually impossible. Babies need to learn to tolerate frustration and learn self-soothing techniques to calm themselves and prepare them for life's inevitable obstacles. Gentle limits are the way to do this. A dilemma occurs when a parent needs to step away to promote growth. When babies learn to walk, first they creep along the furniture, and then they hold on to a hand. Eventually both baby and caregiver must let go so that independent walking will occur. Both parent and child feel anxiety at this separation. Struggles appear as each development task, such as rolling over, sitting, standing, and talking, is mastered. This is normal and may consist of an increase in fussiness or frustration experienced by both baby and caregiver. As each new step occurs, challenges and tensions are introduced, resolved, and mastered.
When do caregivers step away? Sometimes adults have the tendency to infer adult meanings from the child's actions. It is important to remember that a baby may not be feeling or experiencing what the adult feels. We cannot “read” an infant's mind. Too often adults have a tendency to project their own feelings on to the baby and not really listen to or attune to their baby. The grandmother who is cold tells her granddaughter to put on a sweater. This assumption that we know what is going on in an infant's internal world can lead to conflicts in parenting if we project instead of attune. Try to understand your baby's needs and not confuse them with your own.
The wise mother of twenty-month-old Esme learned that she did not want to put her daughter down to say good night. She realized that her loving her child “too much” had gotten in the way of setting healthy limits.
Development of Internal Controls
Infants learn internal regulation, a balance between inhibitory and excitatory control, from the routines and regularity of their environment. Development and regulation of physiological needs such as hunger, thirst, sleep, elimination, and tactile stimulation happen almost intuitively. Each developmental milestone is subject to regulation from the environment, especially the family. Having a “night owl” baby does not lead to a normalized routine. This baby must be slowly synchronized to the world's sleep/wake cycle. Healthy emotional development occurs with appropriate regulation of developmental tasks by the family. As parents regulate infants, infants internalize this as self-regulation.
When adults provide the necessary skills to help an infant complete a task successfully there is an increase from the child's current knowledge to a higher level. Initially it may be as simple as picking up a crying infant. Later, we tie our child's shoes until she learns that skill herself. But we do not tie her shoes forever. Nor do we forever pick up a crying child. Gradually we must withdraw our support so the child can function independently. The capacity to use small amounts of anxiety, excitement, and curiosity as a signal allows babies to more fully explore the world.
Babies cry in order to communicate all of their needs. Calmingbabies leads to positive attachments and feelings of safety for the infant. Crying does not necessarily mean distress; rather, it can be a simple communication about a wet diaper or a signal to play. A mother of an eight-month-old relates that her baby cries to get her to come into her bedroom at night. The minute the baby sees her mom she smiles with delight. This mother had the wisdom to recognize her daughter's cries not as signaling distress but as asking her mother to come play.
There are many ways, short of holding or feeding a baby, to stop their crying. Helping them learn self-soothing can come in many forms. The key is creating a balance between frustration and comfort. The frustration element provides an opportunity for the child to grow and develop skills. Too much frustration is disorganizing, but having no frustration prevents a child from learning. To soothe crying babies who are preverbal (under fourteen or fifteen months), waiting several seconds before picking them up can be helpful. Alternatively, handing a child an object or a favorite blanket can be a soothing technique. If your baby is still distressed, patting her on the back gently or stroking her may work. As your child becomes older, soothing words can be quite useful. All these methods are the beginning of a journey in teaching your child self-regulation. These rudimentary steps to self-regulation bring about less fussiness and less crying. The result maximizes the baby's growing competence and self-control.
Saying No Helps Your Child
Many of us grew up believing that discipline means humiliation, shame, guilt, and an occasional swat on the bottom. Today we interpret discipline in a way that is true to its Latin root, which means “to teach.” Setting limits should be done with reason and firmness, in a positive, loving environment. Teaching self-soothing is as important as teaching language or social skills.
