Episode 13: Toddler Night Wakings, Early Rising, and Nap Refusal: Your Pediatric Sleep Questions Answered

Audio of Ep 13 Mailbag
Craig Canapari MD: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Sleep Edit, a podcast devoted to helping tired kids and parents sleep better. We focus on actionable evidence-based sleep advice, so everyone in your home can sleep through the night. Now, a quick disclaimer, this podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice.
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Here we go. Welcome back to another episode of the Sleep Edit Podcast, episode 13, another mailbag episode. I’m Dr. Craig Canapari ,
Arielle Greenleaf: And I am Arielle Greenleaf.
Craig Canapari MD: and we are here to help tired parents and kids sleep better. I always enjoy these mailbag episodes ’cause sometimes these are tough situations the parents are facing.
Arielle Greenleaf: It is always a tough situation when it comes to sleep. I mean, if you’re not sleeping, everything’s tough.
Craig Canapari MD: Arielle, I, I guess there’s a couple of ways that people send these to us. Some are through our email address for the podcast, which is
Arielle Greenleaf: the sleep edit show@gmail.com,
Craig Canapari MD: one day I’ll be able to remember that.
Arielle Greenleaf: actually, I need to apologize to people. I need to check it more frequently. There was a message from someone that was nine days old, so I apologize for that. I will check it more [00:02:00] frequently.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, and if you have signed up for my email list, I often send that out there to you. So let’s, we have a loose clustering of topics. And the first questions were actually we had two questions about 24, the concept of 24 hour sleep. One from a sleep consultant who says, I use this concept all the time in my practice, but would love to hear how you explain it.
And a parent wondering what it is ’cause he or she has seen parents refer to it.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah, and I don’t even know. I feel like this is something You sleep doctors don’t really talk about, in the same way as us sleep consultants. Probably because you’re solving more complicated issues than than the things that we’re working on. You know, we’re dealing with normally developing children who have difficulty with their schedule or they’re not sleeping correctly, and just a few fixes will work. One of the, actually, like [00:03:00] one of the most critical pieces of what I do is determining 24 hour sleep. And what I mean by that is that we all have, I. Our own set of sleep needs. Craig, you may survive on seven hours of sleep and I may need, se I may need nine hours of sleep. children are no different and as you know, for , normally developing children, there is a wide range of what is recommended and or normal. So if you’re looking at an infant, there is a range between 12 and 16 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. That is a very wide gap, especially if you’re stuck in the time, you’re in the frame of mind of wake windows. So if your child ha only needs 12 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period, that means they need 12 hours of awake time during the day order to, enough sleep, drive to fall asleep easily and take, a restorative nap or have a restorative night. [00:04:00] Likewise. If a child needs 16 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period, that’s only eight hours of awake time. So those periods between sleeps are much smaller and shorter than those who have lower sleep needs.
Craig Canapari MD: And just to clarify, those really wide windows of normal sleep are in infancy and they kind of narrow as kids move through childhood though, if you are, if your child is in the high end of normal, they’re probably gonna continue to be on the high end of normal through childhood and adolescence. I feel like clinic, sleep clinic is full of young kids that don’t need a lot of sleep and older kids that need a lot of that, that do need a lot of sleep because if you, if your kid,
if your kid is in the high end of normal, say as an infant, they need, it can be 18 or even 20 hours of sleep. You feel like a parenting genius, right? Your kid’s gonna sleep no matter what. They take long naps. Whereas if your kid is in the low end of [00:05:00] normal you are really gonna be struggling because it’s not like you’re gonna get a nice 12 hours in a row.
They’re, they’re not mature enough to do that in early infancy. So you’re gonna have some fragmentation of sleep at night and naps are gonna be very difficult to figure out.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah. And I think that’s the tricky part. And that’s the magic of sleep consulting is that if you’re working with a good sleep consultant, going to look very closely at your child’s sleep logs. And first, the first thing is we determine, okay, how much sleep is this child actually giving us in a 24 hour period?
And it’s really, really surprising. How quickly you can determine that. A lot of the apps now are smart enough to show us trends, and we can see trends at seven, in the past week, 14 days, 30 days, 90 days. And it’s really wild how consistent children are. the problem arises when sleep isn’t distributed appropriately.
And so [00:06:00] someone may have a child sleeping four hours during the day, but then struggling to fall asleep at night and then only sleeping eight or nine hours overnight. and they’re like, why is this so difficult? Well, because your child’s sleeping too much during the day. We need to redistribute that to the nighttime hours, which means, probably widening those wake windows so that the child is getting enough sleep drive.
But also we’re pushing some of that sleep into the overnight hours. It’s really like an. It’s almost like a math problem, honestly. It’s
Craig Canapari MD: Sure.
Arielle Greenleaf: let’s figure this out. And I’d love to include in the show notes just some examples of what this looks like from a sleep data perspective. I have had a lot of children on the lower end of the spectrum in the last six months. So when I say lower end, I would say, you know, like a four month old that only needs 13 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. If you look at those wake windows that [00:07:00] everyone’s programmed to look at four months, they’re like, oh, two hour wake windows. For little Johnny that’s not enough because he’s only giving us 13 hours in a 24 hour period.
So how are we, making sure he’s getting restorative sleep during the day, but also getting restorative sleep overnight. And that’s the nuance there. And those windows can be different. The dis, you know, dispersing them can be different because some children need a longer wake time in the morning or a shorter wake time in the morning and vice versa at night. that’s where I think the ma, the magic of Sleep consulting comes in. We do help to determine the 24 hour sleep needs distributed appropriately, and that’s very, very nuanced. As you know, sleep is very nuanced, so it’s not something that I can say, well, if your child needs 14 hours of sleep, this is what their schedule should be, because it could be very different from another child that needs 14 hours of sleep.
Craig Canapari MD: So 24 hours sleep. It’s just the amount of time that [00:08:00] a child is gonna sleep in 24 hours. And this is gonna be fairly consistent if child’s a good sleeper. Bad sleeper. Bad sleeper, right? Like, I don’t like the term bad sleeper, but that’s how parents sleep.
Arielle Greenleaf: sleep needs. That’s all it
Craig Canapari MD: the What apps do you like for parents to track this?
Arielle Greenleaf: Oh man, that’s a really tricky question because the app that I like to look at the most for data, I really dislike the other parts of the app. So I, I hate to speak about brands, but I really like the data I get from Huckleberry. I do not like the idea of their sweet spots because it doesn’t pick up the nuance of each child.
So it may suggest like a 10:00 PM bedtime, or something like that. ’cause it’s using like an algorithm to determine the schedule or the sweet spot. But from like a data perspective, it really shows me, it breaks it down. Here’s how much daytime sleep they’ve been getting. Here’s how much nighttime sleep they’ve been getting.
