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Curtain Calls
Getting Toddlers to Sleep and Keeping Them In Bed By Laura Cone
Yasmeen Neuman says she made the mistake of rocking and staying with her oldest daughter, Eva Marie, until she fell asleep as a baby. This continued through her toddler years.
"With my first one, I did everything wrong as a first-time parent," says Neuman, who lives in Tampa, Fla. She says she spent at least two hours at bedtime and naptime with Eva Marie, who is now 4.
With her 2-year-old toddler, Annaliese, and 1-year-old, Celia, Neuman, took the graduated extinction behavioral approach. "I put them to bed when they were 4 months old," she says. "Then, if they cried, I'd tell them they are OK and set the expectation they could and would be able to go to sleep by themselves. They are great."
She would check on her daughters every five or 10 minutes the first time they got out of bed. The next time, she would wait 15 or more minutes. By the fifth or sixth night, she says she did not hear any crying. Her children still take two-hour naps during the day, which do not interfere with their sleep at night.
A pediatrics expert for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, Downey says extinction, a behavioral psychology approach, is also referred to as letting a toddler cry it out. He prefers the graduated extinction approach used by Neuman for her twoyounger daughters.
"You check on your children and make sure they are safe," Downey says. "Eventually, you increasingly avoid going into the bedroom. The idea is so they self-soothe instead of depending on a bottle or your presence. Others employ extinction, which is unmodified. It's just no matter how long it lasts, you don't go in there other than to make sure they are safe. While both approaches have been shown to work, for some reason I like the graduated extinction better."
But before trying any psychological strategy, Downey says it is important to cross out the possibility your toddler is ill or has a medical problem. "The thing that we emphasize with kids who can't seem to settle down at night is the importance of making sure they are healthy," he says.