When do we start setting these limits for a child? We start this process very early. Waiting a few moments to pick up your crying child or talking slowly to her while preparing food are the beginnings of teaching an infant to wait and to learn expectations of routines. Even babies learn routines quickly. Most can settle themselves when hearing their caregiver's steps or the tone of a voice. The baby stops crying or fussing. Most limits should be simple rules spoken in advance so that children know what to expect. If your tendency is to always jump to do things for your child, to protect your child from feeling frustrated or from experiencing failure, you will not be teaching him techniques he will need for the future. The progress is gradual and is part of the challenge of parenting.
Families are not democracies. Parents are in charge and have ultimate authority. Unlike past generations, when child rearing was done in a more autocratic society in which the father had supreme rights, today limits are presented by both parents to create order. When limits were presented in an autocratic manner, fear and intimidation, not learning and understanding, ruled the family. Yes, family members should have mutual respect and principles of equality, but this does not imply that children have an equal say. A baby changes the family balance, creating a new equilibrium. Parents must take charge and make decisions in the best interest of the child even though it might cause distress. No one lets an infant or a child ride in a car without a safety seat. Even if the child protests, families usually stay firm on this rule. Other limits sometimes have to be invoked in the same way as the seat belt law—firmly and confidently.
Behavior can be modified. Our culture, family, and society influence the norms and values of behavior standards. One of the first steps in changing behavior is to first understand the behavior. Once a limit is set, you cannot expect children to simply accept it or consider it normal. We do not say to infants “Don't cry.” We show them soothing techniques: a pacifier, a thumb, a blanket.
When a child enters the toddler stage, the learning of no signals the beginning of the child's ability to do symbolic thinking. The toddler, becoming more adept at communicating his needs, begins to collide with his caregiver's wishes. This conflict leads to frustration and rage. This rage must be negotiated carefully, because it has the potential to disrupt the child's sense of well-being and safety. This does not mean that limits should not be dispensed. Parents have to be very clear and present limits in a calm, soothing voice and stand their ground despite pleas for them to waver. If you have already encouraged a positive and protective environment, the child looks at these limits as an extension of that protection.
It is never too late to say no to your child. A thirteen-year-old girl with long-standing nighttime difficulties came to my office for evaluation. Her history revealed that she had never been taught to sleep through the night. She had wandered from room to room, disrupting her parents’ sleep, since the age of fifteen months. Her parents felt she must be up for a “reason” and that she needed them at night. They thought that setting limits on this would be too frustrating for her, and so they waited for her to grow out of it. This child did not have anything psychologically wrong with her; she had just never been taught the skills of learning to sleep. Treatment consisted of education regarding sleep habits and then “forcing” her to stay in her room while her parents stayed by the door so she could not exit. After experiencing the anxiety and learning self-soothing techniques, she (and her parents) slept through the night for the first time in over ten years. Sleeping in their own beds for several nights created renewed energy and positive relationships. Taking pride in their accomplishment increased their feelings of competence.
My Child Has Sleep Problems.
What Do We Do Now?
So your child does not sleep. The beauty and the joy of seeing your child loses its luster when seen through weary eyes. Sleep deprivation creates difficulties for both the parent and the child. How does letting a child cry at night or keeping him in his room when he is obviously distressed help him develop self-esteem?
A child awakens for many reasons—illness, trauma, a disturbance in the nap schedule. A friend came to me when her child became afraid to sleep at night after they were robbed. My friend herself, however, was still frightened, traumatized, and afraid to sleep. I told her that when her fears relaxed, her son would sleep again. She called me up several weeks later to explain that all were sleeping better in their own beds because the thief had been captured. Babies who are ill or scared will awaken, but only temporarily. If more than several nights go by and your child is still waking, this behavior has become a habit and is no longer a cry for help. Listen to your intuition and experience; recognize that limits must be gently introduced.
It is common to want to avoid the unpleasant situation of teaching your child to sleep. None of us wants to hear our child cry. However, the longer you delay correcting the sleep problem, the more difficult it will be to remedy. Recall that all developmental steps proceed with some frustration and difficulty. The brain needs order and predictability to develop and form neuronal connections. As Dr. Weissbluth explains, a child's sleep disruption creates disorder at the highest level.