Here’s the total amount of [00:09:00] sleep they’ve been getting. They do it on a daily basis, a weekly basis, biweekly, monthly, and 90 days, and it’s extremely helpful.
Craig Canapari MD: So let’s talk ’cause we’re gonna get into some now specific questions. And I will say we do think about this concept in sleep, doctor land. Honestly, the most common example we have is usually dealing, explaining to teenagers why taking long naps in the afternoon is problematic for their sleep.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah.
Craig Canapari MD: ‘ cause I’ll see kids who come home from school. They will sleep from like two in the afternoon till eight o’clock at night and then be up till two in the morning
Arielle Greenleaf: Right.
Craig Canapari MD: feel like garbage in the morning. And that is like an inappropriate distribution of sleep. And that’s an extreme example.
Arielle Greenleaf: I mean, I don’t
Craig Canapari MD: I,
Arielle Greenleaf: it’s that extreme because I think if you don’t know, you don’t know. Like, so if you’re a new parent and you just don’t know and you’re letting your baby sleep six hours during the day, and then you’re wondering why they’re only sleeping or nine hours overnight, I just think that a lot there [00:10:00] needs, it would be helpful if there was more clear education around what you’re talking about.
Craig Canapari MD: well let me ask you this. How do you decide the distribution of nap time, mornings versus afternoons in an infant? Is it based on what’s worked for parents? Because I feel like it’s sort of like with little babies, it’s almost as if parents are throwing everything in the wall and just seeing what sticks.
Arielle Greenleaf: Right? Well, I feel like there’s a lot of factors that go into it. Unfortunately. I wish it was like so simple okay. Say there’s a child that needs, it’s, this is tricky. Say I determine that a child can only do well with two and a half hours of sleep. During the day, and then maybe they’re giving us 11 hours overnight or something like that. They give us 13 and a half hours total during the day. What I like to do is
Craig Canapari MD: 13 and a half hours of wakefulness during the day.
Arielle Greenleaf: No, if they only need 13, if they need [00:11:00] 13 and a half hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. So they’re giving us 11 hours overnight and two and a half during the day. I generally like to make that morning nap around an hour then push the afternoon nap to an hour and a half so that we’re pushing bedtime out a little bit later so that the 11 o’clock isn’t, the 11 hours isn’t putting down at six and going to bed or waking up at five.
We wanna make sure we’re getting to a normal wake up time for child. So I’m trying to think there was. So there was someone recently where the child only sleeps 10 hours overnight no matter what. They just will only sleep 10 hours overnight. If you know that. And you’re trying to put them to bed at like seven and wondering why they’re waking at five, well, you know, that’s, [00:12:00] we’ve gotta shift bedtime a little bit later.
And parents are often scared to do that it goes against what normal wake windows and it can be scary because they’re afraid that child’s gonna be overtired. But I’ve never had 24 hour sleep distribution backfire on me ever. In fact, parents are like, wow I am amazed at what just happened.
Craig Canapari MD: So essentially the levers parents can. Pull are when they put their kid down for naps, when they put their kids down for bedtime, I guess the number of naps, of course. Um, and you can shorten a nap. No, no. Parent is like, oh my God, have to wake up my, like three month old at 10 in the 10 in the morning so I can get them to school.
Right? Like that’s never a problem that people have. So I, I’m curious though, would you say that the kids that you see who have somewhat chaotic sleep patterns or that’s how it feels to the parents that actually their nighttime sleep durations are [00:13:00] relatively fixed and what you’re adjusting more is the timing of their nighttime sleep window and the timing of their naps, or,
Arielle Greenleaf: So yeah, I think my goal is always 10 to 12 hours overnight.
Craig Canapari MD: okay.
Arielle Greenleaf: I don’t know. It may be anecdotal. I don’t know where I read that or if I read I feel like I read 10 to 12 hours is, a good goal to aim for. It’s I sound so silly right now. I don’t know where I read it, but it’s be, it’s always my goal to get 10 to 12 hours and I’ve very rarely missed that goal. Usually I can get at least 10 hours out of a child overnight. So Yes. Then it’s the
Craig Canapari MD: Even a, a young, an infant. And of course we’re talking about
Arielle Greenleaf: yes,
Craig Canapari MD: may still be kids who are waking up to feed. It’s not necessarily 10 uninterrupted hours in a young infant, but 10 hours of pretty consistent sleep overnight.
Arielle Greenleaf: Right, right.
And then for daytime, my goal is at least one hour for the two nap, the first two [00:14:00] naps. The later it gets there, you know, the cat naps later in the day. Those are harder to extend, but I aim for an hour. For each of the first two naps. Some children are giving me 2, 2, 2 hour naps. It just depends on their sleep needs. I have a child right now who is one and she takes a two hour nap and sleeps 12 and a half to 13 hours overnight. It’s kind of crazy, but that’s just, she’s higher in sleep needs and and she tends to, she tends to do better with an earlier bedtime and a longer night
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah.
Arielle Greenleaf: pushing her a bit.
Craig Canapari MD: I think the flip side is, not to condescend to people who do have higher sleep knee babies. It can be difficult ’cause they do tend to do a lot of sleeping and if they’re, especially if it’s a second or third kid and the family does not always have the luxury of having the child have as consistent as like your first kid.[00:15:00]
As long as you have a parent at home, you have a fair amount of discretion about the timing of things.
Arielle Greenleaf: Even a nanny or a babysitter or something.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah,
Arielle Greenleaf: if the child is at home, it’s much easier than if they’re at the day at daycare. That
Craig Canapari MD: we should set your second kid. Forget about it. It’s just that they’re doing whatever the first kid needs them to do. So let’s get into a couple of we just have a couple of nap challenges here. One is, I know what you’re gonna say to this. We just transition to one nap. How long should I let that nap go?
I’m worried about it starting to disrupt bedtime and I know, hold on, let’s say it together. It depends.
So why does it depend?
Arielle Greenleaf: it depends on their sleep needs,
Honestly. So the child has transitioned to one nap and they’re sleeping three hours during the day, and then what used to be a seven 30 bedtime is now, an they’re not falling asleep till eight 30 or nine, then clearly you’re gonna have to curb down, cut down some of that nap time sometimes.
[00:16:00] So my goal for one nap is, an hour and a half minimum. And then beyond that, some kids can do two, two and a half. I very rarely see a child able to take a three hour nap and then have a decent night.
Craig Canapari MD: I
Arielle Greenleaf: children do, but not I would say that’s more the exception than the norm.
Craig Canapari MD: honestly, those were my kids. They could sleep from, they could sleep from two to five and be in bed by seven 30.
Arielle Greenleaf: Five. And then have a, like only be awake for two and a half hours. Were they up at the butt crack?
