For those of us still in the sleep deprived baby days to those who are baffled as to why their 7 year old (or 3 year old or 3 year old or 4 year old – pick an age, really) still wakes up 5 times a night, this post from Mother Words blogger Jenny Raphael helps us understand that no matter what their age, our kids may sometimes need a little “sleep training.” And we’re not talking about the Ferber method.
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Oh, evening grownup time. Kids-are-in-bed time. Clock-out-of-parenting time. It is a precious decompression period – a chorus line of hours once able to accommodate a meal, a drink and a three-episode binge of The Wire.
But older kids stay up later, eroding our grownup time to an hour, sometimes two.
“I have one show in me,” my husband often says when we meet on the living room sofa.
And our oldest son, Maxon, is doing everything in his power to sabotage what is left of evening grownup time by coming downstairs regularly to interrupt our catch-up talks and R-rated television because:
He needs a hug.
He can’t stop thinking of the doll from the Annabelle TV spot.
He forgot to do his math pages and he has to do them now.
He wants a glass of water. Not from the bathroom sink, but from the kitchen sink.
He wants a bigger glass because he doesn’t want to keep going back to refill the small bathroom cups.
Is this glass OK to use?
Should he pick a different glass?
He wants us to turn the music on in his room.
He wants to confirm we will come into his room to check on him.
His sheets are twisty.
He can’t sleep.
Reading isn’t working.
He doesn’t have anything else to read.
His bed is making a funny noise.
He wants to know what we are watching on TV.
Can he watch it with us?
When can he watch Walking Dead? When he is 14? How about 16?
What about Game of Thrones?
He wants another hug. A long one.
Now, Maxon was not easy to sleep train. He wouldn’t take a pacifier or a thumb, and had no interest in self-soothing. We had to reboot him every few months, using tactics from our pediatrician and every sleep book on the market. It’s worth noting that the No Cry Sleep Solution is pure fantasy, and it had me sitting in my house with the baby monitor to my ear like I was on a surveillance mission, ready to bust into his room at the first syllable of a whimper. When we tried one of the cry-it-out methods, the boy howled for an hour. One night I was on my knees in his dark bedroom as he cried, praying to God that I was doing the right thing.
To read the full post on Mother Words, click here.
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Jennifer Raphael is writer of as-yet-unpublished fiction, a freelance marketing writer and a blogging balabusta for the Jewish Exponent. Jennifer started her career in journalism, writing for TV news and a suburban newspaper before joining the staff at Philadelphia Magazine. As a freelancer, she has written articles for Glamour, Mademoiselle, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health, to name a few. You can see more of her work on her website: www.jenniferraphael.com, and join her intimate band of Twitter followers @jenniferaphael. Her weekly parenting blog, Mother Words, can be found at http://www.jewishexponent.com/mother-words. She describes her parenting style as Method.