Parents need to support each other in training their children. In my own situation, our first child failed to learn on his own to sleep through the night. Being a child psychiatrist had taught me about nurturing and reducing frustration, but not about parenting. Thus, believing the standard theories learned during my training, I feared that I would “damage” my child. I was unable to let him cry initially, despite my glazed eyes and crabby disposition. When our son was thirteen months old, my husband recognized that he was up for the secondary gain of being with us. Together we decided that sleep needed to be encouraged for the health and welfare of the entire family. My husband and I held and comforted each other through that difficult night while we let him cry. He held me back when I wanted to go in to comfort the baby. We both stayed up and listened to the crying, reminding each other that this, too, was part of the “joy” of parenting. After a few nights, we slept peacefully, continuing our growth as a family.
It is a common misbelief that awakening is a signal that a child has unmet psychological needs. This leads to parental guilt and blame. Stop this line of thought immediately!
You may be uncertain whether letting your child cry will damage her permanently. Letting your child cry is neither punitive nor withholding if you think about it as training a physiological need. It is important to understand the context of your actions. You are not a “bad” parent if you let your child cry. Teaching a child to sleep is not ignoring his needs. Infants and young children do not appear to remember crying spells; however, they do begin to remember repeated behaviors from caretakers that form a pattern. If you have been protecting and doling out frustration in small doses during the day, the child internalizes this protection. In teaching a child to sleep, the parent's goal is to reward good behavior, in this case sleeping, without inadvertently rewarding poor behavior, that is, waking.
When Other Issues Get in the Way
Child's Issues
Some children are born with difficult temperaments. Raising a child who is challenging stresses the system. A difficult to care for infant erodes the reserve of parents by excessive crying and demanding. These children tend to have more problems sleeping and then to react more extremely to stimuli, leading parents to be more extreme in their own reactions. You may find yourself short-tempered, exhausted, and frustrated. A simple no becomes a tantrum. Giving your child a blue balloon instead of a yellow one could trigger a major meltdown, leading to a feeling of defeat. Remember, the trick to parenting these children is to become more flexible and leave more time to prepare or to plan transitions. It is always important to look for the positive aspects of each child. The stubborn infant may transform into a persistent or ambitious adult.
Setting limits and sticking to them is extremely important, especially with challenging children. These children may not respond immediately, so you must be flexible. If you say “no playing with your food,” the difficult infant may take an extra swipe before stopping. Avoid the power struggles and appreciate that she is obeying. Unfortunately, because many of these children learn slowly, directions and corrections must be repeated over and over until learning takes place.
Some children are not endowed with all their learning processes intact. For example, children with auditory processing deficits may not use the spoken word for comfort, requiring more physical contact. Children who have difficulty reading nonverbal cues will respond better to verbal commands. Parents usually find ways to compensate for their child's deficits. Frustration tolerance may be harder to measure in these children. Always, a gentle push toward competence must occur. Children endowed differently still need to be taught frustration tolerance despite the challenges it poses to parents.
Parents’ Issues
Having a child stirs up many personal issues that, if not understood, can interfere with parenting. If a parent cannot act in the infant's best interest, there will be specific disruptions that inhibit growth. Some parents lack the ability to read their baby's signals. When children do not have their signals read, they are at risk to develop “primitive strategies,” meaning that they tend to cry and become more unable to self-soothe. Once these strategies are in place, they are continuously repeated because the baby or young child learns to cry to get what he wants. These maladaptive strategies will need to be unlearned in a more supportive setting later in life. Fortunately, there are several books and tapes to help parents learn about normal development. Once parents learn, they can teach their baby.
