When Sharing Means No Sleep

Q: Help! We’ve just moved our three-year-old daughter from a crib to a twin bed in her five-year-old sister’s room. However, the transition has not been going well at all. We put them both down at the same time but soon the playing begins. The three-year-old keeps getting out of bed and keeps the five-year-old awake. We’ve tried for a month to get the younger one to sleep, but end up putting her back in the crib about 10 p.m. because neither girl is asleep. Our nine-month-old son needs the crib but we all need sleep, too. What else can we do to help smooth this transition?

A: Ah, the trials and tribulations of room and bed transitions! We went through a similar struggle with our two youngest (boys). The youngest one kept getting out of not only his bed but the entire room as well! As with most transitions, children take time to settle into a new routine. With a little modification, I think your two girls will soon be sleeping much better.

Start by putting the girls to bed separately, with their bedtimes staggered by at least half an hour. This will give the younger one time to settle down on her own before her sister joins her in the room. We’ve found that most of the time, the youngest was asleep when the older one climbed into bed.

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Don’t forget the power of music to sooth them to sleep. We’ve long let our children listen to songs, poems or story CDs when going to sleep. You should make sure it’s not too stimulating, but there are many wonderful CDs for children out there. We’ve especially enjoyed the Rabbit Ears storybook audio series (read by famous actors), as well as various children’s poems. (My mother’s recording of her reading children’s poems on a cassette tape that we had transferred to a CD has been a favorite of all. Something like this makes a great gift, too).

Make sure the girls have plenty of exercise during the day, as activity contributes to good sleep patterns. A quiet bedtime routine that avoids extra stimulation, such as screen time of any kind, will provide signals to their brains that sleep is coming soon.

But if the playing continues despite all of your efforts, just let the girls know that it’s only forbidden if its too noisy. That means no lights on, no bed jumping, no shouting or screaming. If they play quietly for half an hour and fall asleep on the floor, that’s okay.

The most important thing is for you to let your girls figure out on their own how to fall asleep in the same room. Remember, you can’t command a child to go to sleep, but you can provide the tools for her to learn to do it on her own.

Email Sarah if you have a parenting question you would like to see answered on this blog.

Addicted to Teasing

Q: Our 5-year-old son loves to tease his 7-year-old sister—and when I say, love, I mean it’s nearly constant throughout the day. We’ve tried time outs in his room when he teases her but that hasn’t slowed the taunting. Part of the problem is that he can so easily get under her skin with a comment, and I can tell he loves getting a rise out of her! What can we do?

A: Your son has become addicted to teasing. Right now, he receives lots of attention when he teases his sister—both from her and you. And children who get attention for doing something will keep on doing it until you step in with an offer he can’t refuse (a la the Godfather Principle, attributed to John Rosemond).

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The easiest way to address this is to institute the ticket system for teasing. Write down (or use illustrations if he can’t read yet) three target behaviors related to teasing, such as name-calling, put downs, etc. Post that sheet on the fridge along with four tickets (squares of cardboard or construction paper). Each day, he starts out with a clean slate of four tickets—essentially, his margin of error. Every time he teases his sister, he loses a ticket. All you have to do is call the infraction and have him remove the ticket from the fridge.

When he’s used up his “free” quota (i.e., all four tickets), then he’s confined to his room for the rest of the day and goes to bed directly after supper--and make supper early than usual. This system works because you’re not talking about the teasing with either child—you’re only calling the infraction in a calm tone.

It’s likely that he’ll race through his tickets at first because he’s not learned how to control his tongue. But if he’s like my sons, the thought of being indoors during this glorious springtime will drive him to figure out how to stop teasing. As he progressives and starts losing fewer tickets, you should take away a ticket at a time, to tighten up his margin of error gradually. When you get down to one ticket, you can suspend the program, as you can’t expect perfection.

As for his sister, tell her that you are handling it, that she’s not to tattle-tale about the teasing, and that her brother is younger and therefore needs more time to learn self-control. You don’t want her gleeful at his mistakes, so make sure you don’t accidentally appoint her in the role of victim, thereby placing him in the role of villain.

