Children That Are Masterful At Hiding Their Sleep Cues

You + your blog = unique, original, interesting content! What blogging ideas do the photos on your phone and the word zeal inspire? Your blog post is live! Now it’s time to get as many eyes on it as possible. To show you how it might work, let’s step into the shoes of a freelance photographer. Imagine that you’ve just published a blog post called 5 Secrets to a Knockout Brand Photoshoot. Let the visibility activities begin! Then, upload those videos to your YouTube channel. The big idea is to get people to join your email list so you can nurture the ideal folks into a someday sale. There’s also Instagram and LinkedIn to consider. And any other social sites where your ideal clients hang. Then there’s your email list. You can also send the blog post to your list, either a teaser summary of the post with links to <read more>, or the entire blog post, right inside the email. Finally, consider publishing your blog post on a site like, Medium, too. I like to say that Medium is where blog posts go to get discovered. How are you feeling right now? Think you can handle this blogging thing? Are you at least willing to give it a try? I help mothers tenderly teach their children the skills of sleep in a loving and nurturing way so that you can get the restorative sleep you need at night to be able to show up as a powerhouse mompreneur during the day.

A Face In The Crowd

The one thing every mompreneur needs to know when she’s overwhelmed and exhausted from lack of sleep because her child is not sleeping well, is that it is absolutely possible to solve her child’s sleep struggles once and for all so that she can enjoy calm bedtimes, peaceful nights, and reliable naps. When we dream of being business owners and parents, nobody is naive enough to think it will be easy. A recent study conducted by Welch’s revealed that moms work an average of 98 hours a week, all this time is due to juggling their professional obligations around the schedules of their children. However, if your sleep is disrupted by your children’s sleep difficulties, imagine the toll it will take on your health and your business. Needless to say, my dynamic, successful mompreneur clients come to me all the time and they are perplexed over their child’s disruptive sleep patterns. It may look baffling on the surface, but if you just scrape a little, a medical condition or a developmental milestone may be the culprit. A child goes through major physical and cognitive developmental milestones very rapidly. Every time a child has to grapple with these changes, their sleep patterns are heavily disrupted until they master the new milestones. Babies cope with the new changes in their body by waking frequently during the night, sometimes becoming wide awake in a bid to reconcile their environment with their new skills. This can cause your baby to become fussy and needy. Another cause for disrupted sleep is underlying medical conditions. A few underlying medical conditions that commonly contribute to children’s sleep problems are silent reflux, asthma, eczema, food or seasonal allergies, and sleep apnea.

My Universe

Now that we know that milestones and medical conditions can interfere with sleep, what steps can you take? The first task is to get professional help to rule out medical conditions. Disrupted sleep will only worsen any underlying medical condition, so work with your pediatrician to manage the medical condition, and understand that it is essential for your child to sleep soundly as it is during their sleep time that healing occurs. The second task is to track your child’s development and identify when your child is in the midst of a developmental leap. It’s important to identify the window of developmental and neurological transitions that are the optimal timeframe to reset disruptive sleep patterns and stretch sleep duration. To help you with this, keep track of your child’s developmental milestones and be prepared to offer more opportunities to practice these skills during the day. For many mompreneurs, work happens in stolen moments when the child is napping or when they work a second shift after the child has gone to bed. A child’s sleep requirements vary as they progress through stages of development. Every child has a unique and optimum sleep window, and abiding by their window is the foundation for quality sleep. The sleep window is directly influenced by the interval of waking time that passes between nap cycles and bedtime. If the sleep window passes without the child sleeping, the child is overtired. The overtired child is often squirmy, and unreasonably demanding. Sometimes an overtired child will act goofy and hyper.

All Quiet On The Western Front

Both are examples of typical behavior for the wired and tired child. Missing the sleep window is a very common cause for hyperactivity struggles during bedtime which are typically followed by frequent waking throughout the night. This is a vicious cycle because when your child is awake throughout the night, your attention is required. This frustrating cycle feeds on itself, so it is important to recognize and catch the child’s sleep window accurately. The first suggestion I have to break this cycle is to actively pursue an early bedtime. Recognizing the sleep window begins with studying your child’s body cues for sleepiness. On the other hand, some children are so sensitive to their sleep windows that they skip the early sleep cues and start to display signs when it’s already too late. Sometimes children that are masterful at hiding their sleep cues will only show cues if they are in a dimly lit room with a full belly. The most reliable approach to identifying your child’s sleep window is to keep a sleep log for 3 to 5 days. Everyone agrees that sleep is fundamental to healthy cognitive and physical growth. Yet, reports say that today’s children are sleeping 70 fewer minutes than children did a century ago. Do we really think children’s sleep needs have gone down?