Craig Canapari MD: My younger
Kid, yes. But my older kid used to take these epic naps. He still is an early to bed kid.
Arielle Greenleaf: yeah. Mine is
Craig Canapari MD: He’s probably on the higher sleep needs spectrum. But I think to the writer of this, it’s gonna be obvious, right? If you just track this a little bit, if your kid takes a long nap and night bedtime’s a disaster, you either need to move bedtime later or shorten the nap.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah, that’s, I would say just track the sleep for about five to seven days. Track how long the nap was, [00:17:00] track, how long nighttime was, and then like you’re saying, I mean, I don’t know that many parents that would love to have like a 9:00 PM bedtime. So if you want to have a decent bedtime, you’re probably in a bedtime that doesn’t drag on, you’re probably going to have to cap the nap a little bit.
I think it’s also important to mention that having a an intentional start to the day is really important because if some days your child is sleeping until seven and then other days you’re waking them up at 10, that’s gonna screw up. Your entire schedule. So having an intentional wake time, I mean, they say that for adults too, who are struggling with sleep, have a regular schedule, even on the weekends, don’t, because otherwise you’re, and then they’re like the baby isn’t falling asleep till 11.
Well, yeah, because they woke up at 10. You can’t expect that.
Craig Canapari MD: Sure. And honestly, that’s. For most of our families, that’s not gonna be a problem they’re [00:18:00] gonna have, but it will be a problem in older kids. So yeah, I, I would say that I maybe let the kid app nap ad-lib, see how bedtime goes. If you wanna adjust bed, if you have to adjust bedtime 30 minutes later, and that works for you, it doesn’t really matter.
But if it’s if it’s, you’re have, you’re seeing prolonged awakenings in the middle of the night or a really delayed sleep onset, those are the signs that the nap is too long. And again, it’s the idea of 24 hour sleep. Are you taking sleep from the nighttime sleep period and putting it during the day?
That’s when it’s a problem.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah, it’s interesting that you bring that up too because I find that sometimes, well a lot of times it’s bedtime struggle, like sleep onset is just pushed way too far. Sometimes children are waking up for two hours in the middle of the night because they’ve gotten too much sleep during the day or they’re waking up at three or four in the morning. So again, it goes back to that distribution of 24 hours sleep.
Craig Canapari MD: So here’s another one. My two and a half year old is in full [00:19:00] nap boycott mode at home. It’s been going on for almost two months. He still naps at daycare for four days a week, but refuses at home often sobbing and screaming. We had a new baby recently and changed daycares as well. He’s clearly exhausted.
What do we do? And this is from Morgan.
Arielle Greenleaf: oh Morgan, I’m so sorry. That
Craig Canapari MD: Morgan.
Arielle Greenleaf: lot, especially with a new baby.
Craig Canapari MD: Morgan. We have some bad news for you. Your child is giving up the nap and the
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah,
Craig Canapari MD: two and a two and a half is not a crazy age for that to happen.
Arielle Greenleaf: it’s not.
Craig Canapari MD: Es especially with the new baby at home. The reason your child will nap in daycare is because you’re not there. Your child wants to spend time with you, especially with the new baby around, and they’re kind of getting ready to give up the nap, right?
Like I would wager also on that if the child is napping at daycare, bedtime is probably a little bit later in a scenario like this. I’d say with the [00:20:00] new baby, it’s important to spend some time one-on-one with your child without the baby, if it’s at all possible. Even if it’s 20 or 30 minutes a day expecting that there’ll be some quiet time in the afternoon.
Kids don’t go from not napping, from napping to not napping smoothly. It’s not one day they’re like, I feel great. I’m not gonna be a jerk during my usual nap time. I mean, there tend to be a lot of screaming and crying during that period when they sort of fall apart.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah. And I would say too if it’s been going on for that long, nap regressions, I hate the term regression, but nap regressions do happen. They can coincide with things like a new daycare or a new baby or something developmental. But what if it’s been going on for two months? That’s tricky. I agree.
I always recommend that one-on-one time, 20, 30 minutes, quiet time instead of force trying to force something that’s only causing distress at [00:21:00] this point. I think the quiet time is more restorative to them than screaming there for however long. Yes. That’s for everybody and I think it’s important to note Craig I’m sure you’ve seen this. This information. But there, the latest research about naps out is actually out of UMass. And what they’re discovering is that give up naps based on brain development. So when the part of their brain that store’s memory is fully matured, they are able to drop naps more easily. And that can happen at two and a half or five.
It just totally varies. So I, we can look up that research, I can share that with everybody. But it is interesting ’cause I think a lot of times parents are just focused on that age again. Oh, your kid will drop their nap between three and five. There’s a variation.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, it’s [00:22:00] a huge variation. Yeah, no, that’s interesting. I have not seen that. But it makes sense. So yeah, the struggle is real Morgan I. Oh I’m always surprised about how long kids are gonna nap in daycare, when they won’t nap at home. It’s just, there’s the social pressure.
If everybody else is doing it, you’re gonna do it too.
Arielle Greenleaf: and sometimes that causes a problem because sometimes I had this client, it was just a horrific situation where they were napping her at daycare. She would then not fall asleep till 10, 10 30 at night. She was a complete mess. And they requested that they not nap her. And they were like no, we can’t not nap her. So we got the pediatrician involved. The pediatrician was like, this is not healthy for the child. And they’re still like, oh, well we believe that children this age need a nap. It’s daycare is great. We’ve talked about this before. My daughter was in daycare from four and a half months on, it’s hard.
But it’s. Very tricky for [00:23:00] some children when it comes to sleep because either they’re napping when they shouldn’t, or they’re like dropping a nap when they shouldn’t, or I, but I do agree there is like a pressure ’cause everybody else is sleeping. They make the room dark, especially on one nap.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, nothing exciting is going on.
Arielle Greenleaf: time, nothing’s going on. Plus they get a lot of stimulation at daycare. That’s one
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah.
Arielle Greenleaf: you may consider Morgan, and a lot of parents don’t realize this. Children get a ton of stimulation at daycare, physical and cognitive. And sometimes on the weekends we’re tired as parents.
They’re not running around for four hours before they try to nap. Consider something like that, see if that might help. In some cases it does get
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah.
Arielle Greenleaf: Fresh air is always good
Craig Canapari MD: You can put your kid in like a gymnastics class or something, but
Arielle Greenleaf: swimming
Craig Canapari MD: that being said, it is hard to mimic the degree of stimulation you’re gonna get in school. It’s just dealing with all the kids and stuff like that. Yeah, it’ll get better about six [00:24:00] months. Okay. Bedtime timing and adjustments.
As kids grow, how do you know when it’s time to shift to a later bedtime? My toddler’s bedtime is still early, but I’ve heard bedtime before. 9:00 PM is ideal. What does the research say? So, I guess let’s start let’s start. How do you know when it’s time to shift to a later bedtime? It’s usually when your child can’t fall asleep at their previous bedtime.
