– Hi, I’m Dana. Welcome to this week’s video.

Now, for this, I’m talking to those parents who have done the Sleep Sense program and here’s a common mistake I see parents making especially if they’re doing the stay in the room method.

So let me give you a little bit of context for that. Basically, one of the methods in the Sleep Sense program allows a parent to be present through the process of learning to sleep well and that goes really well for a lot of children especially older children.

Like toddlers and older children, that method works really, really well. But here’s a common mistake parents make is that they stay in the room. And here’s why they do this.

It’s going pretty well, right? The child is taking maybe five or ten minutes to fall asleep. That’s no big deal, you’ll stay in your chair, it’s fine. They’re probably sleeping through the night, which is lovely and you don’t want to rock the boat. I get it. You don’t want to rock the boat. It feels scary.

But here’s the problem. It might not happen this week. It might not happen next month. But I promise you, at some point in the future your child will figure out that the longer they put up a fuss or put on a show or talk to you or flop around in their bed or sing to themselves or have a puppet show with their hands the longer you have to sit there.

Now you’re held hostage for an hour, sometimes more, as your child does all of these things and that feels less fun, and that starts to feel pretty intolerable. And so I get a lot of emails from parents saying, “what do I do now?”

Well, there’s only one choice. You’ve got to get out of the room because now your child understands that the longer they put on these shows for you, the longer you stay and what also might be happening is you’re having some nighttime wake-ups, okay?

Because again, if they think, if you think “I only sleep if somebody’s sitting there” and I wake up at 3:00 in the morning and no one is sitting there, that’s going to probably provoke me to call or cry for that person to come back and sit there.

So now your toddler thinks it’s your job all night to sit in your chair and watch them and that’s not gonna be fun for anyone, either. So that is why the ultimate goal for any child is that they learn how to fall asleep independently, right?

They don’t need you, they don’t need a pacifier, they don’t need a bottle, they don’t need anything but their own skills and that is a beautiful gift to give a child. That is a gift that’s gonna grow with them throughout their life. The fact that I know I am 100% capable of getting myself to sleep every night is a pretty great feeling.

Thanks so much for watching today. Sleep well.