Train Your Toddler to Sleep With This Method From Harvey Karp
Dr. Harvey Karp is probably best known as the guy who wants to help you put your baby to bed. The author of The Happiest Baby in the House, Karp gave us Five Ss for soothing — swaddling, lying on the side / stomach, muffling, wiggling and sucking — to help us soothe even the most distressed babies. But Karp, a pediatrician and child development specialist, has a trick to help toddlers fall asleep. Especially when they want someone to lie down with them until they fall asleep.
He tells Scary Mommy that his method, called Twinkle Interruptus, which is a beautiful name, teaches children to be more patient and a little devious. What more could we ask for?
You walk into the room with them, then you leave, then you return, then you leave and return. And within a couple of days, you leave for a minute, two or three, and they fall asleep while they are waiting for you. And that usually solves the problem without crying or fighting.
How it works
1. Little Annie begs you to lie down with her until she falls asleep. And maybe you will, but as soon as she falls asleep and you try to get out of her bed, she wakes up and screams for you to lie back. And it’s going on enough nights in a row that it’s bad for your sanity, and you need Annie to go to bed alone – preferably without you vomiting at her.
2. You do all the “interrupt flicker” on Annie, pretending to suddenly remember something that you need to do very quickly. “Oh wait! I forgot to turn off the bathroom light. Wait here, I’ll be right back! “
3. You leave for a few seconds and come back. (This reinforces the belief that when you say that you will be back soon, you mean it.) When you re-enter, you say, “Good expectation! Good expectation! »And then go back to the song you sang on repeat before leaving the room.
4. After a few minutes, you “remember” something else you need to do, but this time it will take you 15 seconds instead of five (“Good expectation!”).
5. Over the next night or two, you repeat this, but at longer intervals (30 seconds, then a full minute, and so on).
6. They fall asleep while waiting for you.
Karp describes this method in detail on his blog , where he estimates it works with about 75% of children over the age of 18 months (and sometimes children over the age of 12 months).
For children who are more anxious about separation and start crying as soon as you leave the room, he suggests that they return to comfort immediately. For these kids, parents can run Twinkle Interruptus in the room by “looking” for something across the room and working their way up to actually leave the room when they feel comfortable and trust you will return.
“Please don’t find this insidious,” Karp writes . “But everyone is tired and can’t handle the frustration before bed, so now is the best time to be a little harder than going into a battle of will.”