The Quotable Parent: Fabulous Fraiberg #6: Why Your Toddler Won’t Sleep
June 24, 2010 by Dr. Heather
Filed under Annoying Toddler Behaviors, Sleep, The Quotable Parent
zzzzzz…….Excuse me, I was just dozing off.
I haven’t been able to get much sleep over the past, say, 10 years or so (I keep having babies, what can I say) — and the pursuit of sleep, because of unwilling babies and toddlers, has become an obsession for me. Unfortunately, there’s no holy grail, but at least there’s a good explanation for it. As usual, I turn to the Fabulous Fraiberg for a little support over my sleepless children. I always get goosebumps when I reach the end of this section:
We began with a baby in the first month of life….His world was a chaos of undifferentiated sensation from which he slipped gratefully into the nothingness of sleep…
At 18 months this baby is traveling extensively and has acquired a small but useful vocabulary (just enough to get a meal and bargain with the natives). He has encountered some of the fundamental problems of the human race — the nature of reality, of subjective and objective experience, causality, the vicissitudes of love, and has made promising studies in each of these areas. We could easily forgive him if these first encounters with our world should create a desire to go back to sleep twenty hours a day. But this fellow upsets all notions about human inertia by forging ahead like a locomotive right into the densities of human activity. Sleep?…Let us try to take it away from him and put him back into the darkness. Sleep? But look, he can’t keep his eyes open! He’s drunk with fatigue. He howls with indignation at the extended hands, rouses himself with a mighty exertion from near collapse to protest these villains who take away his bright and beautiful world. From his crib, in the darkened room he denounces these monster parents, then pleads for commutation of sentence in eloquent noises. he fights valiantly, begins to fail — then succumbs to his enemy, Sleep.
Sleep -- at last
From Selma Fraiberg, The Magic Years, pages 63-64
Don’t blame the toddler for resisting sleep. But notice, Fraiberg doesn’t suggest we take him out of the crib and let him keep up his explorations — no, Fraiberg asks us to understand the toddler’s dilemmas, to empathize with him, but to put him to bed nonetheless, when he needs it. A toddler can be “pushed” to go to sleep. A 6-month-old baby shouldn’t (yet). It’s this major disparity in the developmental needs of young children — 3 months, vs. 6 months, vs. 9 months, vs. 12 and 18 and 24 months — that confuses us, as parents. But the more we understand the unique needs of the specific age of our child, the better we will be at negotiating their needs.
And now, off to get a cup of coffee — the baby needs me 
Aloha,
Dr. Heather
The BabyShrink
thanks for this post. My 13 month old son will go to sleep without resistance at night, but the naps are entirely different! I’m never sure if I should leave him in his crib to cry or not. Last weekend he cried for 30 minutes and when I went into his room, he wasn’t even lying down! He was just sitting there at the end of crib crying. Should I just not worry about naps and wait until he passes out?
Hi JD,
Why not try delaying his naps by 15-30 minutes and see if that has any effect? Toddlers vary widely on how much sleep they need in a 24-hour cycle, and I urge you to experiment. One of our kids was the same — lousy napper, great nighttime sleeper. If he doesn’t nap but sleeps well at night, I say you’re doing pretty well. There’s too much fun for a toddler to be asleep when the sun in shining!
Some parents worry about serious damage from too-little sleep, but that’s really only in extreme clinical situations. Sounds like your guy just likes to play in the day, and makes up for it at night. Let us know how it goes!
I will give it a try Dr. Heather. He does generally sleep well at night – thanks for the reassurance! I just can’t express enough how grateful I am for your website and advice!
I’ve been following your site for awhile and referred some parents now that I’m at an elementary school. Great stuff Heather and of course, baby is beautiful!
I’m hear, right now. She doesn’t whine and cry, she just stays up for hours jabbering and making up nonsense stories and singing and playing random jungle music with her crib toys (note to self: remove the batteries). I love this quote. Sums it all up so well.
My 2 year old daughter has NEVER been a good sleeper, even when she was born. I had to finally let her cry and not open her door for 3 nights in a row until she understood that Mommy was not going to let her have her way. It was very difficult for me to listen to her screaming, knowing she was laying by her door with her pillow and blanket. It DID work though, thank goodness!!! She still wakes up crying the odd time during the night but then goes back to sleep, no light on, no t.v. on. I have learned to deal with things differently with my 2nd child (son). He is 6 months old and will sometimes wake up frequently crying. I just go in to his room, rub his belly, turn his music back on, and leave the room. I will give him a bottle once in the night but have started to give less and less in the bottle each night (as guided by his pediatrician). I have had many, MANY nights in the past of little or even NO sleep and I was almost at my wits end! Parenting is definitely the most difficult YET rewarding job you will ever have!!!