By Mary Sheedy Kurcinka; 331 pages. Subtitle: Tactical Strategies to Help Your Family Get the Sleep It Deserves
If you're up to your ears in behavior books -- weighing different styles of behavior charts and rewards, negotiation and analysis, time-outs and time-ins, positive and negative discipline -- this cozy volume's modest notion that all your child and family needs is adequate sleep may seem impossibly simplistic. So, fine, your situation probably is more complicated than that. Still, you've got to love a parenting book that gives you permission to take a nap.
- Considers a new angle on behavior problems
- Offers specific strategies and charts
- Makes allowances for differences in temperament
- Benefits of additional sleep for parents also discussed
- Writing is upbeat, cheerful and enjoyable
- Might have benefited from consideration of medical problems that cause sleeplessness
- Style may be too chatty and story-heavy for some readers
- Will be at best one piece of the puzzle for kids with behavioral disorders
- Part 1: Seeing the Link Between Misbehavior and Missing Sleep
Chap. 1: Temper Tantrums, Morning Wars, Homework Hassles - Chap. 2: Is Your Child Misbehaving or Missing Sleep?
Chap. 3: Short-Tempered, Feeling Overwhelmed: Are You Missing Sleep? - Part 2: Learning About Sleep From a New Point of View
- Chap. 4: How Do You Get Your Child to Sleep?
Chap. 5: Why Kids Do or Do Not Sleep - Part 3: Exposing the Culprits That Can Keep Your Child Awake
Chap. 6: Tension Triggers
Chap. 7: Easing the Tension - Chap. 8: Time
Chap. 9: A Good Night's Sleep Begins in the Morning
Chap. 10: Temperament - Part 4: Enlisting Effective Strategies for Sound Sleep and Good Behavior
Chap. 11: Ending the Bedtime Battles
- Chap. 12: Customizing the Bedtime Routine to Fit Your Child
Chap. 13: Night Waking, Night Terrors, and Nightmares - Chap. 14: Naps and Siesta Time
Part 5: Preventing Potential Problems
Chap. 15: Infants
- Chap. 16: Taking the Fight Out of the Morning Start
Chap. 17: Travel and Holidays
Chap. 18: Changing Beds
Conclusion
This book caught my eye because its author, Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, wrote one of my early favorite parenting books, Raising Your Spirited Child. I appreciated the insight that book gave me into my son's temperament, and the effective ways to consider it and deal with it. But I didn't really expect that sleep would be as significant a factor in his behavior -- after all, I've spent years convincing everyone who works with him that his diagnosis of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder explains it all. Yet my son knows better than me; when he saw the book sitting on my desk, he pointed to the subtitle of "Is Your Child Misbehaving or Missing Sleep?" and said, "Mom, that's like me!"
So even if your child has a tried-and-true behavioral diagnosis, and plenty of good neurological reason for tantruming and poor transitioning and mood swings, it's probably worth considering the degree to which tiredness and sleep disruption reduce his fragile stores of coping and resilience. And even more worth wondering why, when we modify the environment at school and outings and other times of day, we expect our miswired kids to sleep the way "typical" kids are expected to (but often don't, either). Kurcinka has some good ideas for working with your child's temperament to make bedtime less of a battle, and while she doesn't get into medical complications that can cause sleeplessness, she does offer suggestions for kids who are more intense, more sensory sensitive, more slow-processing, and more high-energy than normal.
She also emphasizes that your child may not be the only one misbehaving because of missed sleep -- parents, too, need adequate rest to provide the patience, tolerance, and creativity their children need to feel safe and secure. My son was kind enough not to point that fact out to me, but I bet he was thinking it.