Email Sarah if you have a parenting question you would like to see answered on this blog.

A Big Family Advantage

Having more than two kids these days can raise a lot of eyebrows, as I’ve found out when mentioning our four kids. But what many people fail to realize is the many benefits to siblings are to children. A January 2014 article in the Christian Science Monitor illustrates just one of those advantages.

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“In large families, young kids can’t always get a lot of individual attention from parents, but healthy interactions with an older sibling might help compensate for that,” the article opens. A new study by Canadian researchers found that when older siblings help and interact with younger ones, it benefited both. The study’s authors admitted that more research is needed to determine the full extent of the benefits, but the findings of this limited data intrigued me.

Siblings are more than an annoyance to each other—they are an integral part in how each child develops. For older siblings, schoolwork is reinforced as they assist younger brothers or sisters to learn material they’ve already covered in school. Reading is strengthened as they read books to younger siblings. Leadership skills are developed as they manage the play of multiple children of differing ages.

Having brothers and sisters can be a great advantage to your kids, one that will be more of a positive than a negative. “Siblings really play this very strong role in how kids come out,” said Jennifer Jenkins, the study’s senior author. “I’d like people to think about those sibling relationships a little bit more and then how to strengthen them.”

Until next time,

Sarah

Do Not Disturb the Family Peace

Over the summer, as I was writing in the downstairs office, I heard a ruckus upstairs. Sounds of screaming that didn’t sound quite so happy. With four children between the ages of 4 and 10, one gets used to a certain amount of loudness, but my mother’s radar detected something different in these sounds.

I followed the source to my girls’ room, where the 10-year-old was attempting to drag the 9-year-old out of the room because she “wanted her room to herself.” Never mind that the room was both of theirs, she wanted to be alone. I separated the pair for a cooling off period, thinking that a 10-year-old was a little too young to pull a Greta Garbo.

Sibling conflict can be overwhelming, especially when you have a mix of ages and genders. Most of the time, my children do play well together with a minimum of fuss. But it’s inevitable that conflict will raise its ugly head at times. Through in the holidays, with all the excitement and anticipation, and things can go south in a hurry.

The way you as a parent handle sibling clashes can help—or hinder—how your children interact with each other. Here’s how we handle sibling clashes.

We decided that we would not play referee. It was not our job to intervene when the wailing started out of sight. We would not judge who was right and who was wrong. No assigning roles of victim or villain for us. If we happened to actually see the wrongdoing, that was another thing. But we would not participate after the fact in their disagreements. We would give kisses, but would not encourage tattling.

To enforce this, we created a chart and stuck it to the refrigerator. Titled “Do Not Disturb the Family Peace,” the chart outlined what would earn every child a ticket:

1. Keep it down. (Do not become too boisterous or noisy.)
2. No hurting each other. (Do not hit, punch, push or otherwise maim your siblings.)
3. No tattling. (Do not become a snitch on your siblings.)

Clipped to the fridge beside this chart are three tickets, pieces of laminated paper. For each infraction, the entire group loses one ticket. If all three tickets are lost, the entire group goes directly to their rooms for the rest of the day and directly to bed after supper.

This eliminates the problem of trying to figure out what happened. It doesn’t really matter who was at fault, does it? What this system is doing is putting the resolution of conflict onto the children, where it belongs.

When I hear the kids going at it hammer and tongs, I simply walk up, say they are disturbing the family peace and directed one to get a ticket. No arguing, no drama. Then I leave.

So far, in the months we’ve had this system in place, they have yet to lose all three tickets. And if they do, I’ll enjoy a nice day without kids underfoot, and a more relaxing evening with my husband.

Now, would it be terrible of me to wish they would lose all three tickets one day….?

Until next time,
Sarah

When Siblings Fight

Ever wonder how to handle sibling fights? I explore ways to help parents and brothers and sisters live in more or less in harmony in my article, "Why Can't They Just Get Along?," on Crosswalk.com.

Find out how to stop most conflicts from escalating and how to create an atmosphere of peace instead of discourse in your home.

Until next time,

Sarah