Does your child have an addiction problem?

It's a deliberate, drastic statement to help get parents to think about sleep differently.

Too often we feel powerless to talk about the issues that cause us real stress and anxiety for fear of being judged.

Credentials are important, and Glow Dreaming has now worked with 80,000 + children collecting data, analysing their sleep, and conferring with leading sleep researchers and specialists to better help and understand the issues parents face every single night.

Addiction

 - a compulsive, chronic, physiological or psychological need for a habit-forming substance, behaviour, or activity having harmful physical, psychological, or social effects and typically causing well-defined symptoms (such as anxiety, irritability, tremors, or nausea) upon withdrawal or abstinence: the state of being addicted.

Now, if we break this down and look at it in the context of your child’s sleep, what might cause them anxiety, irritability and even nausea in some instances if they don’t have it?

YOU.

There isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with your child needing or being addicted to you. In fact, some parents like the idea because, to them, it equates to a sense of a deeper love or affection.

This is fine but you need to understand that this addiction will, in most circumstances, mean you and your child get less sleep.

Let me be very clear; we do not condone the cry it out method and we don’t believe you should neglect your child’s fundamentals needs.

However, for the best sleep outcomes there are certain rules, boundaries and routines that have proven to get results. This in turn means you get more sleep, feel less stressed, and can give more of your best self to your child during the woken hours.

Addiction can also be considered a level of neediness, where the parent can’t be out of sight without the child becoming distressed.

This sense of neediness often seems to increase during the night as the parent disappears for longer periods of time and the child often wakes in different circumstances to which they fell asleep.

Imagine you fell asleep in your partners arms in the living room and woke up in a totally different space, your partner now nowhere to be seen.

Now imagine you thought your partner had disappeared forever. That’s exactly what children feel when they fall asleep feeding or being hugged, and wake up in a different space with you nowhere to be found.

These bedtime cues also create a routine that the child becomes dependent on and it revolves around you being there every single time they wake up.

You become your child’s addiction.

We all want to hold our children, love them a little harder and keep them young for as long as we can but it doesn’t have to be bedtime addiction.

Glow Dreaming knows how to break this addiction in the gentlest, safest and easiest way for both parent and child.

Breaking the addiction ensures the whole family gets the sleep they need, so that you can all be the best versions of yourselves for one another.  

 

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