Kim West and Macall Gordon on Why Kids Won’t Sleep, and What to Do About It

Debbie:

Hey Kim and Macall, welcome to the podcast.

Kim West:

Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Macall Gordon:

Thanks.

Debbie:

Yeah, I’m as always, I’m looking forward to this conversation. I feel like I say that at the beginning of every episode, but I really am. This is another topic that is just such an issue for all parents, but especially parents who are listening to this show, because we’re going to be talking about sleep or maybe lack of sleep or all the impacts of challenging sleep on our lives. So I’ve read your formal bios, but because I have the honor of having both of you on the show, co-authors of this new book, Why Won’t You Sleep? And also you’re both experts in this space. Would you take a few minutes and do a little personal introduction for yourselves? Kim, do you wanna kick us off?

Kim West:

Yeah, sure. I am a mother of two daughters who are grown young adults now. And I am a clinical social worker for my goodness, 32 years can’t even believe I can say that. And 30 years ago, when I had my first baby was when I developed this, what I call a gentle approach to sleep coaching, because I really wanted to not let my baby to cry it out alone or cry herself out alone. so I did that and became known as the sleep lady and have written several books on using this gentle approach. Then 14 years ago, I started training gentle sleep coaches.

Macall Gordon:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the super cool thing is Kim and I were moms right about the same time, having almost the exact same struggle. And we took different paths. Kim tried to solve the problem and I just suffered through it. So at the time it was cry it out or nothing and I knew I couldn’t do it but I didn’t have an alternative or didn’t have the presence of mind to think of an alternative. And so I just slogged on through and was perplexed by all of the stuff I would read because at the time that was really at the super duper beginning of the internet. So that wasn’t really a thing. So it was books and magazines and all the books and magazines were basically saying, just cry it out. That’s what you have. And I was just perplexed by the whole tone of it. So I went to graduate school in applied psychology to really focus on what we know about sleep training and what we know about sleep training for more intense kids because I had had two of them and the stuff just didn’t track. So after getting my master’s degree in teaching research for a bit, I was like, you know, maybe I should use this knowledge to help parents with sleep and I kind of cast around looking for different training programs. and that’s how I found Kim and chose that program because it was the most balanced, but also, really looked at the whole picture. wasn’t just like, okay, we’re going to get in and give you two weeks of information on sleep training on this method. It was really intense. And, so I like intense. So I went that way.

Debbie:

Well, the apples don’t fall far from the tree then, right?

Kim West:

Exactly. was just going to mention the topic of temperament.

Macall Gordon:

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Debbie:

Yes, yes. And I can’t remember the name of the book, but I’ll say so. My kiddo is 20. I definitely, there was a book, someone who, funnily enough, did not have children, but was sure that this was the book I needed to read. And it was a sleep training book. And I was like, great. Because it resonated with me in that Yeah, I’m going to have this child who self-soothes and who can do, you know, I kind of dictated who this child would be. And of course that is not the kid that I got, but it was, I didn’t, for me, was either do that or have your kid co-sit. Like there was nothing in between that I knew of. And even though it didn’t feel right to me at the time, I just felt like, you know, I didn’t have any other options. So, could we even just define what sleep training is just so we’re all on the same page? What is sleep training?

Macall Gordon:

Man, that’s a big question. Because I think, and I think Kim’s got lots to say as well on this, but from my perspective, it’s kind of equated with, and it’s kind of a bad term for a lot of people, it’s equated with crying it out, right? It’s like, because everybody thinks that’s the only way and that’s the only strategy. To me, sleep training, it’s a funky term, admittedly, is all about transferring the work of going to sleep and back to sleep from the parent to the child in whatever pace people pick. Fast, drastic, incredibly slow, somewhere in the middle, but to me, that’s what the work is. I don’t know if it’s out in the world, that’s how people understand it. Yeah.

Debbie:

Do you have anything you want to add to that, Kim?

Kim West:

I think that, yeah, I sort of think about it as helping our child learn the skill of putting themselves to sleep so that they can then apply it to learning how to go back to sleep, whether it’s in the middle of the night or naps. And then what age is appropriate is a whole separate conversation and whether you stay and offer physical and verbal reassurance, which I’m more pro about or whether you leave them to figure it out on their own.

