Dear Kerry,
My toddler is having so much trouble going to sleep that sometimes I have to hold her in my lap for hours. My mother-in-law says I should just let her cry it out. My sister says to let her sleep with me in my bed. My mother says I should lay down in my daughter’s room. My husband and I are very, very tired and we don’t know which advice to follow.
What do you suggest?
-Sleepless in Saline

Dear Sleepless,
We can all sympathize — there is nothing like the fatigue of the first few years. It can undermine your spirits and spoil your fun during this amazing time of your child’s growth. So you are asking about two really important things — the going to sleep issue itself and also the question of choosing an approach.

Another reader asked a similar question earlier this year (January 2010), and two weeks ago we talked about a little one who didn’t want it to be night. You might find it useful to access those columns on annarbor.com/parenting and see some of the ideas we discussed then for helping children let go into sleep. That’s often a hard job for them at this age, when they are just learning to be in charge of themselves and aren’t certain what happens to them when they are asleep and so aren’t aware of themselves. Plus they have so much to process from the day that they may not find it easy to let it all go. A nice bedtime routine to cool down and calm down often helps that problem.

You’re getting a lot of conflicting advice, which I think is one of the hardest things about parenting. Everyone sounds so convincing, and they can make you feel as it you don’t know what you’re doing or, worse, that what you’re doing is bad.

Here’s where the idea of thoughtful parenting comes in. How can you decide which approach you want to use? You are the parents, and you know your child’s needs and your own better than anyone else does.

Once you have defined the problem, the second step is to discover the source of the difficulty. But the next, and crucial, step in problem-solving is to define your goal. What do you want out of the solution to the problem? In other words, what is your priority?

If you are both just so tired that you feel desperate, then anything that helps your daughter go to sleep will be your priority. If holding her is what works, or sleeping with her, then you will probably opt for that in the short term. That is only a short-term solution, since it makes her dependent on your presence to sleep, but you may all regain some bounce, which can give you energy to tackle the underlying task of her learning to let herself go into sleep.

If your priority is to help her learn this independent lifetime skill now, along with her other moves forward in self-care, like dressing herself, feeding herself, mastering toileting and so forth — then you can make the investment of energy and stamina up front and all reap the benefit later. Like most parenting decisions, this has a short-term and a long-term effect. Sometimes we opt for the immediate need, and sometimes we go for the future. Neither is necessarily better than the other. They are just different, and either choice can be thoughtfully made. Whatever you choose on purpose will feel better to you than being pressured into someone else’s solution.

To help her settle herself, talk with her in the daytime about how bedtime is now going to work.

“After bath, and tooth-brushing, and stories, then it’s time for bed. Bedtime is a no-talking time. And then soon you will go to sleep. I will sit with you until you are ready to go to sleep. Then you can tell me, and I will go finish the dishes and read my book.”

If she cries and doesn’t want to let you go, you might pick her up for a brief hug and a gentle reminder that you will put her down and sit there until she is ready to help herself go to sleep. This method may take 25 times of up-and-down and hug and reminder, or she may want you to sit there for an hour or two the first night. But your persistence will give her a clear bottom-line message that bedtime means bedtime. She will most likely relax within a few days in the security of your presence and get sleepy enough to let you go. Don’t sneak out on her, because then she will anxiously wake up repeatedly to check if you are there — she has to know when you go to feel safe.

I hope you all soon get plenty of sleep and feel good about bedtime! Please let us know how it goes.