A Healthy Child Needs a Healthy Brain, A Healthy Brain Needs Healthy Sleep

In addition to two different definitions of ‘sleep consolidation’ (Blog Post 231A), there are two different ways to look at sleep problems in children.

1. One extreme point of view focuses entirely on brain maturation as if parents were bystanders only responding to the child’s drowsy or sleepy signals.This viewpoint occurs mostly among sleep researchers in academic institutions who view children’s sleep through the narrow lens of the scientific medical discipline of neurology.
2. Another extreme point of view focuses entirely on sleep-related parenting behaviors such as choosing nap opportunities and bedtimes and other parental sleep-related behaviors such as putting the child down drowsy but awake (Blog Posts 83, 115X, and 226C), bedtime routines (Blog Post 78), co-sleeping (Blog Posts 178 and 179), parental presence after putting the child to sleep (Blog Post 77), responding to non-distress sounds at night (Blog Post 11), and high intensity soothing in the middle of the night (Blog Post 77).My experience of having practiced general office pediatrics for 40 years and, through consultations, I have helped parents change their sleep-related behaviors with a subsequent complete and rapid improvement in their child’s sleep has led me to focus on parenting behaviors. I think that sleep-related parenting behaviors are the root cause of sleep problems in neurotypical children.