A Good Sleeping Guide

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 946, 27 September 1957, Page 26

A Good Sleeping Guide

This is the text of a talk on health broadcast recently from ZB, ZA, YA and YZ stations of the NZBS

bv DR

H. B.

TURBOTT

Deputy-

Director-General of Health

No two children are alike in their ? sleep requirements. Some get along nicely with very much less sleep than we think they should have; others | seem to be real sleepyheads. Some toddlers are the plague of their mothers’ | lives. They simply will not go down | for their morning or afternoon naps, | but cry or call out or play instead of | falling asleep. Do you need to worry | | about it? Baby or toddler will be getting enough sleep, by night and by | day, when not getting as much as you expect or desire, if he is happy and | growing nicely, and doesn’t seem to become overtired and "scratchy" more than could be expected at his age. It is not much good being other than philosophical about it, for you can’t make a child go to sleep. Most parents know this from sad experience. A child falls to sleep when it will’ and no amount of punishing or promising has any effect. A small child can keep anxious parents on the go most of the night, even though anyone can see he is dead tired and fighting against giving in and dropping off to sleep. The thing to recognise, then, is that falling off to sleep is a habit, and that-all our efforts should be along the lines of making a pattern of going to sleep that avoids bad features. For example, if you start staying beside a child until he goes to sleep, or lying beside him, you’ve had it! He will kick up a hullabaloo unless you do this every night. If a child cries on being put to bed, leave him to it. Don’t start comforting him and coming back to see why he doesn’t stop. He will keep you coming and fight against impending sleep because he thinks you, will come once more-and again once more! If you pick him up to make sure he is comfortable, put him back at once. No arm rocking or patting, or he will cry for this in future. Little children often wake in the night, and most times re-settle on their own. If you go in every time he wakes, he learns to expect a visit and won’t go to sleep until you. do. So use your gumption! You can pick the cry of distress, surely, and respond to that one only. When you are putting a child to bed it is quite all right to let him be a little autocrat. Teddy has to be put in a certain place, the window

opened just so! But once there he is expected to spend the night without undue attention. He soon realises this if you avoid the mistakes of overanxiousness, and avoid popping in and out. Bedtime should be the same time each night, but be a sport and give a fellow a warning so that he is conditioned to giving up that terribly important bit of play in which he is absorbed. When the right time arrives don’t give in to any pleas for extensions of time, or after the wash or bath. Story over, and the child in bed, the goodnight kiss should be the end for you. No going back because he cries, wants a drink of water, or wants anything else he can think of to get you back. No _going back because he plays in his cot or bed-or he will perpetrate activity to force your return. You can slip back after he has fallen asleep and tuck the bedclothes nicely around him. Little children find it hard to fall asleep if overtired, and also if not tired enough, as may happen with too much sleep in the day. Parents have to pick a course between these extremes. Being too hot is a common cause of sleeplessness, and beads of perspiraomer «63 Ure ln lCUGtifa €10n far ade

justment of bedclothes. Waking up in the night is not abnormal but commonplace in little children. They cry out for "mummy" because ‘they have learnt to love and think always of her. Therefore, there is no naughtiness in calling you. Your task is not to respond at every call, so developing a bad custom, but only when really needed. The cry of pain, the scream of a night terror, is easily distinguished from the habit calling or crying out for mother. In these cases you must go, ease the first as best you can and reassure in the latter, after his bad dream. But in all normal wakening in the night parents have to be careful not to create a rod’ for their own backs by responding to every call from little children.