DBecoming parents, as we know, often means dealing with the spectrum of sleepless nights: sleeping a whole night becomes a real mirage for many. The consequences? Not so negligible. In fact, not sleeping is not only an effort but can become a problem problem that creeps into everyday lifeimpact on work, alters the balance of a couple and, often, also self-confidence. There’s no point in resigning yourself to tiredness, it’s better instead explore the situation from another point of view. Which? To explain it, in the new book ‘Born to sleep’ (Vallardi) is Chiara Baiguini, gentle sleep educator, certified Life & Family coach and communicator has become a point of reference in Italy on this topic, with a community of over 170 thousand people. «Nights with a small child can make you feel lost, tired, sometimes even wrong. This book was created to tell parents that this is not the case: they are not doing everything wrong, they’re just trying to understand something that no one has ever really explained» explains the author. The premise from which the book starts is simple but often ignored: sleep is not a behavior to be corrected, but a process to be understood.
Children’s sleep: between errors and false myths
The classic move that parents tend to make is precisely that of try to correct the child’s sleepbut ending up committing several missteps.
«The most widespread? Believe that to make the baby sleep it is useful to put him to bed late or make him as tired as possible» explains the expert. «By doing so you risk having exactly the opposite effect. In fact, children sleep better when they go to bed not excessively tired.” The other great false myth is «that related to breastfeeding», underlines Baiguini again. «Many parents turn to me expressing their intention to stop breastfeeding so you can sleep better at night. In reality it is not always a decisive change, on the contrary. In many cases the parent finds himself without what is a very powerful regulation tool for the child».
Sensory profiles
So what to do? The approach suggested by Chiara Baiguini applies the concept of ‘sensory profiles’ in infant sleep. That is, every child is born with a nervous system that processes stimuli – light, sound, contact, movement – in a unique way. This determines not only behavior during the day, but also the how he falls asleep, wakes up and experiences sleep.
“When the kids can’t sleep they aren’t throwing tantrums but they are simply telling us that they have received too much sensory input from the outside or, on the contrary, too little”, he explains. «In fact, some children need a lot of sensory input, they are generally those who move a lot during the day, push or lift objects and so on. Others, however, need to reduce the stimuli they receiveto feel protected in a calmer and quieter environment, perhaps in the dark and with white noise that helps them lower the volume coming from outside.” Know the child’s sensory profile it is therefore the first step in implementing a whole series of habits that can help him enjoy bedtime better.
The cover of the book ‘Born to sleep’ by Chiara Baiguini (Vallardi)
Children’s sleep: what the CARE approach consists of
The approach created by Chiara Baiguini it then invites us to reinterpret sleep as a relational and physiological processin which the child is not a subject to be “trained”, but a person to understand. «The assumption is that sleep is first and foremost a relationship. It is often considered only in reference to the child but in reality sleep is a family issue, a relational dimension”, explains the expert.
The approach is called DEAR, acronym for those that are the four key dimensions.
C for Connection
“The child needs to feel connectedto feel the bond with the parent”, explains Chiara Baiguini. «It is through this bond that he can feel safe and then fall asleep and let yourself drift off to sleep. However, it must be considered that parents often arrive in the evening exhausted, tired, stressed by the weight of the day, reason why Connecting with children isn’t always easy. Here then is the connection is not only with the child but also with ourselves: understanding how we feel and what we need.”
A for Hospitality
The same goes for another fundamental concept of this approach, that of welcome«which on the one hand means support the child when he is tiredwithout preventing him from expressing his emotions and managing to be a safe haven for him, but on the other hand it also means welcome our feeling of fatigue and recognize what is sometimes our emotional storm, the struggle of having to manage a whole series of situations both from an objective and emotional point of view”, explains Baiguini again.
R with adjustment
«Even that of adjustment it is a concept to be understood bilaterally: it means provide our children with support to help their nervous system calm down but also learn to regulate our nervous system. If we don’t let go of the tensions accumulated in our body and remain tense, worried and annoyed, our child will hardly be able to calm down”, the expert invites us to reflect.
And as empowerment
The final ‘E’ of the CARE approach? Well, it refers to a word that may sound curious regarding the topic of sleep but which instead, today more than ever, has a important meaning.
«It’s that of Empowerment», concludes Chiara Baiguini. «We live in a time where parents are bombarded with a series of advice, information and indications which often suggest everything and the opposite of everything. The result? You end up feeling even more confused. I also experienced it as a mother when I realized that I had lost contact with my instincts. Empowerment means to me restore parents’ confidence in their ability to read the signals that the child sends. This is a resource that all parents have but which they often fail to listen to because the background noise is too loud.”