Some parents bend over backward to appease their child: “I want to avoid the strict parenting that I received.” This may lead to the absence of limits. Parents who are too sensitive to their child's needs risk enabling their child to become too dependent on their caretaker. These children do not learn to read their own signals and require an adult to do it for them. Children crave order, and setting limits is one way to that end. Harsh commands, physical punishment, or power assertion produces children who have higher levels of guilt and exhibit parent-pleasing behavior. It is even worse when, after becoming too harsh, spanking too hard, or letting your child cry too long, you quickly rush to hug your child. This sends a very mixed message to your child. Your child starts to think that crying is what you need to do to be hugged.
Some parents like their children to remain in one developmental stage because they themselves have certain needs that were never adequately met. For example, keeping a child up at night may fulfill a parent's need for closeness. Here the child is forced to ignore her own need to sleep in order to accommodate her parent's misreading: “I know you are up because you missed me. I am here now.” Like the grandmother who is cold and asks her granddaughter to put on a sweater, the mother who is lonely imagines that her daughter is lonely, too, and so she keeps her baby up with her late at night and hinders the child's sleep. The baby gets conflicting information and may not know what to read—her own signal or her caregiver's. The child may then have difficulties integrating new information because skills to manage this situation have not been taught.
Let's continue with Esme's mother's story. Note where she writes, “I now miss having my mother as a grandmother to my daughter…. I also miss having her be a mother to me.”
“ONE MORE STORY” (CONTINUED)
Bedtime is a special time—sitting in the rocking chair, holding her in her jammies, the night tape playing softly, the whole house quiet, no phone, no distractions, no interruptions, no pressures or time constraints. It's a time of intense, focused interaction with my daughter. Not that I don't have plenty of time with her during the day—I'm a writer and I work at home two or three half-days a week. But only at bedtime does she really let me cuddle with her, hold her—during the day she's too busy running around playing and never wants to sit still. At night she strokes my hair, wiggles my nose, asks me to sing “Hokey Pokey,” reads Goodnight Moon or If YouGive a Moose a Muffin one more time. We have so much fun together! I love our quiet time as much as she does, and I'm very guilty of letting it go on and on, into five, six, seven songs or books, another minute, another cuddle, until we're both exhausted.
My husband and I discussed the complex reasons for my attachment to my daughter. I was very close to my own mother, although not so much physically, which is probably why I value that cuddle time in the rocking chair. My mother died seven years ago, when she was only fifty. I was on the cusp of my marriage and I went through a very difficult mourning period. I still miss her a lot, and having a child has made that loss even sharper. I now miss having my mother as a grandmother to my daughter. I miss sharing my baby with her. I also miss having her be a mother to me. I don't want to lay the burden of having to be everything for me on my child. My own mother, who had a difficult relationship with her mother, did that to me, which is maybe why I have separation anxiety to begin with. And, again, I don't want to love my child so much that I'm unable to effectively establish consistent, clear boundaries and rules.
Marriage Issues
Babies establish a new equilibrium in families. The couple is no longer alone, and the role of parent must be established. The importance of social and emotional support to the developing child must be emphasized. A positive emotional climate influences a baby's development. If the parents cannot create this support, development of the child may be hindered. Without support for both parents, caregivers are more likely to engage in dysfunctional parenting with their children.
If adult intimacy needs are not being met by a marriage or the relationship is not supportive or is stressful, parenting tasks become difficult. Either partner may turn to their child to meet those needs. Toddlers exposed to parental conflict develop a negative response to this tension and are at risk to become aggressive toward peers. Infants as young as one year can sense this distress and develop an emotional response to it. Mothers and fathers may demonstrate two different regulatory patterns. Often in conflict-filled marriages, mothers become overinvolved with their infants and fathers tend to withdraw and not be as affectively responsive to their children. Both responses may be damaging to a child's sense of security and competence in the future.
When both parents work together, as did Esme's parents, sleep problems are more easily solved. Note where Esme's mother writes, “And of course, when Esme goes to bed earlier, I have more time to enjoy a nice dinner with my husband.”