Macall Gordon:

Yeah. I think the way Kim’s stuff is so new and refreshing and different is because all of the sleep training stuff is absolutely dictated and grounded in behaviorism that we do not use in any other aspect of child rearing. have ditched behaviorism as a model for working with our children except in sleep. And under behaviorism, the old thing of whatever you reward persists. And if you take the reward away, that behavior goes away. We don’t use that anywhere else. And in that model, parental health is cast as a problem, as something that perpetuates the behavior rather than the thing I adore about this method, Kim’s method.

is that instead we’re scaffolding those skills. I tell parents it’s like teaching them to ride a bike. You don’t just give a kid a bike and walk away and go, luck with that kid, I’ll be over here, right? You help them. And so when we tell parents about this process, it’s consistent with their way of teaching their kids everything else. It’s not this weird anomaly where they have to steal themselves and grit their teeth and get through it and, you know, be outside in the hallway crying themselves because it’s so horrible, you know, like we don’t need that. It’s not necessary. And it isn’t even logical. You know, to me, I never thought it made any sense. so my child is learning a new skill by literally crying themselves to sleep, not understanding why, you know, I always like to use this example that if you let’s say rocked your baby to sleep, you know, for eight months and all of sudden you’re like my back hurts, this isn’t working, the minute I put them down they wake up, I have to re-rock them and you decide as the parent, I’m changing it and you’re gonna put them down awake. Well, of course the baby’s gonna cry. You it’s not their fault that the only way they know to put themselves to sleep is to be rocked sleep and they don’t understand why you’ve changed.

Kim West:

And so, I mean, I always think of it as I felt the same way. I remember when I was in internships and, you know, with social work school that when working with little kids, the whole concept of time out never really made sense to me either. Like, you know, so the kid has an incredible temper tantrum and you’re sort of punishing them by having them go and sometimes shaming in some cases, having them sit in a corner in a chair. And I was always like, okay, so what if they don’t stay in the chair? This is before I was a mom. And what are they actually learning about their feelings and how to manage their feelings? And so that kind of went, I thought of the same thing with sleep. You know, I feel like it’s my job as a parent to help model and teach, I hate to use this overused word, self-regulation. You know, what do we do with our big feelings? And even our small feelings, you know, with our children. So.

Debbie:

Yeah, it’s interesting when you think about it that way, especially with such a little one, right, that we, you know, for some reason around the area of sleep, we have this idea that they need to be able to learn how to do this at a very young age. And I was just thinking about, you know, when you have a child, a little one who isn’t sleeping, it’s like a quality of life issue for the parents, right? And you can, it’s like, you can feel really desperate and like, this is not sustainable. And there’s also this, you know, there’s the measurement against other parents and what other kids are doing. So I feel like the stakes around sleep in particular are so high, but it doesn’t make sense that we would have this kind of behaviorist approach to sleeping when we’re talking about such little children.

Macall Gordon:

Well, and there’s really no, this is my big soapbox issue on the current sleep training situation. There’s no caveats for limits, right? It’s just like, nope, however much crying at whatever ages, it’s all good, right? And Kim’s got a couple of horrible stories of people who were like, well, we just kept going and my baby cried for, you know, two hours every night or more. we, there’s no, there’s no limit about when it would be good to use it. How much, how much is too much for what children is it too much, right? That’s where we really get into temperament and neurodiversity. How much crying is too much for a particular child at a particular age, right? Yeah.

Kim West:

And parents are being told like, there’s a new study that shows that it doesn’t cause any emotional damage. You should address that McCall, because I know in the United States, pediatricians are telling that to their families.

Debbie:

Really?