And I’d say consistently, anybody’s associated, anybody’s entitled to a bad night or sleep once in a while. But if your bedtime was seven 30 and all of a sudden consistently, you can, it’s creeping a little bit later. Creeping a little bit later, you hear your child babbling, talking themselves, playing in their room till late 30.
Maybe you want to move the start of the bedtime routine a little bit later.
Arielle Greenleaf: I don’t like. I have no problem with babbling and playing and falling asleep for an
Craig Canapari MD: Oh I,
Arielle Greenleaf: If a child is like screaming, crying, or just completely [00:25:00] fighting bedtime for a long time, then I would say you probably wanna look at that. You may also wanna look at the daytime sleep again, like, look at that 24 hour sleep.
Determine maybe we can shave a little time off down here and push bedtime out a little later, because children can stay awake longer as they get older.
Craig Canapari MD: yeah. No, absolutely. And I would say that I like kids to fall asleep within 30 minutes of lights out. Even if they’re playing, talking, et cetera, maybe they’re talking or whatever, but I feel like that can become a problem pretty soon if they’re in there for an hour before they fall asleep.
Bedtime before 9:00 PM There’s certainly, there’s nothing magic about 9:00 PM per se. There was a study out of Scotland about 10 years ago that said if kids going to bed before 9:00 PM actually had better kindergarten preparedness, but that the kids who went to bed later, we’re talking about toddlers here.
9:00 PM is quite a late bedtime for a toddler or a preschooler. [00:26:00] I know Ariel, you had sent me this meta-analysis that I’m gonna put in the show notes that showed that earlier bedtimes led to more sleep in kids. This was a study looking at non-medication interventions in healthy children, and they had about 15,000 children in this meta-analysis, which is a combination of multiple studies.
In this particular study, they were showing that it was secondary school. Mostly in the little elementary school, the earlier bedtimes were more effective and not younger kids. In the, in that meta-analysis, I know that you’re a big fan of early bedtimes for infants. There was a study out of Penn State that was looking at infants age six to 24 weeks, and it found that bedtimes early before 9:00 PM were associated with 78 more minutes of sleep.
And the interesting thing I found about the study actually was again, it’s a small study of 24 kids if with each hour earlier of sleep each, sorry, with [00:27:00] each moving a bedtime one hour earlier, the wait time was only 8.4 minutes earlier. So it’s not, this kind of gets into it, it’s not always as linear as you want it to be.
If you have an early morning waking kid, moving the bedtime later doesn’t necessarily help that much.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah. So this is why the, it depends thing is such a huge thing. And again, yes, I feel like I was way more into early bedtimes for everyone in the first part of my career this point. I’ve really dug into this 24 hour sleep. The notion of 24 hour sleep and. It doesn’t lie. Like it it just is what it is.
And so some kids will sleep from six to seven or six to six others, you cannot put them down before eight. Or they’re just a mess. They’re up at [00:28:00] five or four. and you just have to, you have to, it’s so nuanced. so nuanced.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, no, it is. I will say most parents. Again, you’re probably not listening to this if your kid sleep is perfect, right? If your kid is struggling to fall asleep at night after the lights are out and it’s taking a long period of time, sometimes a later bedtime can be helpful, sometimes not. I’d say usually trying shifting things 15 or 30 minutes later and giving it at least three or four days is a reasonable thing to do.
If things are going great, you don’t have to do anything. And most parents, I would say, ’cause my, look, my kids are 17 and 14 now, it wasn’t hard to figure out when they should be going to sleep, like outside of the first year of life, which is challenging. After that, for a long periods of time, we had the same bedtime and then they got older and they got a little bit later and they got older.
Got a little bit later. And it wasn’t hard to figure out. I feel like [00:29:00] if you just pay attention you’re not gonna miss something and your kid’s not all, your three year old’s not all of a sudden gonna start staying up till 10 o’clock at night unless you change something that you’re doing.
Arielle Greenleaf: Or if they’re ready to drop their nap, especially
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah.
Arielle Greenleaf: age, that’s when I start to see that.
Craig Canapari MD: I mean, I see a lot of families where we really are working a lot on sleep hygiene, getting devices outta the bedrooms, et cetera. That isn’t the case. Some parents really need to just go through the basics of don’t let your kid watch TV to fall asleep. Don’t,
Arielle Greenleaf: No iPads before bed.
Craig Canapari MD: Exactly.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah
Craig Canapari MD: let’s talk about night waking and feeding. We had two questions about this, which are pretty similar. What’s the best way to wean a night? What night? We need a toddler who still wakes at night for a bottle. I. This is from someone who’s ready to make a change, but not sure where to start.
And here’s a more specific one from Pat. My 18 month old goes down, drowsy around 7:15 PM It wakes up around three or four in the morning and won’t settle without [00:30:00] milk. Any tips? I dunno. How do you like to address this?
Arielle Greenleaf: think that, I think we’ve definitely talked about this in past episodes. The way to change it is to stop doing it the, it’s up to you to decide what, which method you want to use with that, because there has to be some sort of behavioral intervention there where either you’re doing a camping out method or you’re doing a check and console method, or you’re sitting with them and comforting them, but not giving them a bottle.
There is no way to stop it without stopping it, and it’s not gonna be easy if a child is dependent on it, that’s the way I look at it. I don’t know.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, I think that if it’s one bottle, it’s simpler than if it’s two or three. Certainly. There’s not a lot of science around this, to be honest. Your child likely is hungry if every night for their entire life they’ve been drinking a bottle of milk or formula,
Arielle Greenleaf: with that.
Craig Canapari MD: I don’t know. I mean, it’s a, it’s a, it’s,
Arielle Greenleaf: and they’re normally developing and their weight is okay, I [00:31:00] don’t know. I don’t think they need they
Craig Canapari MD: I don’t think, I don’t think they need it either, but it’s like 24 hours sleep, you’re getting a certain number of calories 24 hours a day. If you’re taking into some, look, two or three ounces of milk is not a lot of calories, right? If it’s an eight ounce bottle, it is a lot of calories. So I’d say if it’s two or three ounces, I just swap it for water and, go for it and recognize there’s gonna be some fussing.
For a couple of days. I don’t think it’ll be indefinitely if your child is taking a significant, a large bottle, six to eight ounces, maybe you wean it down a little bit. Ferber talks about diluting it. Honestly, it’s just I’ve come around and maybe just going cold Turkey on this sort of thing and just
Arielle Greenleaf: totally agree.
Craig Canapari MD: rip off the bandaid.
