07: What Matters Most to a Toddler
In This Episode:
Get ready to dive into a day in the life of a toddler to learn what they are seeking. In this episode, Jessica speaks directly to exhausted parents craving comfort at the end of the day. She gently reminds parents that: boundaries are healthy, patterns are good, and toddlers are searching for both of these all day long. She even gives her best advice as to how to figure out your own pattern/boundaries/ rhythm that you want for your day to create less anxiety for you and your child.
The Big Idea
Children seek out rhythms and boundaries in their day and when they see that pattern and repeat it enough times, they will stop questioning or testing it.
Questions I Answer
Is it possible to set a routine for my young child?
When should a bedtime routine be created for my baby?
How do I set boundaries around sleep for my toddler?
My child isn’t respecting the boundaries I set, what do I do?
Help, my child is so clingy, what is wrong?
Actions to Take
I would love to know how you're looking about your day differently after listening to this episode - feel free to send me an email or DM me on Instagram @SleepHappy and let me know!
If you enjoyed what you heard today, please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I'd love to hear what your thoughts were as I finish out recording for the season. And I wanna make this podcast yours and answer your questions. And those reviews help us so much as a new podcast.
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(00:03):
Welcome to the Good Morning podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Bryant. I'm a pediatric sleep strategist and founder of Sleep Happy Consulting. Many parents today are spinning their wheels, living from sun up to sundown in a cycle of overwhelm, frustration, and some serious exhaustion. I'm here to tell you there is another way. Let's follow that frustration together. Find out what's not working so you can decide to change course confidently and move towards a better tomorrow. A better tomorrow starts with a good morning. Having good mornings is more than sleep. It's about being intentional with how you set your child up for success in the world, how you show your child to care for their mind, their bodies, and others so they can reach their full potential. And you, you are the best person for the job. So let's decide to have a good morning.
(01:15):
Hello friends, and welcome to Good Mornings. I'm your host, Jessica Bryant. This is episode seven, "What Matters Most to a Toddler". Welcome back. I'm excited to dive into the day of a toddler and what they are seeking and what matters to them. And if you are a parent that's just feeling frustrated and depleted, you know, by 11:00 AM if you're feeling confused and you don't know when nap time is, you don't know if it's gonna happen or maybe it's gonna happen, but it's not happening the way that feels good to you. And then on the flip side, bedtime, you've got that, those palpitations in the evening where you're just, you're just not sure how bedtime's gonna go today, is it? Is it, am I gonna hit the window? Is it gonna take 15 minutes or is it gonna take two hours? Or am I gonna be still trying to get my child to bed at 11:00 PM I see you, I see you wanting the rhythm and patterns of your day to feel comfortable to you as a parent.
(02:31):
And I see you craving to know, okay, it's seven o'clock, we're gonna have a comforting closure to our day. We're gonna say goodnight. And then I, as the adult, can switch gears to either my to-do list or my self care list, or my connecting with my partner and all the things that you need to do to be the parent you dreamed of the next day, instead of the palpitations, the frustrations, the irritability as you come to the close of your day because you are not even sure if your day is gonna close or if you are just going to be on the cycle of up all night and there is no end and there is no rest for your own body. So the big promise today is that boundaries are healthy, patterns are good. These things make the world go round. And toddlers are searching for those boundaries all day long.
(03:37):
They're pushing, they're testing, they're looking for that safety net. So today we're gonna talk about putting the effort into figuring out the pattern or the boundaries or the rhythm that you want for your day creates less anxiety for you as the parent and your child. It creates less fussiness, less questioning, fewer tantrums. As one of my friends says, boundaries are your friend, not your foe. So what are holding some parents back from setting boundaries? There's a lots of factors, but I feel like it is the myth that our children are the ones that know how to move through their day and we just need to wait until they start sleeping well. Or we need to wait until they're old enough to use words that as a parent, I'm just a spectator. I'm just here to keep them, you know, from harming themselves all day and running interference and just kind of wait out until this magical phase.
(04:54):
You know that just someday, and I wanna take a step back and I want us to look at your toddler in a different way to maybe see what they're communicating to you, what they're questioning, some of their actions, their fussiness, their tantrums, their breakdowns have to do with, that's how they question. They're wondering what comes next, or they're communicating that they're confused, they're not sure how you're gonna respond, or they're so tired, they don't know what they want, they don't know how to help themselves, and they need you to kind of set that structure. So that's what I'm hoping for today is to, to let you know that by looking at your child from a different perspective and also taking what your heart is telling you is frustrating. What maybe your partner is frustrated about that, listening to that place and sitting with that feeling and thinking what needs to change.