Macall Gordon:

Yeah, yeah, it’s one of those you really have to like meet research where it is. And that means you have to look at how those questions were asked. With research, it all depends on how you ask the question and how you choose to measure the outcome. Now, I should say, and I know Kim, we are still on the same page with this. We are not saying that using Ferber or whatever, causes some emotional damage in any, that’s just not, that’s not true either. What we’re missing is nuance and we’re missing a better assessment, again, by age, by temperament. So the way that they’ve measured emotional effects or side effects is a little bonkers. There was one study that said there were no long-term effects on attachment, which I don’t think there would be, but let’s just take this as an example. They assessed attachment not with the strange situation, which is the usual way, gold standard. They did a five-question scale that measured something called disinhibited attachment. I was like, what’s that? I looked it up, and it’s the kind of attachment style that you’ll see in children from orphanages with severe neglect, where they’ll indiscriminately run up to a stranger and say, take me home or something. So the idea is since kids who went through crying it out didn’t have this crazy severe level of attachment disruption, they said it didn’t affect attachment. It’s like, you know, it doesn’t make sense or they measure it with just measures that aren’t really a thing. Now, lots of them have used good measures. There’s no behavioral issues on that child behavior checklist. There’s a lot of different things, but some of them that are used, we don’t even know how much crying there was. So it’s like, well, how much crying was without effect? Was it without effect for every child in that study? What about that one over there who cried for three hours? What were the effects for that kid? But we don’t know because it all gets collapsed into averages.

Debbie:

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I do want to say, because that jumped out at me, you talk about attachment in the book. And one of the other things that you say, which I just want to reiterate, because it could be comforting for listeners who maybe have let their child cry it out here or there, that what you’re not saying is that doing that a couple of times is going to result in an attachment disorder. Because I think so many parents also carry guilt or shame about having made some of those choices. So that’s not what you’re saying.

Kim West:

Absolutely.

Macall Gordon:

Not at all. I think honestly, attachment is a big construct. It’s a big thing that takes time. It’s not, I think in the book we say it’s not that fragile. It’s not like you can do one thing and ruin attachment. Attachment is built over time, over a pattern of responses. So absolutely no. I, you know, if I were gonna look for side effects, I wouldn’t be looking at attachment personally. 

Debbie:

Okay, that’s super helpful. So you have a new book that is just out. It’s called Why Won’t You Sleep? A Game Changing Approach for Exhausted Parents of Non-Stop Super Alert Big Feeling Kids. And I really love that subtitle. And I want to know more about it. Who did you write this for? And why were those the adjectives that you use to describe the children?

Macall Gordon:

I think we wrote it for our past selves, right?

Kim West:

So Macall and I both have what I used to call alert kids and what McCall likes to call live wires. Well, you feel like both your kids are, right?

Macall Gordon:

Yeah, two different kinds, right? I have one that’s sort of, I call them innies and outies. So kind of more like introvert, extrovert types. So both in tents, they just took it in a different direction and had really different sleeve styles as well, both of them. So I had it coming and going with those two. So, you know, what I was seeing, and again, it comes from deeply from both of our experiences, that the usual people who decided, like you said, Debbie, that, you know, okay, I just, have to do it. I have, I just have to sleep train because I’m dying here. And they found that their experience was not at all what the book said. Not at all. It was not 30 minutes of crying. was hours over many nights and the books never talk about that. And so these parents were really just stuck. I mean, either they weren’t trying it at all like I did, or they tried it and it was just a dumpster fire and they were just stuck. So I like to say that, you know, the sleep wars that they talk about, you know, crying it out versus co-sleeping — it’s all fought by people for whom that worked. Then there’s all these people in the middle who are just struggling because neither side worked for them. And so this is really who we wrote the book for is to really take some sleep information and tailor it for people with these alert, sensitive, persistent children who are curve balls for sure.

Kim West:

And who we really felt need to have a gentler approach. These kids need more help and support in down regulating and I always like to say rewrapping themselves emotionally. They really need their parents for their caretaker support. That’s why we wrote this book.

Macall Gordon:

Yeah, and you know, I did do some research on temperament and sleep and you know, what we thought would be the case really definitely was that it wasn’t for lack of trying that these parents were struggling. The parents of more intense, sensitive kids had tried a higher number of strategies with all with less success. So they had really done the work and stuff just wasn’t working because really all the except for Kim’s approach really, all the stuff out there is one, it’s still that one thing. And you’re like, well, great, if that doesn’t work, what else have you got? And so it’s been great to say, we have something for you.

Debbie:

So would you walk us through kind of like the broad strokes of Kim’s approach so we can kind of understand what makes it different from more like other methods that are out there and why it can work so well for these more intense kids?