Just stop it, offer them water. In a week, you’ll be done.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah. I think that, the slow weaning, it sounds like, it sounds gentler, but you’re going to be removing it regardless. And so it’s almost like you’re prolonging. That change because they’re like, wait a [00:32:00] minute, you’re giving me less and less and less if you just take it away. In so many cases, I have parents that stop it and they’re so scared about it and the child just gets through it in a night or two.
It’s like way less for them than it is for the parent. There’s so much anxiety around it. Always talk to your pediatrician. If your child has weight gain issues or any other health issue, perhaps they might need a bottle. In a normally developing toddler who’s, toddlers don’t eat great anyway.
I think Dr. Porto
Craig Canapari MD: No.
Arielle Greenleaf: that,
Craig Canapari MD: they don’t.
Arielle Greenleaf: Always, if you’re worried about it, talk to your pediatrician. If they say there’s no concern, then you’re just gonna have to get rid of the bottle in some way, shape, or form. And that’s really up to you which method you want to use.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah. If your child’s growing normally have at it you probably know if your child has growth problems. And that’s a different ball game. So let’s go, we have a bunch of questions about night wakings and or regressions. Here, do you want to, do you wanna read [00:33:00] one?
Arielle Greenleaf: Sure. Let me get in here. Night, wakings and regressions. Okay. from Tired Mom, Becky, 4-year-old used to sleep through the night, but for the last seven months she’s been waking two to six times a night. She falls asleep on her own and we’ve tried everything. Rewards Bedtime Pass, even went to a sleep clinic, nothing’s helped.
We’re totally stuck.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, I’m this is a scenario where, I am maybe looking a little bit for a medical issue, and I don’t mean a terrible medical issue, but if she snores, could she have sleep apnea? Could she have IC limb movements of sleep, which are associated with Russell’s leg syndrome? If she’s moving a lot during the night or complaining that her legs are bothering her is her sleep opportunity too long?
This is another one. If she’s, if this kid has a 12 hour sleep opportunity and she’s, if you plot this out, she’s sleeping for 10 hours, I might shorten her time in bed. But for kids for [00:34:00] kids like this where parents are doing everything right, she’s falling asleep independently, it sounds like they’ve got a good bedtime routine.
They’re still waking up a lot. The sleep duration is age appropriate. I can see if you’ve been to a sleep clinic, you can consider a sleep test and maybe shortening the time in bed. I don’t know what you would add to this.
Arielle Greenleaf: I mean, always medical would be my first question for this sort of situation. I would also wanna know if they’re napping. If they’re napping, then obvi. I would assume a sleep clinic would be looking at that, but can’t really make assumptions about anything. If they’re napping, then I would probably be recommending we drop that nap or at least cap it to a very short amount of time to see if that made a difference.
I also wonder what’s being done when she wakes at that time. Is mom or dad sleeping with her? Or offering something is it a power struggle?
That.
Craig Canapari MD: is she waking up? Wake up one, wake up, two, wake up three till you take her back to your [00:35:00] bed. That’s probably has a behavioral layer to it, but,
Arielle Greenleaf: the other thing I think about Craig is, I just used this recently, thanks to you. You know, if there’s a sleep anxiety going on there, I just used Huggy Puppy with somebody and it worked literally in one night. We were having the very similar problem, child is. Just under three.
And we used Huggy Puppy. It turned into Huggy Bunny ’cause they didn’t have a puppy on hand and it’s, it worked amazingly well. He, the child was struggling, dad was, dad’s a surgeon and he was working late nights. He was missing dad. And bedtime was taking forever. He’d wake multiple times and or wake at like three in the morning and be awake till six. we had tried everything. We had dropped the nap, which made a good a difference initially. But then this came back up. We gave him Huggy Puppy and it was incredible how quickly it worked.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, huggy Puppy just briefly is an intervention that was actually created in an Israeli sleep doctor named Abby Ade [00:36:00] for refugee children who had a lot of, and experienced a lot of trauma. And you give a child a stuffed animal and you give them a script that they have to this baby this stuffed animal is very scared and you need to comfort them at night.
And it just kind of works. I’ll put a link into the show notes on how to do it. But yeah, if there’s a lot of fear, that’s a great suggestion.
Arielle Greenleaf: You might also consider the bedtime pass. That’s
Craig Canapari MD: Looks like they did it.
Arielle Greenleaf: Oh, did they? Oh boy.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, that’s why I feel like there’s like,
Arielle Greenleaf: yeah. Bedtime pass
Can either they work or they don’t. Like some kids don’t give two hoots about that.
Craig Canapari MD: Rewards are tricky to implement.
Arielle Greenleaf: tricky.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, that’s what I would do. I’d look for the medical stuff. Maybe shorten the time in bed. And if there’s fears, try that. Hug the huggy puppy. So listen, we got another one from Pat here who it’s double dipping here.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah.
Craig Canapari MD: My daughter
Arielle Greenleaf: it? You got it.
Craig Canapari MD: just turned four wakes between four 30 and five in the morning and refuses to stay in the room till her hatch light turns green at six.
It’s waking everyone up, including her baby brother. [00:37:00] We’re trying a reward chart and rereading your book. Oh, thank you, pat. But we’re exhausted help
Arielle Greenleaf: I think it’s similar questions. Is she n is she napping?
Craig Canapari MD: Actually. I,
Arielle Greenleaf: the other thing is there’s a new sibling
Craig Canapari MD: I, I have one actually, I find that the sort of the hatch. There are many products like this, they’re nightlights that change color when it’s time to get up.
Arielle Greenleaf: I,
Craig Canapari MD: And this is based on some work I’m blanking on the name of the guy out in Nebraska, who’s a really smart sleep psychologist. I’m gonna put a, I’ll put his name in the show notes ’cause I’m embarrassed that I can’t remember.
His first name is Brett. I, he invented this thing called the Morning, Brett Kuhn the Morning Light Protocol which is what this is all based on. So I would say that if your child is waking between four 30. Five and you have the hatch light set till six. It’s too long a wait for your child to stay in bed.
And what you need to do is make you need to rig this game. It’s a game, right? [00:38:00] You want the child wins the game by waiting till the light turns green and coming outta the room. You need to rig the game so that your child can win. And a 4-year-old expect them to lay in bed for an hour and a half is not a game they can win.
So I might start staying the hatch light to five 10.
And. Offer a lot of positive attention when she stays for that. And then a week, move it to five 20,
Arielle Greenleaf: Yep.
Craig Canapari MD: and then a week, move it to five 30, and then just go slowly. So the goalposts, she’s building up this muscle of either sleeping a little bit later or just being able to spend some time in the room.
Obviously you don’t wanna, you want to reward your child when they win the game. And reward doesn’t, you’re probably not gonna wanna light off firecrackers or anything like that at five in the morning. Say, oh wow, what a good job you did. I’m so proud of you. Offer some positive attention.
