Why won't my child fall asleep at bedtime?
Children get used to going to sleep in a certain way. Now, sleep time comes and as they get older, babies or children won't really want to go to sleep, so they will resist. Babies can resist going to sleep for a number of reasons. One, they may not want to go to sleep if they're older. Number two, they may resist because whatever they were used to having as they were falling asleep has been withheld from them, and so there will be a resistance. So, it's very important to understand what the mechanics are and what is going on in order to deal with the problem. Broadly speaking, if you want your child to have healthy sleep habits then it's really important to set up what we call good sleep hygiene. Good sleep hygiene starts firstly by a good routine, and secondly by consistency. You establish your bedtime routine with very clear steps, and it's not all a big rush; it's very metered and very calm and soothing, etcetera, etcetera. As long as you can be consistent about it and you initiate this hygiene and these steps early on you may never have problems and your baby won't have problems going to bed, because it becomes so entrenched and they're used to that. Even as they get older, even as they're a toddler, it's just a part of life. Bedtime is fun, it's story time, it's cuddle time, and it's goodnight. So, you can actually avert a lot of problems initially if you get your routine right, you have good sleep hygiene, and you're consistent; you will be fine. What happens when it doesn't work like that? What happens, for example, if for whatever reason, your baby has bad sleep habits? There are multiple reasons why babies learn these bad habits; whether they're fed until they fall asleep, or whether they've come out of the hospital and they've been ill so they've been held and rocked until they've fallen asleep, and now they're used to being rocked. Maybe they're sharing a room with an older sibling and there's a television on, and now they're used to falling asleep with the TV on. Whatever the reasons are that got them into this habit, that reason is causing them to wake up in the middle of the night and require the same habit to be given to them in order to fall back to sleep; it's now becoming a real issue and you have to change it. This requires a great deal of behavioural modification. Essentially what you need to do is that you have to almost rewind and go back to the beginning and get your child used to a healthy sleep routine.
