Sleeping Children

Currently I am writing a little booklet on how to get your child to sleep through the night, in their own bed, AND in their own room.

WOW I hear some of you sigh, wouldn't that be nice!

I know a lot of you, whether your children are typical or special rarely experience the beautiful silence that fills the house once your children are in bed. Or the few hours of adult time in the evening, that children going to bed at the regular time of 7.30pm would give you.

This IS possible, even for you and your child.

The first part of it as always at The Autism Treatment Center of America is filled with useful believes to adopt as you teach your child to sleep through the night.

The one I want to share here is:

"It is useful to teach your child to put themselves to sleep".

As I wrote and thought about that I realized that this is a skill that we actually have to help our children learn. So many of our children are robbed of the opportunity to learn how to put themselves to sleep, by numerous versions of the following routines:

1. Rocking them lovingly to sleep in your arms.
2. Lulling them to sleep by putting them in the car and driving them around.
   
3. Letting them fall asleep in front of the TV, or the sitting room couch.
4. Lying down beside them with your arms stroking their back.
5. Literally being their pillow.
6. Reading them a book until they are sound asleep.

SO once they awake to find themselves, not in the car, or on the couch or without their Mom or Dad, they go immediately to find the thing that will help them sleep again. If it was them, most likely they would just roll over in their cosy beds and nod off again.

SO the next time your child is crying for you to come and be the mechanism by which they put themselves to sleep, think twice, for you are robbing them of the opportunity to learn this skill for themselves.

Once learnt this skill will be used everyday for a life time.

I will let you all know once the booklet if finished.

I wish you all a good nights sleep.