Sleep training is counterintuitive. When your baby cries, you want to go pick her up and rock her back to sleep. There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help. So you don't need to pick her up, you need to sing a sleep song and beat slightly to give her a sleep environment.
Night Lights, Blankets and Lullabies
Children are even closer to that beginning than we adults are. Night looms larger because time moves more slowly. A child's day represents a much larger percentage of life lived than it does for any parent. The mental capacities of young children do not include the rationalizations grownups use to explain to themselves that a fear is unjustified.
We are not in the habit of devoting much thought to the fact that every night human beings lay aside the wrappings in which they have enveloped their skin as well as anything which they may use as a supplement to their bodily organs
The truth is that a baby develops emotionally and cognitively through the reflective exchanges he has with his mother. The essential brain development that regulates emotion takes place after birth, and it happens through the back-and-forth of maternal-infant attunement.
Sleep resistance, bouts of insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, crawling into bed with parents in the middle of the night. All these are so common among children it seems fair to call them normal.
Bits of blankets or stuffed animals or their own fingers or thumb that occupy a space between the subjective inner world and the outside world.
There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help. Parental rituals and transitional objects serve as vehicles for making the passage and, indeed, to a child's ability eventually to comfort himself.