I think that I do think that part of what we’re missing [00:39:00] here too is the schedule. And it might be that this kid is what, why is this child waking up? What is ha like, is she just getting enough sleep? Is she sleeping from seven to five, which is 10 hours of sleep and she needs a later bedtime?
That is one possibility. Another could be is she’s not really ready to wake up, but she might hear you getting up and feeding the baby and then you get up A sound machine might be helpful in that scenario. Like our,
Arielle Greenleaf: a sound machine in the hallway.
Craig Canapari MD: yeah.
Arielle Greenleaf: If it if the child already has one in their room, it can be helpful to have it outside the room as well.
Craig Canapari MD: What are you offering when they do wake up? Are you like, and again, pat, I’m not casting aspersions on your parenting. Are you handing her an iPad when you’re like, just please be quiet for 30 more minutes or something like that. I’m not saying that’s ’cause it’s something that you do, but I had a lot of parents do this and offer this sort of a sort of reinforcement that is very powerful and not really desirable.
Like an i giving your kid an iPad at five in the morning is like [00:40:00] too good. A reinforcement.
Arielle Greenleaf: Here’s some dopamine.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah. Too big a dopamine hit.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah.
Craig Canapari MD: so those are the things I would try early morning. Awakenings yourself.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah,
Craig Canapari MD: Here, do you wanna read the next one?
Arielle Greenleaf: yeah. Alright. Question. My five-year-old daughter falls asleep independently every night and never gets out of bed, but she still wakes frequently, especially after illness calling for me from her room. Sometimes she’ll settle back after a quick check-in, but on rough nights I end up sleeping with her briefly.
Is there a better way to handle this phase? is from, I think it’s Carys.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah, I think that, yeah, lying down with her is a very powerful reinforcement. You mentioned illness, I’m assuming that means just routine upper respiratory infections and not some other more serious illness. I think that the key for these [00:41:00] situations is to offer the minimum you can do without, and get your child to go back to sleep.
And it sounds like sometimes you’ve fallen in the habit of lying down with her, which is it’s tough ’cause that’s a very powerful reinforcement for night wakings.
Arielle Greenleaf: That’s one of the hardest because I think I find that, if they’re sick, you want to comfort and sometimes that means, I just had a parent recently whose had an ear infection. She was like, and she sleep got even worse. Like at three in the morning we were watching pep a pig. So like it was just totally fallen off. can fall into that. If you have one night sleeping with them the next day, they might expect it. It’s just like real quick. For whatever reason, that one is a tough one.
Craig Canapari MD: I mean, bedtime pass might work well here, and I’ll put in a link in the show notes, but it’s like a hall pass for seeing mom or dad during the night. That might be a good one, a good thing to try as well. Sometimes these [00:42:00] are, we call this a phase, right? When your kid starts doing something annoying, let’s highlight the positives.
Your child falls asleep independently, never gets outta bed. These are all good things, right? So I don’t think this is catastrophic here, but it is annoying because the fact is.
Arielle Greenleaf: of Go ahead. Sorry.
Craig Canapari MD: When your child wakes up for five minutes a night, you may be awake for 30 minutes.
That’s what happens when you become a parent.
Arielle Greenleaf: I think it’s tricky because you’re just, it’s night wakings are the hardest ’cause you’re just, your own sleep is so disturbed by it. So I think that’s the hardest place to make a change in your own behavior. Bedtime is easy because, well, easy because it’s, you’re awake. Middle of the night and early wakings are just so tricky because you’re tired and you just want to go back to sleep however you can.
Craig Canapari MD: Here’s another one from a Anjo. I think that, or Anyo.
Arielle Greenleaf: Joe.
Craig Canapari MD: Our granddaughter starts sleeping through the night, 10 months thanks to our podcast.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yay.
Craig Canapari MD: Now, she sleeps from 7:00 PM to 5:00 AM How [00:43:00] can we gently encourage her to sleep a little later in the morning?
Arielle Greenleaf: Oh, well, you’ve listened to us so far it could be a matter of bed timing. You may have to shift things a little bit. You know what can happen sometimes is if a child’s an early riser, 5:00 AM often a caregiver will then put the child down way too early for the first nap, and then that sets the stage for the rest of the day, which ends up. You can’t really push bedtime beyond seven because they’re toast because you’ve started like the naps really early and then, the schedule is all off. So shifting them for shifting that first nap or sticking to the sort of good timing of that first nap, can be really helpful.
It might not be easy in the beginning just because they may be a little tired when they’re going down. So that’s one way I often help people with that sort of thing. The other thing is you just, that’s 10 hours of sleep, they could be [00:44:00] done, or they’re just an early riser, which is a stinky thing for everybody, but.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, we’ve I’m sorry. I’m just looking ahead. There’s something for our next question. Yeah, I think that it’s, it really depends on the kid and looking at 24 hour sleep needs. It sounds like the baby’s in sleeping through the night at 10 months. I don’t know if she’s 10 months old now, or two years old or something like that.
Arielle Greenleaf: I’m not sure either.
Craig Canapari MD: but I think earlier in the podcast we did cover a lot of different things to try here.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah. alright I’ll ask this next one. Sleep and anxiety. Sleep anxiety and bedtime struggles. Okay. Our 7-year-old is very anxious. At night, he asks us to sit outside his door until he falls asleep, which can take over an hour. He also wakes once or twice a week from nightmares and comes to our bed. How can we support his anxious mind while also helping him build more independence? And this is from anonymous.
Craig Canapari MD: So this is something we talked about [00:45:00] in an earlier episode with Dr. Danielle Garay. I’m gonna link to that in the show notes, but, anxiety is common and separation anxiety specifically, which is what’s going on here. This is a 7-year-old, and I would say that first of all, if there is any history of trauma in your child’s life, if they’ve experienced anything scary, and sometimes trauma can be something that’s obvious we were in a horrible car accident, or it could be something that was very scary to the child.
That’s something you wanna work with a therapist on. If this is just really around bedtime, there’s no trauma history, there’s definitely some stuff that you can try. And I also will share a post about accommodations. There’s actually a wonderful book called Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD, which I recommend all the time by Eli Lebowitz, who is a child study center at Yale, who talks a lot about this.
But es essentially, accommodations are things that we do to help smooth our child’s way through [00:46:00] life, right? So imagine you have a child and you make them lunch every day to go to school, right? That’s an accommodation ’cause they need something to eat. Now imagine that your child insists that they have to have the bread cut off in a certain way and cut diagonally and the peanut butter on top and the jelly on the bottom, or they won’t do it.
If you give into this every time, that’s an inappropriate accommodation because it’s just sort of unreasonable. And I’d say your child expecting you to wait 10 hours, or sorry, not 10 hours, your child expecting you to wait an hour outside of the room is really kind of unreasonable, right? It’s not practical for you, but you fall into this pattern.
