If you have not already done so, please read Blog Posts 1 through 5 that describe how sleep is important and beneficial. I will post specific information for parents and children based on my book, “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child.” Please do not be put off by my book’s length. This is a reference book. Read only the topic of interest to you.
Marital satisfaction and co-parenting quality are closely linked. Parents who report higher satisfaction in their relationship tend to work together more cooperatively as parents — and that cooperation turns out to matter a great deal for children’s sleep.
Co-parenting refers to the way parents function as a team in raising their child. Within the natural differences that exist between any two parents in temperament, background, and parenting philosophy, the quality of that teamwork has measurable effects on whether a sleep plan succeeds or fails.
A study of infants during the first year asked parents about their beliefs regarding night wakings — specifically whether they endorsed statements like “My child will feel abandoned if I don’t respond immediately.” The findings were telling. When a mother strongly believed in responding immediately to every night waking and the father did not share that belief, cooperative co-parenting quality was lower. And when both parents strongly endorsed immediate responses to night wakings, the negative features of co-parenting quality were higher.
The implication is direct: for extinction to work, co-parenting quality needs to be high. A plan that one parent believes in and the other quietly undermines — or that collapses the moment one parent can no longer tolerate the crying — is not a plan. It is an experiment in intermittent reinforcement, which makes night waking harder to resolve, not easier. High co-parenting quality requires that both parents are genuinely aligned, not just formally agreed.
High co-parenting quality, in turn, requires a foundation of marital satisfaction. This is not a minor footnote. It is one of the reasons that helping a child sleep is sometimes harder than it looks, and why addressing the relationship between parents is sometimes as important as addressing the child’s bedtime.
The Brief Coparenting Relationship Scale gives a sense of what researchers measure when they assess co-parenting quality. Parents rate the following statements from 0 (not true of us) to 6 (very true of us):
Two items are reverse-scored, meaning higher agreement indicates lower co-parenting quality:
Higher total scores reflect higher co-parenting quality. Parents who score well on these measures tend to present a unified front at bedtime, stay consistent across nights, and support rather than undercut each other when the plan becomes difficult. That consistency is what allows a child to learn to sleep.
— Marc Weissbluth, M.D.
