Do transition objects help with child sleep disorders? Problem is, when they wake up at night they are going to want those objects back especially if it is a pacifier. Problem is, when they wake up at night...
Problem is, when they wake up at night they are going to want those objects back especially if it is a pacifier. Those things get lost all over the place, under the blanket, on the floor.
They want to go back to sleep but they can't find it. It will be like you sleeping in your bed and then waking up later in middle of the night. You are sleepy, you are tired and it's two in the morning. You're not going to go back to bed if you are in your bathtub. You are not going to fall asleep until you get back to your bed.
If I don't have that I am not going to fall asleep. It tends to be bigger issues for kids. We are talking about parents who rock their children to sleep or sleep in their bed or have them sleep in the parent's bed and it's wonderful with a newborn. You are not going to think that's very funny with a three-year-old. So people can fall in to their trap where you always want your child to be safe and the only way you feel they're safe is if they sleep with you. .
Again usually the amount of times they wake up could be so brief that they have no memory of it. And it doesn't mean anything but if they wake up and say, "hey wait a minute. I fell asleep by being in mom's arms. Where's mom now?"
And they start crying and screaming and then we have problem with a child that won't sleep through the night. Now you got a habit that's going to be difficult to break.
And this is good information because it is an extremely common problem that most people don't know how to deal with it. And with all due respect most physicians don't either. They get trained on it but they don't get told what to do. As in medical school I got zero hours of training on this sleep. And when I went to residency I probably received about five hours over three years. So again in this age I think it's lot better. For physicians of my age and older we need hours of training in this. So a lot of remedies and stuff we will come up with may not have been all that helpful. Again kids crying and things like that. There was nobody to say hey listen you know with the baby or infant you are teaching him things just as if you were teaching him to eat with the fingers. You are teaching him to tie his shoes. You are teaching him how to walk. Teaching him words on how to talk. Same thing with sleep, you teach somebody how to fall asleep. And if you teach them that you fall asleep by being rocked to sleep they will expect that the rest of the night too. So it depends on what you want to teach them. Certainly there are cultures where everybody sleeps in the same room. And this is not an issue. That's how everybody sleeps. So sleeping together is a part of normal life. In United States the culture says we sleep in our own space. So if that's what you want to teach then doing it as early as possible and being as consistent as you can will get you that behavior.