(06:03):
I'll tell you a story about one of my clients named John. He was 14 months old. A mom reached out to me, he was her fourth child and he was 14 months old. Mom was exhausted. She told me that he was not eating solids very well. He was nursing frequently throughout the day and night. There was no predictable routine. We weren't napping, we were co-sleeping at night, but the co-sleeping was starting to break down and parents weren't getting any sleep. You know, 14 month old was not getting any sleep. So we drove into talking about temperament, awake times, rhythms of the day, and set a plan to start building a bedtime pattern, a bedtime routine. And since the co-sleeping was not leading to sleep, both parents were like, we're ready to transition to independent sleeping and build his confidence in falling asleep in his own sleep space and sleeping through the night.
(07:16):
So after 10 days of setting those boundaries and working through how it felt for him to go into his crib independently and calm his body for the very first time in 14 months, once we started, he saw that pattern repeat, and he gained confidence and he got comfortable in that new routine. Remember, it's new. So from a 14 month old's perspective, we've got to repeat it enough times for them to see the pattern. And that's the hardest part. Parents, every child is different and every child tests it. They're going to bump up against that new safety net, that new boundary enough times to make sure that you are staying consistent with it. So mom and dad worked together as a team. Dad took on bed times. We started to see the nighttime sleep cycles connect. He slept longer and longer each night. And after 10 days, mom shared a video with me and she explained that she was actually had an appointment with a doctor because she was afraid that her child was failure to thrive because he wasn't eating solids, he wasn't eating three meals a day with snacks.
(08:46):
She felt like something was going on. And she sent me a video of what it looked like with him asking to nurse every hour during the day. And it was really eye-opening for me because she was sharing another piece. And sometimes, you know, we can never see into someone else's lives and fully understand what they're going through. And she did her best to explain it to me, but it really was powerful to me to understand and to see the difference. And she sent the second video, which was him running and playing and smiling. His eyes looked different, his facial expressions. And the biggest part is once he was sleeping through the night, he was eating everything. He was trying new foods, he was sitting at the table, he was touching the foods, he was feeding himself, and he was eating three meals a day. And when we look back on that, we look at John's pattern of the day and he didn't know what was coming next.
(09:49):
Number one, he was sleep deprived. So he didn't have enough energy to sit at the table and eat solid foods and work through the sensory processing of how does that feel? Do I like that? Ooh, how do I move that around in my mouth and swallow? Do I like that taste? You know, all the taste buds, all the sensations. That was a lot more work for his body and his mind than nursing. So he still needed, of course, the calories and the nursing and all of that, but he was doing that so frequently, every hour during the day and possibly, you know, even every hour at night, that's 24 feedings a day. He didn't have to take that much at a time. So if you use this example to see that he was communicating, he was confused, he was communicating, he was very tired, and he was not able to understand, you know, and have the energy for the meals.
(10:56):
So once we got the sleep in place, then we have, we're interacting more, we're less clingy to mom because we've built that confidence in self regulation, emotional regulation that we need for life. And we see, and he can know, oh, it's bedtime, just like my, my sister and my brother, they go down for bed at night. So, so does John. And you know, everybody's at the table. He was more part of his life. So I want you to think in terms of what does your child's day look like? And number one, what are your frustrations? Jot those down. What are your child's frustrations? Or a better word would be, what are your child's communications? Is there a pattern to when they have a tantrum? Are they always fussy from 10 to 11:00 AM Do they eat a better lunch than they do dinner? You know, write these patterns down and let's, let's flip the question to, uh, what's wrong?
(12:06):
What do you need in this moment? Why are we fussy to, what are you telling me? What are you confused about? What is my child confused about? And if you can't answer that, then the next question would be to dive into, okay, let's, let's look for an example of what a normal, or let's say typical pattern of the day is for my child. So that's definitely something you can DM me and ask me, you know, you can find on my website or you know, on my Instagram page, some resources like that. So feel free to reach out if that's not a resource you have. Easily acceptable. But I like to start with norms. What are the norms for your 18 month old, for your 20 month old, for your 22 month old? Start there. Okay, so if that awake time is four and a half to six hours before nap, what is my child's communication in that first four and a half hours of the day?
(13:18):
Write that down. Another thing to think into consideration is that young children cannot process their entire world at their age. You know, they do not come out of the womb knowing how not to play in the street and how to, where to fall asleep at night. So those are things as parents that we need. If we think in terms of, okay, we've got, you know, a 15 month old and we live in a house, we're just going to let him fall asleep wherever. That's not gonna happen at the same time each day. That's a lot of sensory input. That's the television, that's someone cooking in the kitchen, that's someone watching a TikTok. You know, there's lots of sensory input going on in the whole house when there's multiple people. That's why generally we're putting a child down into a crib. It's a consistent space, it's a confined space.
