Consistency is the KEY to Success

Does any of this sound familiar to you:

• It is has been a long day and your energy is spent so you decide that tonight instead of trying to allow your child to put themselves to sleep on their own you are just going to go ahead and rock them sleep because sometimes this will work. 
  
• It is 1am and you feel like you just fell asleep so you decide that are just going to quickly rub your child's back because sometimes this will make him fall asleep. 
  
• It is 5am and you just really want to go back to sleep so you go get your awake child and bring them back into your bed because sometimes this will let you get a couple more hours of sleep. 
  

The fact is that sometimes most things will work. Think about the gambling industry. It is multi-million dollar industry because sometimes we win. And think about children who have meltdowns in the candy aisle at the grocery store. This often happens because sometimes after throwing a big enough fit their parent will give in and buy them candy (again).  These intermittently reinforced behavior (behaviors that are sometimes responded to one way and sometimes responded to other ways)  are so powerful because of this randomness. When our children wake up and sometimes we feed them, sometimes we rock them, sometimes we bring them into our bed with then our children do not know what behavior gets what response. This inconsistency ends up creating more tears and more wakening (the behaviors you were hoping to reduce!).

Consistency is one of the most important keys to successfully getting your child to sleep through the night. And consistency means that if you do not want to rock, nurse, walk, bounce, etc your child to sleep every time they wake during the night then you can not walk, rock, bounce, nurse your baby to sleep some of the time. The goal is to pick a reasonable response to your child’s night time waking and stick with it….not just some of the night but all night.  

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