Macall Gordon:

Well, I think, again, the game changing part of this is that you get to stay with your child at first, and then we just gradually move you away, which really works across the board. It really works for toddlers and, you know, and it really works for babies, but it works on up where you say, okay, we’re gonna do something new, but I’m gonna be here for you and I’m gonna help you. And then we gradually move that parent out, away and out, but it’s gradually over the course of I’d say a couple of weeks.

Kim West:

Also the parent is doing less and less to offer support. So whether it’s through their voice or touch. The idea is that I’m going to be there to support you while you learn this skill and I’m going to do less and less and sort of pass the baton to you, right? Until you’ve internalized the skill yourself. And it ends up being so empowering for the parent because not only are they able to be more consistent because they’re there, but they’re learning about their child and themselves, I would add, and they are seeing their child learn a new skill, which is like, mean, so often the parents say, I can’t believe it. Like they started like rubbing the sheet or humming or rocking their body or they actually can do it because these parents have given up hope they feel like something is broken, you know, and their child will never be able to do this.

Macall Gordon:

Yeah. Well, and that they, I think the other piece, the parent side of this is so many of these parents just feel like they’ve been steamrolled by this big, powerful child. And they have been, and they feel like they can’t have an impact. I can’t set a limit because it just blows up in my face. And so the exciting thing is that parents can say, no, no, we’re going to sleep in the crib tonight. And when it actually starts working, it gives a parent a little feeling of, okay, I can set a limit. I can have something actually happen here. And that’s hugely powerful because I say, can’t, with these kids, you cannot just follow their cues. Or I joke around and say, I followed my kids’ cues right off a cliff. Like it was not good. Like I didn’t feel like I could set a limit because the cost was so high for them, with them, right? They would freak out and I was so tired. So this whole process works on both sides of the equation in a supportive way. So there’s so many parents where I have to encourage them to set these limits, you know, and can say the same thing. I have to say, no, it is okay to ask your child to learn something new so that you can be a functional parent. And it’s just a slightly different way of saying the same things, but I don’t know, in a way that makes sense for this group.

Debbie:

And I think of it really as scaffolding, right? So we’re always talking about scaffolding when we’re learning any new skill. And our job as parents of these kids is to be attuned to them, to understand when they need more support, to look for windows of opportunity when they might need less, to notice the little growth spurts that they have and try to build on them and know also that it might go back and forth, but it’s not necessarily consistent. And so I really like this idea of becoming fluent in them. You know, when in your book you talk about this process and there’s so much, what’s the word I’m looking for? The parents really determine, you know, this is too much for my child right now. I’m gonna go in and offer this kind of support. So that’s what I really appreciated about it. It is very responsive to who they are and respectful, knowing that we’re working towards something that’s a better, again, quality of life for everyone involved in the family, but in a way that does feel really connected and in relationship.

Kim West:

Yep. I always like to give parents the example of, know, so if you’re, you know, three year old or two year old says, you know, I’m, I, you know, I want a cookie before dinner and you say no, and they escalate, you know, there’s more nos and they have the full blown tantrum. I’m a big believer in doing what’s called a hug hold instead of timeout. And so then after the hug hold, after you’ve calmed them down, and if they’re verbal enough, just talk about their big feelings they had and how they felt about, know, that you said no, because you know, in our family, we don’t have cookies before dinner, you know, so I tell parents like we’re teaching them about their feelings and how they what they can do with those feelings in a different way. But we’re not giving them the cookie before dinner. You know, and it’s the same thing with sleep. Like, I can be there to help you, but I’m not going to put you to sleep.

Macall Gordon:

Right. Because you can, as you said in the book, we cannot put our child to sleep. They’re the only ones who can get themselves back to sleep and who can put themselves to sleep.

Kim West:

I think especially, I just want to say this just because I know that McCall you gave the example of the crib. I think that it is especially important to take an approach like this with children in beds. Because when we take more of an extinction model, usually one, either the parent or the child or often both get into a huge power struggle and patients are lost and doors are slammed and locked and all kinds of things happen and that everybody feels horrible and anxiety is raised and we don’t have a lot of success. And so I’m kind of biased. I mean, I’m sort of biased about certain groups of kids, you know, like for instance, newborns. I’m not a supporter of sleep training newborns. And then children who have been adopted later and not at birth, that we definitely have to go gradually and gently, of course, children who are neurodivergent, have any special needs, and then children in beds. And then you take those kids and the ones that are more intense and alert and live wire, and we really have to pay attention and be more available to our children to help support them as they learn.

