When they were actively self-settling or able to fall asleep once in a while without help, those skills are still there. It’s just that those skills are still only doable when there are minimal interruptions.
Or perhaps consider learning to drive. At first it’s stop and go, but with practice (with a supportive individual who helps you feel safe and secure thereby reducing your own anxiety), you get better. However, being able to drive on quiet streets at a slow speed is one thing. Moving to a busy road is another and often results in greater anxiety and some mistakes that weren’t present on the slower roads. Again, with highway driving we see the need for assistance and support again as the skill of driving is tested and our skill level increases again. But even then, some of us veteran drivers find ourselves in situations that make us fearful and anxious on the road (Autobahn anyone?) and we’ll require periods of support and assistance to help us through them.
For our children, these leaps represent very difficult situations and their limited skills (especially with respect to sleep) make it that much harder for them to utilise any skill they’ve learned. They are being taxed beyond what they are capable of coping with themselves. This isn’t too surprising given how long it takes for physiological and neurological development to take place. For example, the prefrontal cortex is still considered immature at age 5 (and isn’t fully mature until our mid-20s), which means the ability to control oneself is hugely limiting. Emotion regulation (colloquially referred to as “self-soothing”) is known to take years to develop and is reliant upon co-regulation in the early years before active emotion regulation takes place. In short: These leaps and difficulties make it impossible for our children to utilise the limited skills they have developed. Much like too much distress makes it impossible to use our emotion regulation skills.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
The main action you can do is to be there to support your child. My main goal here is to get parents to think differently about these periods of regressions because our fear of lost skills often leads to the idea that we need to somehow retrain our kids when in fact they simply need more assistance to learn how to cope with these more difficult situations. And yes, assistance is exactly the right word because our children need – above all else – to feel safe and secure and that comes from knowing we are there for them during turbulent and difficult times.
Please know that these leaps will end and our kids will return to being able to use their limited skills (and may even have developed some new ones in the process). You don’t need to retrain them and in fact that won’t do much for them in these moments. If we return to the driving analogy, when we struggle in an intense situation without any help or reassurances from those around us, we often end up out of the car insisting we will never do that again. That’s not how we want our kids to think of sleep. We want them to come out of these leaps with the knowledge that they have support because this support is what allows them to flourish.
Originally published on Evolutionary Parenting.
Tracy Cassels, PhD is the Director of Evolutionary Parenting, a science-based, attachment-oriented resource for families on a variety of parenting issues. In addition to her online resources, she offers one-on-one support to families around the world and is regularly asked to speak on a variety of issues from sleep to tantrums at conferences and in the media. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada with her husband and two children.
