Your competent child #4

(Jesper Juul’s Your Competent Child again; it has a website, by the way.) Putting my daughter to bed at daytime has been somewhat difficult the past week. I don’t know if it’s got to do with us having begun to take long walks every day, so that she often sleeps in the stroller instead of at home. But I have noticed that she signals very clearly that she doesn’t want to sleep: she stands up in her crib, takes the pacifier from her mouth and drops it into the bed (she only uses while going to sleep).

At these times, I know that she’s tired and needs to sleep, but I think it’s difficult to know whether “forcing” her to go to sleep is the right way. I know that if I tirelessly lay her down, put the blanket on her and leave the room, she will eventually go to sleep – but am I by doing this reducing her chances of learning to tell us when she wants to go to sleep? Will she learn to sleep only when we tell her to? What will happen when she reaches the “terrible twos”?

Juul seems to be of the opinion that it’s better to listen to the child’s signals and never force him or her to go to sleep. So what, he writes, if the child is more tired somedays because he or she wants to play instead of going to sleep? Don’t we, he asks, sometimes prefer to go to bed later every now and then, even if we are very tired the day after? Put this way, it’s hard to argue with him.

In books about children, the advise most often is to go the tireless way, following a procedure that Juul perhaps would dismiss as mechanic: let the child cry for 3-5 minutes, then go and tuck him or her in, after which you leave the room. Repeat as necessary. We’ve used this procedure to “teach” Elvira to go to sleep by herself, without either of us parents by her side – and it worked.

Juul’s way can be seen (if you’re an advocate of the latter method) as waiting until the child is so tired that it nearly falls asleep among the toys, so that he or she can be carried to bed without resistance. But then, of course, you would have overlooked his fundamental idea that children want to cooperate, and that any resistance is a signal to be respected.

Then again, with a ten-month-old that only understands a handful of words and can’t respond with words, it’s hard to, as Juul suggests, regard the signals as invitations to discussions where both sides of the matter are heard, and you find a plausible solution together.

I think, however, that the two approaches aren’t incongruous: the 3-5 minute scheme applies as long as you don’t feel you’re forcing your child into something he or she doesn’t wants (unless you realize that his/her desires is in violent conflict with his/her needs, in which case I suppose you’ll try again as non-coercively as possible).

Some months ago, as a response to something I wrote at the time, I got the URL of the Taking Children Seriously movement website from Rajesh Babu. I browsed some of their articles today and the one about sleep problems contained some controversial suggestions. ––– I’ll have to go now.