Foreword

Compassionate, courageous, and creative, The Happy Sleeper is a book for every parent of a young child to savor in its magnificent exploration of effective strategies for helping children get to bed smoothly and sleep well through the night. Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright have written a user-friendly, scientifically informed, practical guide that provides the information and intention you need to cultivate healthy sleeping habits not only for your child but for yourself as well!

Why is sleep so important? It is during sleep that we secrete the growth hormones our bodies need to grow and replenish themselves well. Sleep also allows our body and brain to rest and recover from the day’s activities. Recent studies have revealed, too, that during sleep our brains in effect clean themselves up—removing unhelpful by-products of the day’s neural activity—so that we can function well when we’re awake. Given all of this, it’s no surprise that babies and children need so many hours of sleep as they grow. Infants and toddlers sleep half their day or more! In childhood the amount of optimal sleep gradually decreases, but school-age children still need roughly 10 hours of sleep. Even as adults, we should spend about a third of our time sleeping!

Without the proper amount and quality of sleep, science reveals, we will have difficulty focusing, remembering, and calming our emotions. When we haven’t slept well we don’t learn or operate as effectively because our brain hasn’t had the necessary sleep time to optimize its functioning. Even more, without proper sleep, our immune system does not function well, and so we can become vulnerable to infectious diseases. And our metabolic system doesn’t function optimally, so we can be prone to overeat and not process food well, putting us at risk for obesity and diabetes. For each of these reasons, sleep is one of the most important “activities” we humans participate in. And as parents, helping our children develop good sleep hygiene is one of the most important contributions we can make to their well-being.

In this fabulous guide, you’ll learn to take important findings from sleep research and combine them with a crucial working knowledge of attachment research so that you’ll optimize not only your children’s sleep habits, but also their attachment to you. Attachment is all about providing security for your children through anticipating their inner needs, making them feel safe, and communicating with them in a soothing manner. Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright are brilliant sleep whisperers with decades of experience helping parents cultivate secure attachment while simultaneously shaping healthy sleep habits. That’s exactly the combination studies suggest is the win-win-win of effective parenting: give your children the relationship security they need while also providing them the structure they require to sleep well and thrive. And all this while you, too, get some important rest.

You’ll learn in these pages what science and clinical wisdom have to tell us about how to keep the relationship with your child filled with compassionate communication while also structuring healthy sleep strategies. You’ll discover how you can nurture emotional understanding between you and your child while at the same time implementing behavioral strategies that ensure they get the sleep they need. The authors provide you with a framework that will leave you feeling confident in the positive outcome of your approach. This is a plan that works.

Parenting is one of the most challenging roles one can play in life. It’s tricky to know when to hold our children close and when to let them venture out on their own to learn important skills, such as the self-soothing techniques that will help them be Happy Sleepers for the rest of their lives. Having this book as your companion, you will gain the clarity and conviction necessary to build a secure relationship with your child and, in turn, to help them build a secure relationship with themselves and their broader community. Read on, connect with compassion, creativity, and courage, and sleep well!

—Daniel J. Siegel, MD