Healthy associations - joint sleep with a child

The key to understanding why your child wakes up lies in understanding the concept of associations - the connections your child makes between people, things and events and going to sleep, and also by continuing to sleep. We all have something we love that we associate with sleep: a book, a warm bath, music, and so on. But the difference between adults and babies is that an adult can return to sleep after waking up without that means that was used to fall asleep. When you wake up in the middle of the night, usually you can fall asleep again, simply by changing the position of the body or whipping up your pillow. But if a baby wakes up, he can not go back to sleep without the help that put him to sleep. When a child acquires the maturity of sleep, he is able to fall asleep again, like an adult, without resorting to the help that was used to put him to sleep.

Try to understand what the concept of "association for sleep" implies. If your child is accustomed to being rocked, fed, massaged, lulled, that is, parents are laid to sleep, then when he wakes up he expects the same

warm human touch that helped him fall asleep or needs it. If, on the other hand, you put the child in the crib alone and do not help him fall asleep, he will learn to put himself to sleep in his own ways. Then, when he wakes up at three in the morning, he will be able to fall asleep without your help.

This fact spawned two divergent schools: one school believes that the parents should lull the child;the other preaches that the child should simply be put to sleep. Lulling or simply laying is a fundamental issue for the child's night care. Our approach unites both opinions. We believe that in order for a child to develop a healthy attitude to sleep in infancy, he must first go through the stage of lulling his parents, after which he can smoothly move to the stage of self-packing himself to sleep. If you force a child to calm himself, ahead of time, there is a risk that the child will have a fear of going to sleep and sleep disturbances in the future. This also deprives the child and parents of an important period of joint development, when the child develops trust, and the parents develop sensitivity. Most of the children, who, in infancy, are lulled by sensitive loving parents and who receive gentle support during their return to bed, gradually learn to return to