Our babies and toddlers don't resist or fight sleep, though you might hear this said

This article is part of a collection inside The Possums Sleep Program called Deeper Dive, which explores the more complex scientific, historical and social contexts in which families and their babies or toddlers live and sleep. You don't need to read Deeper Dive articles to be helped by The Possums Sleep Program.

Something else is going on when our baby or toddler appears to be 'resisting' or 'fighting' sleep

Our little ones don't resist sleep.

When your little one has a thirst, then you offer milk and her thirst is slaked. Drinking when she is thirsty is pleasurable. But occasionally, babies develop negative associations with the breast or bottle, and then feeds become very disrupted or dialled up, and not at all pleasurable. (You can find out about this here or here.

Similarly, when your baby or toddler has high sleep pressure, and becomes sleepy, then dropping off into sleep is easy, pleasurable, and no-fuss. But sometimes our society accidentally puts things in the way, which dial a baby or toddler up and interfere with easy pleasurable sleep. Then, when your baby or toddler dials up with sleep, this might be called 'resisting sleep'. You can find out about obstacles that get in the way of sleep for babies here and toddlers here.

But we can think about this quite differently, to make baby or toddler sleep easy.

Sleep is a biological process, under the control of body clock settings (babies here, toddlers here) and sleep pressure (babies here, toddlers here). In the same way we can't force our stomachs to secrete gastric acid, we can't make our children sleep. We simply need to remove any obstacles that get in the way of healthy function of the biological sleep regulators.

What things might interfere with easy sleep?

• It's biologically normal (if rather challenging!) for our babies and toddlers to resist being placed on their own away from contact with a loving adult's body, especially after sunset. You can find out about this for babies here and toddlers here.

• Babies and toddlers often resist being placed in a cot because it is an environment that offers very low sensory motor stimulation. You can find out about babies' sensory motor needs here and toddlers' sensory motor needs here.

• Babies and toddlers might even develop a negative association with the bassinet or cot, or the bedroom, which does become a form of resistance. You can find out about conditioned dialling up here. But trying to force them to go into the bassinet or cot or bedroom if this has happened only makes the negative association worse. It's upsetting for everyone if your baby or toddler has developed a conditioned dialling up response to the cot or the bedroom. A conditioned negative response to the place of sleep results in conditioned sympathetic nervous system hyperarousal. This dramatically interferes with the capacity of the biological sleep regulators to do their work.

I'd like to reassure you, though, that if this has happened to your baby or toddler, and it seems as if your little one is resisting sleep, the situation can be quickly repaired by avoiding the thing that your little one has developed a conditioned negative association with, and by growing enjoyment around bedtimes instead, making sleep as easy and enjoyable as possible.

If you have learnt to dread your baby or toddler's bedtime, we can change this, too

As parents, we too might have learnt to dread our little one's bedtime.

We might dread our baby or toddler's bedtime because we know it will go on for an hour or even longer, just when we are most tired and longing for some time alone, or time with our partner, or time to get something meaningful done. We might dread bedtimes because it involves so much work, bouncing on a fitball with a grizzling child in our arms, or breastfeeding endlessly, or constant efforts to tiptoe out of the room followed by the heartsink of our child crying out or screaming out, demanding our attention, over and over.

"This cannot go on", our mind might tell us in despair or anger (and I can only agree, this kind of pattern is completely unsustainable.)

The Possums Sleep Program has been showing parents a different way of doing sleep since 2011, and I'd like to share the steps of repairing this situation with you, in the hope it helps you bring joy back into your evenings (even though you are still caring for a baby or toddler). You might like to start with the evening section on baby or toddler sleep (depending on the age of your child), here or here.

What about bedtimes for high sensory need children?

Some little personalities do require some wrangling to get into the bed, and snuggled up close to you, and focused on a bedtime story. Breastfeeding your baby or toddler to sleep, if you are breastfeeding, usually side-steps this problem once the sleep pressure is high. If you're not breastfeeding, you might still be using milk in a bottle to dial your little one down into sleep, depending on your small child's age.

I have the view that these highly energetic and busy ones are the very children who thrive on an abundance of cuddles, who do best when they are bathed intermittently with generous and highly physical affection, which (despite their wriggling away) helps their nervous system remain more dialled down overall, as a pattern over time.

You can find out about protecting sleep throughout childhood here.