(14:20):
It makes their world smaller. So there's less options for them to test. And they can find comfort in the fewer options. You know, same thing if your toddler is going down into a bed, their bedroom is a larger crib, there is less input. Versus if the door is open and they're in a bed and they're, Ooh, I hear daddy, um, walking in the back door, I'm gonna go check and see what he is doing. I hear, ooh, I hear, um, newborn baby sister crying. I'm gonna go check on her. She needs my help. Right? So all those stimulations go into their brain and it is overpowering to them. So as a toddler, they need us to simplify their world. And so when you take that into consideration and you compare that tip to your current day and your current frustrations with your day, what things pop up, what reflections do you find?
(15:28):
They're gonna be different for everyone. But I would love to know, I would love to know how you're looking about your day differently. How you're seeing that your toddler is communicating what matters most to them. They are looking and searching. And in a cycle of over testing, for you to put up a boundary, a boundary would be it's time to eat a boundary would be okay. I can tell that you're done eating. You know, another example of how young children feel successful with with a boundary is toddlers at daycare. I have families all the time that tell me, well, my child sleeps two hours at daycare every day. Okay, let's think about that. It's a boundary for sleep in their routine during the day. That happens the exact same way each day. So take those tools and reflect on your own day, write down your frustrations, write down your child's frustrations, write down your partner's frustrations.
(16:39):
Take a look at your day and compare it to a typical child's age. What are the awake windows? How much are children your child's age sleeping through the night? Generally, toddlers can sleep anywhere from 10 to 12 hours on the norm. And you know, whether they're sleeping enough is when they wake up in the morning on their own and they're rested. You can tell that they're rested, their facial features are rested, their energy level was good, and their mood is good. That's not to say that every single child wakes up in the best happiest mood. That's not true because we all have different temperaments. But think in terms of your individual child and how are they their best self? What does that look like? What does your child look like? Rested? And that can determine whether they're sleeping enough at night for them and for their body's needs.
(17:40):
Okay, so we've talked about your frustrations, partner frustrations, where those meltdowns are happening for your child. Are they coming home from daycare and they're so exhausted that they're not eating a meal? Are there meltdowns at four in the afternoon? Or are your mornings starting off really hard and you feel like, Ugh, we started our morning and we're already exhausted and you don't know what to do. Write all those things down because it's gonna be so good for you to step back and reflect on your days in a new manner. And then the second piece is have yourself a pep talk. Okay, how can I help my child and myself have more fulfilling days? What do I need to do? Okay, it might be I need to say no when we test this boundary. Or I may need to give my child extra wind-down time.
(18:46):
You know, where is your child exhausted? Where is your child confused? And where is your child frustrated? And that's what we need to, even just reflecting on that is so valuable. I have families tell me all the time that I never looked at it from that perspective. I just thought my child was telling me that they were mad or I thought that they were telling me they felt abandoned or sad. No, they're testing. They're in a cycle of over testing because they don't know where the pattern is or the boundary for your day. And so they're spending all day in a cycle of questioning and seeking answers. If you take one thing away from today's conversation, I want you to take the knowledge that babies, toddlers, preschoolers seek out rhythms and boundaries in their day. And when they see that pattern, repeat enough times, they will stop questioning it.
(19:54):
They will feel safe and they will feel comfortable, and there will be less fussiness, less anxiety, and less frustrations and less tantrums. So that's what your toddler needs most in their day. And I hope you've enjoyed the show today. Thank you so much for joining us. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please take a moment to leave a review. I'd love to hear what your thoughts were as I finish out recording for the season. And I wanna make this podcast yours and answer your questions. And those reviews help us so much as a new podcast. We're on a mission to lift up more moms and dads and help more families have good mornings. So thank you for being here and have a good morning.
(20:48):
I sure hope you left, feeling encouraged. I loved hanging out with you today, and I am so grateful you were here. If you would like more information about Sleep Happy, be sure to visit our website sleephappyconsulting.com and sign up for our weekly emails. If you liked what you heard today, please share this podcast with your friends or your favorite parenting group. I can't wait to get to know you and learn more about how I can lift you up in the journey of parenting. Fulfilled families are our mission. I'm Jessica Bryant and this is The Good Morning's Podcast.
Jessica Bryant helps parents stop fighting sleep with their young children. She provides strategies to help babies sleep through the night, take naps, and stay healthy.
