One of the most common phrases that I hear new parents say is that my child fights sleep. I mean, if I had a nickel, people, for every time I heard somebody say that, well, I’d have some nickels.

So I wanna talk today about what is really going on here. I mean, to you it looks like she hates sleep. It looks like sleep is the last thing she wants.

I hear things like she’s just so curious and she’s so alert and she doesn’t wanna miss out on anything. These are the things I hear parents say as an explanation for why it’s so hard to get this child to fall asleep.

Now, first I wanna give you some good news, that when it feels like your child is fighting sleep harder than normal, meaning it used to take you five minutes to rock her to sleep and now it’s taking you 35 and you have to do it a couple of times and it seems to go on forever. When that starts to happen, that’s good news, because what it means is that your child is not really happy with the scenario.

The rocking to sleep is not really working for her anymore. It’s usually a good sign that your child is ready and looking for some strategies that are all her own. She would like to be able to fall asleep without all this extra stuff. She wants to fall asleep without the rocking. That’s what she’s trying to say. But this is the status quo. This is what you’ve been doing for all of these months, so you just feel like you have to do it even harder to get her to go to sleep.

If this is happening for you, this is a really good time for you to make some positive change. This would be a great time for you to pick up a copy of The Sleep Sense Program and start helping her figure out how do I fall asleep without all of this extra help? What do I need to do to fall asleep independently so that I can get to sleep in a timely fashion and I can stay asleep all night?

And the good news is if you can find this place where your child’s fighting sleep, so to speak, then those are usually the cases where this just takes a few nights. It’s almost like the child was like, ah, thank you. I was just looking for the answers and you helped me find them, and now I’m gonna become a super sleeper.

So that’s really good news. So it’s not so much that they’re fighting sleep. It’s more that they’re just trying to figure out how to get to sleep. And all the easy ways, the nursing, the bottle feeding to sleep, the rocking, whatever you were doing for her in the past, there was probably a time where this worked quite well, right, or well enough that it wasn’t that bothersome to you, but now all of a sudden it’s feeling much more challenging for both you and the child. This is an awesome time to make change.

Thanks so much for watching today. Sleep well.