Toddler Sleep ProblemsHow I Coped When I Didn't Think I CouldThis page doesn't have all the answers to your toddler sleep problems - but it will give you some ideas about how to keep calm when you feel you can't cope anymore. It's all about what happened to me last week. If you're too tired to read the background, just scroll down to the 'How I coped' section below. A Bit of BackgroundWe’ve all had awful nights with our toddlers, haven’t we? Where you can count the number of hours sleep you’ve had on the fingers of one hand – or one finger if you’re really unlucky.
Up til now I’ve been relatively lucky, with a bit of a reprieve after one or two nights. This week, however was truly the worst I’ve had with no less than 4 nights of broken sleep courtesy of my almost two-year-old Tom. Every day I kept telling myself that the toddler sleep problems would be better that night, and every night it was the same or worse. 3.30 am, 4am, 11.45pm – my heart would sink like a lead balloon when I heard him start crying. To make things worse, hubby was away so it was all down to me to deal with it. I have written elsewhere about keeping calm when the toddler pressure is on – but that’s not so easy when you are sleep deprived. What HappenedAnyway, on the fourth night of broken sleep, I kept Tom up as late as I could. He dropped off to sleep in his cot pretty quickly. All was well as I got into bed and started drifting off – only to be woken at 12.15 by his screaming. I decided to leave it and see if he would just drop back off to sleep.10 minutes later, he was still crying. I got up and checked my email. 20 minutes later, the screaming had intensified to that insane pitch where you know your child is incapable of going back to sleep. I knew I had to get Tom up as my older son Louis (not to mention a friend and her child who were staying with us) would soon wake up – if by some miracle they weren’t already. Only trouble was, I felt like I was on the verge of really losing it. I just didn’t know how to do was deal with the situation without ranting, raving and swearing like a lunatic. How I CopedI realised that the best way to deal with the situation was to just focus on doing one thing – keeping calm. This may seem obvious, but when you are in any stressful situation there are usually a number of pressures you put yourself under, and wavering between them actually increases your feelings of powerlessness. In this situation the external pressures were the following thoughts:
I was then able to systematically go through every possible solution. Louis was asleep in my bed already (making room for our guests in his room) so I took Tom downstairs and put all the sofa cushions on the floor as a makeshift bed. I offered him milk. Total refusal. I offered him some toast. Total refusal. I gave him some painkiller (he has been teething recently) which had no effect. By this time my concerned friend got up and offered her toddler sleep problems services – bless her! I surprised myself by serenely saying ‘I’m beyond shouting now, there’s nothing I can do’.
Then I decided to put one of my DVDs on (Confessions of a Shopaholic – pretty colourful just in case Tom might enjoy it too. In actual fact he hadn’t opened his eyes the whole time, which is more than can be said for his furious little mouth!) The baby painkiller must have kicked in at this point because the screaming subsided and he actually lay down and started to drift off - probably dreaming about his toddler sleep problems! I didn’t want to risk relaxing then him starting up again, so I carried on watching the film for half an hour until I was sure he had definitely gone to sleep. At 1.30 I finally got to sleep. Tom slept through til 7am the next morning. The next night he actually slept through. So that’s what I learnt about coping with toddler sleep problems when you feel really on the edge – accept the situation temporarily and focus on just one thing. Don’t try and be superhuman (anyway the costumes are too silly). return from Toddler Sleep Problems to Homepage |