So I think that this is a classic accommodation. And really what you need to do is start changing your own behavior. And this is what Dr. Lebow, which talks about in his book is parent management training. You cannot change how your child feels. You can [00:47:00] change how you you respond to it and you can say, you know what, I can’t really stay outside of your room anymore. I have some other things that I need to do. I will check on you periodically and you are safe. But we can’t do this any, we can’t really do this anymore. And you might wanna plan doing some rehearsal with this. Say we’re gonna do a pretend bedtime and we’re gonna have you be in your room without me outside of it.
And you’re gonna pretend to go to sleep for five minutes and even offer a reward. Because if you’re, let’s say, is this just at night or can your child not be alone in their bedroom? If they can’t be alone in their bedroom at all then you might need to work on that skill before you work on the skill of falling asleep, not being in the bedroom.
Arielle Greenleaf: I think it’s also important to note that the child is going to their bed least once or twice a week. a really important piece of this.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, and the nightmares as well. I mean, nightmares [00:48:00] are, is your child truly having a horrible dream or are they just anxious? It can be hard to differentiate.
Arielle Greenleaf: I do think, Craig, that episode in particular I refer to all the time and especially that discussion around accommodations. I think it’s hard for us to realize, step back and see what our behaviors are. Instead, we’re focused on the child’s behavior and how they’re acting versus what am I doing to. Change that because the only way you’re going to change things is, I think Dr. Garay says this, the only way you’re gonna change that is to stop your behavior. That is per, perpetuating that particular situation. And that’s not to place blame on parents.
Craig Canapari MD: No,
Arielle Greenleaf: all do that. all do this.
Craig Canapari MD: You,
Arielle Greenleaf: We all make accommodations for our children.
Craig Canapari MD: It’s I have a long post about this. I’ll write, but I think that really [00:49:00] you need to start changing your own behavior. The fact is, nothing bad is gonna happen to your child if you’re not out there. They may cry and they may come outta the room and be like, well, you know, it’s bedtime and I can’t I’m not doing this anymore.
I will check on you and, just, it’s it may escalate a little bit. It, I would say. If this is not just the bedtime and it’s happening during the day as well, I might see if you could work with a behaviorist, like a psychologist or a counselor if this is permeating daytime as well.
If it’s just around bedtime, this may be something that you can manage on your own.
Arielle Greenleaf: All right.
Craig Canapari MD: so here’s another one. This is a classic, what we call sleep Onset Association from Charlotte. We built a great bedtime routine for our 2-year-old, and she sleeps in her room on a floor bed, her own room, but she insists on falling asleep while touching us and wakes up at least twice a night.
We’ve been trying the progressive breaks method, but it’s escalating her distress. Full Mel meltdowns, do we stick with it or is it the wrong fit for her?
Do [00:50:00] you wanna explain a sleep onset association? I kind of like.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah, sure. Sleep Onset Association is, essentially something you have to have in order to fall asleep. Some people that might be turning the TV on, for other children, for a child it could be nursing to sleep or taking a bottle to fall asleep and not being able to fall asleep and less doing that. Oftentimes, children need to be walked to sleep or they’ll only take a nap in the car. They need to have that movement. So in this case, it sounds as though Charlotte, oh no. Charlotte is the mom. The 2-year-old is requiring touching in order to fall asleep. And essentially what happens is if they require this at the start of the night then they wake overnight, they don’t yet have the skill to not fall back asleep without that. So then they require it again and it becomes this, that’s essentially
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah.
Arielle Greenleaf: the whole thing of teaching independent sleep. It sounds like things are going, they’re pretty close to good sleep, but this is the last piece of [00:51:00] it, that independent sleep piece. This one is tricky because I feel like it really depends on the child’s temperament.
In some cases, the progressive checks, like I find that children need quicker check-ins ’cause they escalate too quickly. Other children need check-ins that are much farther apart, because they don’t even get the time to just like breathe and take care of themselves. But I think at two, you could easily do something where you come in and you say, okay, I’m going to sit here for three minutes.
And you set a visual timer or a timer or something and leave some. That’s one idea, but it’s not gonna work for all children. ’cause all children, they still may fall asleep. Yeah. thing is camping out. Camping out might be the best, the better method here, but saying, I will sit with you, but I’m not, you cannot touch me and I will not be touching you.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, and if you’re touching me, [00:52:00] I have to leave the.
Arielle Greenleaf: I have to leave, right?
Craig Canapari MD: Like prog. I would say that progressive breaks or progressive breaks is is what it is let’s say it lights out is at eight and your child falls asleep at eight 30 and you typically lay down with them to fall asleep. Then at eight 15 you leave for one minute and you come back and then the next night you leave for two minutes and come back, et cetera.
The challenge with this is ideally when you are coming, your break is short enough that you can come back in the room without your child freaking out.
Arielle Greenleaf: Mm-hmm.
Craig Canapari MD: If they’re if you are leaving the room and that is triggering, a of a total freakout, either the break is too long or it’s not the right fit for them, right?
And usually that’s a three and up kind of intervention, but every kid is different. I know this kid could be two years and 11 months old.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah.
Craig Canapari MD: It could be. 23 months. It’s hard to say, but I would say for this particular technique it’s [00:53:00] probably, it’s probably not the right fit.
I’d say if you tried this for a day or two, I might give it a week. But if you’ve been crying for weeks and they’re still, she’s still crying and crying it’s too long. You,
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah.
Craig Canapari MD: this, progressive breaks really should be, you leave the room, you come back, they’re still calm in, they’re bed.
Arielle Greenleaf: I’d say in the beginnings they can be pretty upset, but there are children who are like extremely distressed by that. And it almost gets them, like, works them into a lather that they cannot soothe themselves no matter what. So that’s why it’s a temperamental thing, but I think in this case, a camping out method with clear boundaries around it, where I’m not gonna sit with you all night and you can’t touch me, and if you do touch me, I’m leaving. Maybe it’s a timer of I’m staying until X or I’ll stay until you fall asleep. But if I, if you wake up in the night, I’m only staying here for three minutes. Something like that.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah.
Arielle Greenleaf: That might be a better fit for this child.
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah, it’s tough. I’d say on the flip side is she’s got a great red time routine. She’s waking up twice a night and I don’t know, at least twice a night. [00:54:00] Yeah. I think at some point you’re just gonna have to break the sleep onset association. I’ve heard this a lot. Parent kids wanna play with her kids.
Sorry.
Arielle Greenleaf: hair.
Craig Canapari MD: play with their parents’ hair? Yeah. It’s like a sensory thing.
Arielle Greenleaf: All right. This last question I found very interesting. This was sent to me on Instagram and I feel like this is a good one for you I could answer it too. I was only seven in 1988 though,
Craig Canapari MD: I was in high school.
