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Posted on Tuesday 15 April 2008
Welcome to A Father’s Voice for April 2008. The Wisdom of the Band-Aid Theory is about how even when I think I am doing the right thing, I sometimes am only making things worse.
A Father’s Voice is my chance to share my voice with you about the challenges and rewards I experience trying to be a very involved father while having to work full-time away from our home. I write during the only disposable time of my day – my train ride to and from home.
The Wisdom of The Band-Aid Theory
By Jeremy G. Schneider, MFT
I have been extremely frustrated with Elijah, my four-year old son, because of his refusal to go to sleep without screaming at night. And I feel certain that the issue involved in both school and going to sleep are very similar – separation. But I’ve been intensely trying to help him go to sleep smoothly at night for eight months now and I’m running out of patience. All for the same reason I am upset about leaving him at school – I don’t want him to feel like we are abandoning him, that we don’t love him – I have been unwilling to let him cry it out (okay, my wife also doesn’t want that to happen). But it doesn’t matter what I do or what I say, he insists on making the process as difficult as possible. Tonight, as I sit to write this, I have let him cry. I refuse to go up anymore.
It always comes back to this. I try everything I can think of to not let him cry it out and I always fail. Always. For the past several weeks, every single time he got upset, I went upstairs to try and calm him down, get him into bed and help him think about all of his Happy Thoughts so that he could go to sleep. For the most part it only reinforced to him that if he gets upset he will get to spend more time with me. That was clearly not my goal.Â
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Clearly your son knows about cause and effect. What you did reminds me of “The Baby Whisperer” which we used to sleep train our son. It worked because I didn’t feel like he was crying it out (though he did cry a great deal) he got the message that no matter how much he cried, I would be putting him right back into the crib after some comforting. It was great for a year and a half. Now he comes running into our room several times a night. It seems like kids know better how to get us to do what they want than the other way around, no?