Can you spoil your baby?

It used to be believed that you were teaching a baby to cry more if you picked them up when they cried, thinking that that baby will learn to cry to get attention. The opposite has been proven to be true.
When you pick up a crying child, you are helping them to regulate (co-regulation) and they will, as a result, be more resilient, especially when this attention is given in the first year.

When a toddler, ages 1.5, 2, 3 (or sometimes older too), has a meltdown and is crying, it is often related to autonomy and security. Their idea of independence and having a lack of physical ability to accomplish what they are imagining themselves doing. They need your positive attention, picking them up, responding with love and patience, please don’t feel threatened. It’s not about you.

Dr. Jean-Victor Wittenberg,(child psychiatrist and Head of the Infant Psychiatry Program at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and Co-Chair of Infant Mental Health Promotion (IMHP) which provides teaching for front-line professionals and develops advocacy initiatives on behalf of infant mental health), recently stated that you don’t need to squelch that behavior. When they are having a meltdown, It’s about them and their development and personal frustration and insecurities. By helping them regulate, offering help and concern, hugs and attention, it helps them know that this world is a good place and you are not going anywhere. You child may be realizing there are relationships outside of yours and theirs and they are insecure about it. You need to fortify that bond for them. 

It’s understandable that you want to teach good behavior but it’s the underlying regulation issues going on under the tantrum that need addressing which will bring about better long term behavior with resilience and independence.

Learning Self Regulation is a long, ongoing process and in the learning period, there is a lot of co-regulation that goes on between caregiver and child to help the child learn to control his/her emotions and modify them, or in other words, to deal with the big emotions that come with the ups and downs of life.

This is why I like gentle methods when it comes to sleep.  The temperaments of babies vary and we as caregivers need to modify our responsive to give them the best chance of good mental health and life success.

Tracy Spackman is a Certified Gentle Sleep Coach
www.GetQuietNights.com
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602-524-7610

6 Things that Cause Early Rising

Early Rising is one of the most frustrating parts of  Baby and Toddler Sleeping Issues.  You have put great effort into helping your child learn sleep skills and even though they are generally sleeping through the night, the early rising is slowly killing you. (I’m being just a little dramatic)
 
Early Rising is when the baby or toddler wakes and can’t get back to sleep well before you are ready to wake up and start your day.  More technically, it’s likely before 6am.  The body’s sleep cycles are different in those early hours and it’s harder to get back to sleep anyway.
Here are the things that typically cause Early Rising and once you have identified the cause, you can work on the solution.
      1.   Lack of day sleep.  Your child’s body has a period of time it can stay awake and when she runs out of energy, she has a sleep window.  If she is not falling asleep by the end of the sleep window, her body produces a hormone called cortisol.  This is the stress hormone.  The fight or flight hormone reaction.  It gives you an adrenaline like burst of energy.  It’s hard to go to sleep for her nap with that pumping through her system and it stays in your system for a while, messing with naps and night sleep.  Often causing early rising.
2.  Too late bedtime.  Similar to Lack of day sleep, missing your bedtime sleep window also causes a rush of cortisol and its residual affect can cause early rising.
3.   Lack of sleep skills from going to bed too drowsy at bedtime. If you used a sleep crutch at bedtime, like rocking or nursing or holding to sleep, your baby didn’t get the practice relaxing their body falling asleep.  She will wake between sleep cycles, that’s normal but she will need you to help her fall back to sleep, especially when falling back to sleep is the hardest in the early morning hours.
4.  Lack of skills from being put to bed asleep.  If you hold or rock or nurse your baby to sleep, they are in a different place when she wakes up between sleep cycles and needs you to help her fall back to sleep.  Again, she has insufficient sleep skills.  She may get more cortisol in the night from waking and needing help and by the early morning hours, just can’t get back to sleep.
5. Tummy discomfort from food issues.  If your baby had a food sensitivity or is having a negative digestive reaction to a new food, that can often manifest in the early hours when sleep is more difficult.  Have you ever woken from a bad headache or a tummy ache? It’s in the early hours that it wakes you over and over again.  At least you can mostly go back to sleep. And as an adult, you likely have pretty good sleep skills. It’s a rough time. 
6.   Developmental milestones like crawling and walking. These are major skills that require brain and muscle changes.  When your baby is working on a new skill, they want to practice this new skill when they wake up between sleep cycles. It’s a very exciting time.  The sooner she masters the skill, the sooner her sleep can get back on track.
  
Tracy Spackman is a Certified Gentle Sleep Coach.  
Call her if you need sleep help.
www.GetQuietNights.com
602-524-7610