How to handle your child’s sleep when illness strikes
You’ve finally done it! You’ve worked hard and you’ve successfully helped your child become a great sleeper. Great job! Even naps are nicely falling into place. And then…BOOM! Illness hits! Maybe it’s just a cold that has to run its course or maybe it’s a dreaded stomach virus or something tremendously uncomfortable like an ear infection or Hand Foot and Mouth. Whatever illness has struck your child, it can potentially cause their sleep to be disrupted.
Good sleep skills to start with are key
Regardless of what the actual illness is that your child has contracted, if he is able to fall asleep on his own at bedtime and knows how to put himself back to sleep in the middle of the night, you will always be in a better place when your child is sick. If your child needs a sleep crutch or sleep association to fall asleep at bedtime, then he will need more help going back to sleep when something bothers him overnight, such as illness. In many instances, when children have good sleep skills, illness causes far fewer nighttime sleep problems then it would prior to any sleep training. In fact, when I am working with a family and their child becomes sick in the midst of sleep training, they are often surprised by how well their child slept despite the illness.
What to do when your child is sick
Here are some tips for how to make it through the illness and return to your great sleeping habits:
Even when your child is sick, if you are still able to put him down awake at bedtime, you will always be in a better spot in the middle of the night. Being able to fall asleep on his own makes his job of moving through sleep cycles in the middle of the night much easier. It often happens that children will cough in their sleep and not wake up when they have fallen asleep on their own at bedtime.
If your child wakes up in the middle of the night (more then just moaning and fussing and then falling back to sleep relatively quickly) when he is sick, always respond because this is the only way you will know if there is something that needs more intervention. Maybe he has a fever or has thrown up. I always recommend doing a parenting check when children who, otherwise sleep well, suddenly wake in the middle of the night.
If you have to do something to help your child be more comfortable in the middle of the night, such as giving Tylenol, you may have to hold him for 20 minutes or so while it starts to take effect. As your child starts to feel a bit better, try putting him back to bed to go back to sleep on his own. In many cases, when children are good sleepers and are most comfortable in their own bed, they actually want to go back to bed after a wake up due to illness.
If your child is so sick that you feel like you can’t leave him on his own, I always recommend staying in your child’s room with him rather then bringing him to your bed unless you are okay with your child potentially sleeping in your bed for the long term. While putting your child in your bed to sleep may not cause a problem if it happens once or twice, as he gets older, this can become a habit that is harder to break once he is feeling better. I find that this is one of the biggest causes of sleep regressions in toddlers, second only to moving from a crib to a bed when they aren’t entirely ready.
If whatever illness your child has come down with is so miserable that any form of independent sleep throughout the illness is out of the question and you need to provide far more assistance with sleep then you normally would, then you will have a bit of work to dig yourself back out of the “illness hole” that you may have fallen into once your child recovers. I find that the farther you fall, so to speak, the harder it is to get back on track. For example, if your child was previously sleeping entirely independently before the illness and now has become accustomed to being held to sleep at bedtime and needs help going back to sleep overnight, you will have a harder climb to get on track. While you know that all of the things you have done to help your child when he was sick were done for completely legitimate reasons, your child doesn’t understand why you are no longer going to be doing those things. This means things will probably temporarily get worse before they get better. Once you are feeling confident that your child is recovered, you will want to work on getting things back on track as quickly as possible. This may mean you need to return to whatever sleep training methods you used if you previously sleep trained your child. While you will likely be met with some resistance initially, when your child remembers that you will respond consistently, things will start to improve and you will have your champion sleeper back.
If illness has taken your child’s sleep for a wild ride and you need help “righting the ship” or if you need help in general with your child’s sleep, contact me to schedule your free initial consultation.