Now that you know how important consistency is in your little one's sleep routine, you can go one step further and take advantage of his natural biology so that he's actually tired when his predetermined bedtime arrives. Nothing is quite as frustrating as knowing your child should be in bed and trying to adhere to an early bedtime, but finding him wide-eyed and energetic when this bedtime arrives.
Everyone has heard the comment, "You can't make a child sleep, but you can make him go to bed." This statement is true enough, but this theory creates all kinds of chaos in the house when said child is jumping on the bed, playing in the bed, popping out of the bed, and generally doing everything in the bed but sleeping. The missing link here is actually having him be tired enough to lie on the bed and go to sleep.
Several brain processes regulate a person's wakefulness and sleepiness. The first is simply a factor of how long a person has been awake. If a child is awake long enough, he eventually will become tired. This is why a long late-afternoon nap can destroy the idea of an early bedtime: a late napper simply hasn't been awake long enough to become tired. The second regulating factor is light and darkness. Bright light stimulates and energizes, while darkness brings on feelings of relaxation and tiredness.
Bright light orchestrates an array of functions in your child's body, from temperature to blood pressure to the release of hormones. Morning light provokes the release of your child's wakefulness hormones. Exposing your child to morning light is like pushing a Go button in her brain that says, "Time to wake up and be active."
Use this to your advantage: expose your child to bright light first thing in the morning. Daylight is most powerful. So set up your child's breakfast, morning cuddle, or the wake-up breastfeeding in a room with windows. If you don't have such a room or if the morning is dark outside, start your child's day in a well-lit area of the house.
As much as bright light is your child's biological Go button, darkness is the Stop button. Darkness causes an increase in the release of melatonin, the body's natural sleep hormone. You can help align your child's sleepiness with his bedtime by dimming the lights in your home during the hour or two before bedtime.
Use night-lights judiciously. Choose small and dim ones. If possible, select a night-light that emits a more blue tone of light (like moonlight) rather than yellow (like sunlight). When you understand the power of light and dark as biological signals, you can see that a bright night-light glowing in your child's bedroom can be counterproductive to helping her sleep soundly all night. When she wakes between her sleep cycles, that night-light actually can push her Go button—even a very dim light and even if it's 2:00 A.M. You can also see that if your child wakes in the night for a diaper change, a bottle, or a trip to the potty, things like turning lights on or opening the refrigerator and flooding the room with light can accidentally signal morning's arrival.
Dr. Charles Czeisler, who studies sleep at Brigham and Women's Hospital, completed years of research on the biological resetting effect of lights. He discovered that even the light of a hundred-watt bulb held ten feet away is powerful enough to reset your biological clock! Keeping this in mind, use the least amount of light you can for your middle-of-the-night duties—the tiniest night-light or a penlight flashlight—and turn it off as soon as possible.
Incidental lights can affect your child's sleep, too. A streetlight outside his window, car lights flickering past, early morning sunlight, or the neighbor's kitchen lights coming through his window can call out to the sleeping child, waking him in the night or earlier in the morning than you'd like. Do what you can to prevent light from entering your child's bedroom. Use light-blocking curtains or shades, or cut cardboard boxes or aluminum foil to fit inside windows.
Pay attention to lights inside the house that enter your child's room through his doorway or around his doorjamb. His room may be dark, but if you're up and about, the light seeping into his room (not to mention the noise of your activities) will keep your little one from falling asleep. This also can cause his repeated waking after you've put him to bed but before you've gone to bed yourself.
A child who fears the dark often finds comfort in the dimmest of night-lights or in a child-sized flashlight at his bedside that he can use if he finds waking in the dark scary. (For ideas on easing these fears, see page 229.)
Keeping a child's bedroom as dark as possible from bedtime to awakening time can be a very powerful tool to define his sleeping hours.
Even if the lights are dim, you'll find that noise and action can override the light- and dark-regulated biological need for sleep. In other words, if the lights are dim, but the television is loud and your child is racing around the room with Daddy or her siblings, then her brain will override that Stop button and convince her to push through the tiredness. She'll become alert, often hyperalert, since she'll be forcing herself to stay awake despite an inner voice that's calling her to sleep.
The key is to keep the prebedtime hour as peaceful as possible:
• Turn the television off, or keep the volume low and the picture dimmed, and avoid loud, stimulating programs.
• Turn the radio to soothing, relaxing tunes.
• Keep video, computer, and electronic games turned off.
• Direct playtime toward quiet and restful activities.
• Prevent your child from engaging in physically active play; avoid having him run, dance, jump, or wrestle during the hour before bedtime.
• Avoid scheduling social events, running errands, or entertaining visitors during the hour before your child's bedtime whenever possible.