“ONE MORE STORY” (CONCLUSION)
As we cleaned the kitchen, my husband and I had a real heart to heart. He was proud that I saw my own part in our bedtime battles and acknowledged that it was not much easier for him when he put her down. We made an agreement that from now on the new bedtime would be 8:00 sharp, with a goal of moving to 7:30 to an even 7:00 in two weeks. That would be the final curtain call, no ifs, ands, or buts. But how to help mom stick to the rules?
Dr. Weissbluth suggested setting a kitchen timer for an allotted time at the beginning of the bedtime routine, say thirty minutes or one hour. My husband and I agreed to try one hour—which would include bath, brushing teeth, diaper, jammies, story, and cuddling. The timer, Dr. Weissbluth said, would act as a signal for the child (and mother!) to understand that the bedtime routine together was over.
The first night the ding of the timer seemed to come incredibly fast. Both my husband and I were enjoying singing an alphabet song to Esme, and we all three turned to look at the timer in a kind of dumb-faced shock. It seemed such an intrusive little fellow! Esme was curious and asked what the bell was for. “Time for bed,” we said, a little reluctantly. “Lights out.” But neither my husband nor I moved a muscle to put her in bed. We did hurry along our song, however, and limit our reading to two books instead of four or five. But the time had seemed to go so fast! We were both amazed at how poorly we'd organized that hour from bath to bed.
We resolved to do better the next night. Again that meddlesome little bell seemed to ring too soon, but this time not as much. Setting the timer had helped us make better use of the early time—in the bath, brushing teeth, and putting on jammies—so we'd have more time for stories. Again Esme was interested in the bell. “Time for bed. Lights out,” we said. Esme smiled. She actually smiled. My daughter thought this little strategy was a delightful game!
“Okay, Mommy. Crib,” she said. Dumbfounded, I stopped rocking. We still spent a minute having the animals call her, one by one, into her bed, but one minute was a whole lot less than before.
On subsequent nights, the timer became our friend. Without a doubt, it added a sense of structure to our bedtime routine and helped us organize our time.
There have been a few nights when that bell still seems intrusive, when I want to read “one more story” as much as my daughter does. I realize that another part of my separation anxiety is that I felt I was an intelligent child who didn't receive as much stimulation as I might have. Fortunately, my parents made books very available—I didn't have a lot of toys, though I always had books—but I had to learn from them on my own. I have trouble limiting Esme's “reading” simply because I don't want to give up an opportunity for a potential learning experience that I perceive myself not having had when I was a child.
So, with a little probing and the help of a plastic kitchen timer, we've turned our lives around. It's just amazing to see Esme respond to new limits with a kind of pride and resourcefulness.
And, of course, when Esme goes to bed earlier, I have more time to enjoy a nice dinner with my husband, talk about our work or our child, rent a movie, whatever. And in the daytime, her naps are more regular, her moods are sunnier, and her appetite improved. Another trick I've learned is to build in more focused playtime during the day. Instead of jumping up to answer the phone when Esme and I are playing with Mr. Potato Head, I let it ring. I also allow for more reading time during the day, so that one of our favorite activities is not saved up just for bedtime.
Now, when I hear those words “one more story,” I know that to respond with a “No. Tomorrow is another day” does not mean I don't love my child. Quite the contrary.
P. S. As the weeks have gone by, there have been a few nights when I have forgotten to turn the timer on. Esme runs to get it off the bookshelf and says, “Mama! Timert!” She has a special place on the second shelf where she likes to put it while it ticks away (I think it gives her a sense of control to place it within her reach). And when it rings, if we're in the middle of the story, she asks me to “please finish.” I find that to be a reasonable request, partly because I know I'm in control now, so I don't get all freaked-out about it being too late. And so we finish our story and then I remind her that the timer went off a minute ago. She studies me very seriously and says, “Okay, Mama. Time for nite-nite.”
Summary
Parenting is a process that reinforces itself: As confidence grows, so does a parent's feeling of competence. One of the most important concepts to remember is that there will be times when you will want to give less attention—even if this causes crying, even at night—in order for your child to develop skills of independence and self-soothing. Crying, in this context, does not damage self-esteem. Rather, the end result is heightened competence in your child and in you.