What if Your Kids Never Let You Sleep Again?

For about six months of this year, we had a glorious period when no child darkened our door at 3 a.m. But last month, for reasons obscure to me and my husband, either one or both of our kids started waking us up again in the middle of the night, multiple times a week. As far as I can tell, the younger one wakes up between sleep cycles, gets lonely and wants a cuddle. One of us takes her back to her bed, and she falls asleep immediately, then the lucky parent gets back into our bed — wide awake.

The older one has some trouble falling asleep at bedtime, which is 8:30 like her sister’s, but usually is slumbering by 9:30. We let her read a dead-tree book in bed as long as she likes, which helps. Her middle-of-the-night wakings are rarer but somehow more chaotic. She usually wakes both of us up, because she decides she absolutely must use our bathroom and turns on the brightest possible light.

I know (I think?) they’re not actually plotting together, but it’s as if they’ve decided to take turns ruining our lives: More often than not, they wake up the next day fully rested and cheerful, while my husband and I are a collective wreck. There’s not enough coffee in the world to fix my face, and then my fourth grader finds the audacity to point out my eye bags.

Thanks, sweetie.

When your children are babies, the proverbial “they” put the fear of God into you about good sleep. “Sleep begets sleep,” they say, and if you don’t establish good sleep habits early on, your children could have behavioral and developmental problems and, later in life, maybe even increase their risk of dying of a heart attack. So we dutifully did all the things you’re supposed to do: created bedtime routines we continue to follow to the letter, have a dark, quiet and cool sleeping environment, put our children back to sleep in their own beds with minimal fuss or fanfare and maintain consistent and regular to-bed and wake-up times.

This is usually where I would pivot to defining the “problem” with my children (they won’t stay asleep) and how to fix it. But as I read the research and after I talked to Dr. Craig Canapari, the director of the Pediatric Sleep Center at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital, I became convinced that the kids don’t actually have a problem; the adults do. And I wonder if, in general, we’re too quick to feel as if the “normal” range of kid behaviors is something that, with enough effort, we’re supposed to control. The subtext of that feeling being that if you’re not able to control your children’s sleep, you’re a bad parent.

According to the 2016 consensus opinion of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, my 5-year-old should be getting 10 to 13 hours of sleep per 24 hours, and my almost-9-year-old should be getting nine to 12 hours for optimal health. And guess what? Even with their night wakings, my kids typically get that much sleep.

In addition to sleep duration, there are a few other dimensions of sleep that the literature tends to mention: sleep quality, which can be objectively or subjectively measured and can be defined as “adequate when the person feels fresh when waking up from sleep”; sleep efficiency, which is the percentage of actual sleeping between bed and wake times; and sleep timing, which is bedtime and wake-up time.

By as many of these measures as we can gauge on our own, my kids’ sleep patterns are fine. They don’t tend to report sleepiness during the day, and even if they have a night waking, they tell us in the morning that they slept well.

When I talked to Canapari about what was going on in our household, he referred to the pediatrician Donald Winnicott and his concept of the “good enough” parent. He argued that good-enough parents may be better than perfect parents because they allow children to “tolerate the frustrations of reality” through their mistakes, according to the American Psychological Association’s Dictionary of Psychology. “What is good-enough sleep?” Canapari mused. “If you’re chasing that last 5 percent of quality or improvement in any parenting domain, you’re going to make yourself crazy.” It’s sort of the pediatric version of the politician’s “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

So how do you know your child is getting good-enough sleep? First, Canapari emphasized that the normal range is pretty wide and that some kids just need less sleep than others (though he noted that the parents of kids who need more sleep aren’t the ones going to see him in clinic). If your child is experiencing distress or anxiety over falling asleep (something my older daughter encounters from time to time), that’s something to work on.

He also said to keep an eye on how late your children are sleeping on weekends. If your elementary schoolers are sleeping an extra three hours on Saturday, that may be a sign they are sleep deprived during the week and that they actually want to be asleep during their normal activities, Canapari said. (If you have a teenager, an extra two to three hours of sleep on weekends isn’t something he’d be concerned about.)

If your children are functioning well during the day, even if they’re getting less sleep than you’d prefer, there’s not much to worry about — but it’s always worth mentioning to your pediatrician if you have any concerns.

That my husband and I are frazzled matters, though, Canapari emphasized. Even if our kids are fine, “you shouldn’t feel guilty about wanting it to change,” he said. And he had a suggestion for us — which many of my wise readers who’ve written in have already instituted in their families. It’s an intervention called a bedtime pass.

Your kids get the bedtime pass every night, and if they want to wake you up in the middle of the night, they present the pass to you. If they don’t use the pass, they get a gift the next day. If your kids get really scared when they wake up, there’s an extra wrinkle to the bedtime pass: You can set up a sleeping bag on your floor for them, and as long as they don’t wake you up, they can still win the game and claim a reward.

We are definitely going to try the bedtime pass with our kids soon. For now, though, we’re too tired even to make that happen.

Want More on Sleep?

I have my own struggles with falling asleep, so one time I tried to treat myself like an adult baby and wrote about it here.
If your children struggle to sleep, should you give them melatonin? Christina Caron looks at the research.
Canapari wrote about how to get your kids to go to sleep and stay asleep in the same room.
Is “momsomnia” keeping you up at night? How about “dogsomnia”?
We love a white-noise machine in our house. Wirecutter has recommendations for the best ones.

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