Arielle Greenleaf: oh, there we go. Okay, so the, this question is about cultural shift and sleep philosophy.
So I was born in 1988 and my mom, friends and I were talking, why does it feel like our parents had such an easier time with baby sleep? No white noise, no wake windows, no elaborate routines. They just said they say, we just slept. Are they misremembering or has parenting really changed that much?
Craig Canapari MD: Wow. There’s a lot. I think there’s a couple of factors here. First of all, [00:55:00] the further back you go, the more likely it was to have one parent at home full time. Usually the mom, not necessarily, but typically, and that doesn’t make, that doesn’t make things easier in this domain. I also feel like there was not nearly, as, my parents were just not that precious about.
Any of this stuff. Like you expected to go to bed and wake up, wake up in the morning and not bug them. And one thing that I think was very clear, ’cause I was born in the seventies, my parents, I love my parents, they’re great, but like my parents were not my friends. And they, I would say that they were softies by the standards of their time, but still that was like compared to parents today.
It was a different time. Like they they certainly did not fret that look. Let me give an example. When I was studying for my sleep medicine boards, I was reading about restless leg syndrome, which is a condition where your legs feel like they need to move at night. And they [00:56:00] said, oh, children with this often say that they kids feel, say they have too much energy in their legs.
And I realized that’s what I would say to my parents, and I’d I still get it once in a while. So I had a little bit of restless leg syndrome, and my parents did not worry about this at all. They’re like, okay, whatever. Go back to sleep. And even by bad insomnia, they’d sh I’d show up downstairs and they’d be like, okay, you wanna watch some tv?
Or they’d be like, okay, go to bed now. And they didn’t, I didn’t feel like their sense of self was particularly tied up in what I did.
Arielle Greenleaf: Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Craig Canapari MD: I don’t know. I do,
Arielle Greenleaf: Well,
Craig Canapari MD: yeah.
Arielle Greenleaf: have something to say because was born in 1981 and I didn’t sleep through the night until I was four, and my parents were. Beside themselves exhausted. But they didn’t, there was no talk about any of this, so
Craig Canapari MD: Sure
Arielle Greenleaf: know that. And the doctor was like, oh, she’s just a kid. She’ll grow out of it, blah, blah, blah. And so my mom thinks it’s ironic that I am so focused on [00:57:00] sleep. She’s like, I could have used you million years ago when you were a baby. I think there’s too much
Craig Canapari MD: you, you gonna travel back in and put Arielle baby Arielle back to sleep,
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah. Right.
Craig Canapari MD: end up a sleep consultant.
Arielle Greenleaf: They also would’ve diagnosed me with some sort of GI issue back then. I’m not waiting until I was like 10 to do that. ’cause clearly my stomach was upset. But, we didn’t have, we didn’t, again, we weren’t focused. They, people weren’t focused on that side of sort of stuff.
I do think, you’re right, absolutely right about parenting and schedules parents at a parent at home, or a caregiver at home, always. But also I find I’ve talked about this before. I hate monitors. I think monitors are like the worst. sound monitor. Okay. Get it. Usually parents can hear their child if they’re really distressed from whatever. Part of their room, they’re, or, whatever part of the house they’re in. video monitors are [00:58:00] a little much, and parents focus on a child just even moving around in their sleep and they think that their child is not getting good restorative sleep and forget it when it comes to these smart monitors that give you all sorts of information that honestly to me just caused more anxiety. So I feel like, don’t think it’s necessarily that children slept better. I think it was less access to information and a different community, a different society the way we, were raising children back
Craig Canapari MD: I, I will say for older kids, and this is fairly clear, that older kids are sleeping less than they were 20 or 30 years ago, and this is likely due to electronics and technology. For younger kids, I don’t think it’s particularly different, but I do think, yeah. Culturally it is just, it is different. I think the the, I think some of it comes down to social media and parents feeling like if things are not perfect the [00:59:00] often it’s easy to make fun of social media, right?
But so often what we’re presented by where it used to be more our friends in the Facebook era, like what our friends would present, and now it’s more like these very sanitized images that we have of family life from, like influencers and stuff like that where everything is perfect. And I think that it’s this comparison that parents often feel that everybody else is doing it so much better than they are.
And of course, there’s always been the phenomenon of keeping up with the Joneses or, that guy’s got a nicer lawn than me or what have you. But it’s so accelerated now. I would say that, I don’t think as parents were any better or worse than our parents were. The culture was certainly different.
And that’s okay, right? My, my kids are very different than I was at their age. And
Arielle Greenleaf: we are different than our parents
Craig Canapari MD: yeah. And it, and I think, believe me, when you are a grandparent, you’re gonna be like, oh, that was [01:00:00] so easy.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah,
Craig Canapari MD: Why are you having such a hard time? When in reality that they probably struggled and stressed about it too.
But you tend to only remember the good times,
Arielle Greenleaf: Absolutely.
Craig Canapari MD: passage of time.
Arielle Greenleaf: That’s why parents have second, third, fourth children they forget about the newborn
Craig Canapari MD: Yeah. An oxytocin surge that makes you forget all the annoying stuff. Otherwise, everybody would just have one baby and they
Arielle Greenleaf: Right.
Craig Canapari MD: even rates would die out.
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah,
Great.
Craig Canapari MD: but yeah, I think you’re doing great. Don’t listen to all the all the all the boomers,
Arielle Greenleaf: Yeah.
Craig Canapari MD: have their own set of issues. So okay.
That’s all the questions we have. Thanks for listening, guys. You can find me at Dr. Craig Canapari com and at Dr Canapari on social media. Arielle, I know has some new handles.
Arielle Greenleaf: I do. I have my new website is at is expect to sleep.com and that’s with two t’s in the middle and my new handle is expect to sleep again on Instagram.
Craig Canapari MD: [01:01:00] Okay, thanks for listening. And please share with your friends. It does make a big difference. Bye-bye.
Arielle Greenleaf: Bye. Thanks. Bye.
Craig Canapari MD: Thanks so much for listening to the Sleep edit. You can find transcripts at the web address Sleeped show. You can also find video of the episodes at that address as well as in my YouTube channel. You can find me at Dr. Craig canna perry.com and on all social media at D-R-C-A-N-A-P-A-R-I. You can find Ariel at Instagram at Ariel Greenleaf.
That’s A-R-I-E-L-L-E-G-R-E-E. N-L-E-A-F. If you like the flavor of the advice here, please check out my book. It’s Never Too Late to Sleep. Train the low stress way to high quality sleep for babies, kids, and parents. It’s available wherever fine books are sold. [01:02:00] If you found this useful, please subscribe at Spotify or Apple Podcast and share it with your friends.
It really helps as we’re trying to get the show off the ground. Thanks.
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