Author’s practical guidance
The weeks when it all comes undone
Source named in the book: reactivity and recovery (Rothbart)
Sleep gets worse in patches: the fortnight a molar arrives, the week language jumps, the month a new room at daycare starts.
Say this now
“Hard week. Same bedtime.”
Two facts, no negotiation. The second one is what carries you both through it.
“I'll sit here for five minutes tonight.”
Extra help with an end already attached, so it leaves when the patch does.
Do this
- Hold the routine exactly through the worst of it.
- Add help with a limit on it — five minutes, three nights, then out.
- Look in the daytime for the cause: a new room, a new sibling, a new skill.
- Write down when it started, so you can see when it ends.
- Decide nothing for two weeks — most patches are shorter than that.
Avoid this
- Starting a new plan in the first week of a bad patch — you are testing a method against a moving cause.
- Bringing back what you dropped months ago — the patch ends and the habit stays.
- "We're back to square one." — you are not. The skills are still there under the noise.
If it repeats
If a bad patch runs past a month, stop waiting it out and go back to the tools that worked before it. Patches that do not end are usually being held open by something that was added during them.
Why the book suggests this
Sleep gets worse in patches: the fortnight a molar arrives, the week language jumps, the month a new room at daycare starts. Nothing has been lost. The same child is running the same system under a load that went up somewhere in the daytime.
Rothbart's work is useful here because it separates how strongly a child responds from how long they take to come back down. When the day demands more, the evening recovery takes longer, and the first place that shows is the middle of the night.
From this collection
Same Words: Every Night
45 prepared situations in this family area.