So that your child can rest properly, we tell you how to create an emotionally positive environment at bedtime.
The bedtime , each day gets longer, and ends with anger, screaming and arguments between parents. For this reason, children go to bed tense and eventually get used to it, which can damage their emotional health.
He knows that every night, before going to bed, he says that he does not want to go to bed and that his parents get angry and threaten him until he can put him to bed. Then he will wake up countless times, and his parents will either beg him to fall asleep or get mad again until he falls asleep and exhaustion. Later, when her parents are sleeping, she will get up and go to bed. At first they will tell him to go to his room, but they will end up giving in and letting him sleep with them.
We feel overwhelmed, we don’t know how to act; we are fed up with a situation that is repeated daily and that we do not know how to face. Bedtime should not be an occasion to measure strength between parents and children. Therefore, parents should not adopt an attitude of supplication: “Fall asleep, I beg you,” nor authoritative: “Fall asleep, I order you.” The pleading attitude leads to overprotection: cradling the child, putting him to sleep, staying with him until he falls asleep or letting him fall asleep on the sofa and putting him to bed without him knowing that we are taking him to his room indicates to the child that they have to sleep, it is not he who falls asleep.
The authoritarian attitude generates aggressiveness, screaming, disqualifications, anger, tension. Parents should convey to their children security and serenity: «I do not beg you, nor do I order you to fall asleep. I don’t sleep on you either. You fall asleep I provide you with the ideal sleeping environment. I offer you my support and my love, accompanying you to your place of sleep ». Sleeping is a vital need of the child, it should not be imposed by the parents. The child learns to sleep by following his natural impulse. You don’t need to be put to sleep. Sleep when sleepy.
Newborns need to sleep almost all day. But after three months, they stay awake longer and longer. They slowly associate their need for rest with the night and the nap time. They associate the different hours of the day with their personal activity: «After eating I take a nap, after dinner I go to bed». They learn to adapt to their environment if we establish an orderly schedule that allows them to perceive their different activities throughout the day.
From the book? Educating boys and girls from 0 to 6 years old ?, by Maite Vallet