How to get your children – and yourself – to sleep better
When we became first-time parents four and a half years ago, we were very quickly thrown into a world of sleepless nights. Our firstborn (nicknamed Barnacles) was a poor sleeper and would wake up multiple times a night until he was nearly two years old, after which he started sleeping longer hours. All those wonderful stories we heard about babies who “slept through the night for eight or nine hours” from a mere four months of age totally didn’t apply to our child.
Fast forward four years later and we now have a 20-month-old (nicknamed Kwazii) who is also far from a good sleeper. He wakes at least two to three times a night, and we joke that the “Armageddon” theme song “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” describes him to a tee.
When Barnacles was young, we were advised by several well-meaning parents to try out several different sleep methods. We tried the Baby Whisperer’s ‘Pick up, put down’ method but gave up as we found it infinitely more tiring than just letting him sleep on the bed with us in the middle of the night (where he usually remained until morning). We then couldn’t bear to try the ‘cry it out’ method, and were too tired to explore other ‘gentle’ forms of sleep training.
While we probably are not the best parents to advise on getting children to sleep through the night, we did find that these eased our stress and made naps and sleep time much more pleasant for both us and the children.
1. Create a routine. We find that children like consistency, as it gives them security. We thus keep our daily evening routine consistent, even on weekends: Dinner, bath time, teeth brushing, a bit of playtime followed by winding down, with both boys in bed by 7pm for one or two bedtime books. Both boys are usually asleep before 8pm, and usually wake for the day around 6.30am. Their early bedtime means we decline all dinner functions – to us, getting our kids to bed early is most important.
2. Create a comfortable and conducive sleep environment. Just before bed, we lay out the mattresses, pillows, turn on the air-con, draw the blinds and turn on our white noise sound machine to indicate that it’s nearly time for bed. The boys usually spend several minutes rolling on the mattresses and playing with the blankets before they settle down.
3. Create a sleep arrangement that works for you. Some books advocate co-sleeping, others are against it. If you’re on the fence either way, then our advice is to do what you feel most at ease with as it will give you much less stress! We have changed our sleeping arrangements several times, with our latest sleep arrangements having our two boys sleeping in their own room (on mattresses on the floor), which is currently working quite well for us.
4. Be flexible. Remember that what works for others may not work for you. We’ve discovered that reading different sleep books and methods can get very overwhelming as different books advocate different types of sleep training. How would you know which is the right one? The answer to us, is that all of them possibly are, but for different people. Get to know your child and work out what is best for him or her.
5. Attachment style parenting works for us. Our firstborn was breastfed for 2.5 years, and our 20-month-old is still nursing. While we could possibly attribute Kwazii’s night wakings to this, we are hoping that he will follow in his brother’s footsteps of sleeping through when he is closer to two years old. As it is, we have already noticed over the past month that he is slowly starting to sleep longer hours when he used to wake up a mere two hours after bedtime. Hopefully that is partly because his older brother is sleeping right next to him!
While we may be sleepy on most mornings, what we know very clearly in our minds is that while many nights may be long, the childhood years are really short. Even after a full day of having our kids drive us up the wall, there’s nothing nicer than having two small children snuggle up close at bedtime. For working parents away from their kids all day, being close at bedtime may be even more valuable. We know this isn’t going to last forever, so we are definitely going to savour it while it does.
Mummy and Daddy Daycare are the pseudonyms of a Singaporean husband and wife who are raising two young boys aged four and one, nicknamed Barnacles and Kwazii from the children’s Octonauts series. Get into the minds of this couple who describe parenthood as a lifetime adventure – you are always learning something new! Whoever said parenting was a walk in the park?
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