Article Review Day 3: Sleep-Onset Association Disorder

Sleep-Onset Association Disorder is a dyssomnia (remember last Thursdays post?).

Night wakings are normal in infants and preschool children. They may wake up as many as 5 to 8 times a night. You may be thinking, my child sleeps all night (or at least most of the time). Or, you may be thinking, yep, they wake up about 5 to 8 times a night. Well, according to this article (I have been reviewing over the past few Thursdays) "the difference between children who are 'good sleepers' and sleep through the night and those who are 'poor sleepers' and wake frequently is their ability to self-soothe after awakening." So, even if you have a good sleeper that doesn't wake up they are probably just waking up and soothing themselves back to sleep. Self-soothing is wonderful and necessary. It sometimes means letting a child cry for a short period of time to discover how they will self-soothe. Many children are never given the opportunity to learn how to self-soothe. What does your child do to soothe themselves back to sleep? Do you soothe them back to sleep?

You may wonder why it is necessary for children to learn this skill. Well, if you soothe your child to sleep at bedtime with rocking or nursing or bottle feeding (this doesn't mean you skip a nighttime routine or if they fall asleep nursing they are going to be poor sleepers) they may learn to expect these as the way to go back to sleep when they wake during the night, and then you do these things to soothe them back to sleep during the night. "These children are unintentionally trained by their parents to expect these conditions and can experience many disruptions in their nighttime sleep leading to sleep loss. Parents also experience stress and a profound sleep deficit themselves because of night waking, resulting in potential for a negative impact on overall family functioning."

So, what do you do if your child has Sleep-Onset Association Disorder:
-Keep reading Lullaby Luna- informing yourself as a parent is a great way to help your kids get a new sleep routine.
-As a parent, you need to learn how "to help your children fall asleep in their cribs or beds and return to sleep during the night with minimal parental intervention."
-You may try "crying it out" or "graduated extinction" where you check on the child during episodes of nighttime crying- you make scheduled checks on the child and slowly increase the time between the checks. "During the checks, the parent should not hold or rock the child, as this will reinforce the crying and the need for parental intervention to return to sleep. By simply checking on the child, the child is reassured that his parents are still present but learns self-soothing techniques and often will accept that he is safe, his parents are near, and that he can fall asleep without the help from his parents."
Note: In my experience, crying will be part of this training, this training is necessary to create good sleepers, the younger the better (I like to do this by 5-6 months old), if your child is older it will take longer and probably be more difficult- not impossible, just more difficult.
-If you struggle to do this on your own or feel overwhelmed hire a sleep consultant.