Debbie:

So in the book, you talk about the negotiator. I was like, I know the negotiator. The talker, the mind racer, the holder, toucher, stroker, cuddler. So could you talk a little bit about these kids who I think are really good at getting their needs met, or they’re trying to get their needs met in a way that can really be triggering for us? Maybe pick one of those, the negotiator, the talker, the mind racer, the holder, toucher, stroke, or cuddler, and give us an example about what that is and then how this approach would be applied to that child.

Macall Gordon:

Yeah. Well, so these are three year olds starting at three and up, but three year olds, I tell people I get babies and three year olds. I think we say more about three year olds than any age group because it’s like their brain really comes online. Like really, they really start getting it about what can I have happen here? And bedtime is the perfect moment. So, that part of the book is really part of like, you’ve got to understand who your kid is and what their particular challenge or MO is at bedtime and work on that, right? So if you have a sensory sensitive child who gets activated by the bath, you don’t do a bath at bedtime. Like just set yourself up for success. So I like the mind racer one, because that was my daughter. And we never had problems with bedtime resistance, but boy, she just couldn’t calm that active brain down. And it would go to fun places, ideas, questions, thoughts, ideas for the story she wanted to write tomorrow. But it would also, at times, go into not great places. So a little rumination and spinning about something she saw, some social dynamic on the playground that wasn’t great or whatever. And that would prolong bedtime just because she couldn’t calm down. So you have to have strategies for that in terms of setting limits and really teaching them. I mean, that’s gonna be a lifelong struggle. That is not something that’s just gonna go away. Hello. And so teaching them, you know, deep breathing, mindfulness, how to have activities where you, I say, put the thoughts away for the day, you actually say, these are all great, we’re gonna talk about them tomorrow. Let’s write them on a slip of paper, we’ll talk about them tomorrow. You know, Kim probably has more of these, you know, stretching, getting them in their body.

Kim West:

Well, doing things like, so often we’re told, well, have your child tell you about their day at bedtime. And that’s like the kind of worst thing to do for these sort of kids. And so if we know that, then let’s talk about that at dinner instead. So then we have some time to slow down and think about more conning activities.

Macall Gordon:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it really is, I mean, it helps you. So really what you’re doing is you’re trying to remove obstacles. At the same time, you’re helping your child have some more skills. That goes also to things like fears and worries, right? We’ve got to help them understand how to drive that powerful brain. And all of that is really important to tackle at bedtime with limits. Like Kim said, you don’t want to be processing the day after the lights go out. And in fact, I say with very verbal kids, conversation should end when the lights go out. I’ve had some parents where all they do is say, mm-hmm, night, mm, night, night, night. They just don’t, they just don’t put more fuel on the fire. So it’s really about teaching these big spirit kids how to deescalate from the day and go to sleep. Yeah.

Debbie:

Yeah, I remember my kiddo loved to read books. And at one point, we realized that reading a book was like watching a movie for my kid, because it was so activating. And they just got fully immersed in it. So we had to come up with a different strategy. But so I love that you mentioned that this is you know, this is a lifelong thing if you’re a mind racer. And so, I mean, as you were talking about your daughter, I was like, well, how’s that looking now? And yeah, I kind of want to understand what is our goal long-term for these kids, because I have to believe that there are many listeners who have kids for whom sleep is going to just be a challenge. It is still for my 20-year-old. It’s something that requires so much intention. We’re always working on sleep hygiene. And it’s always a struggle. And so what is kind of the goal for starting these habits young and what might we kind of expect or hope for, for our kids who have tricky relationships with sleep?

Kim West:

First of all, I want to address that it’s always going to be a struggle. I disagree. I do. And I want parents to not feel, because I feel like I hate that there’s this story going around, you know, that you’re going to have to sleep train your child, you know, twice a year for like 10 years. I have not seen that in my 30 years of practice. Do you have, well, I’m going to give you an example of my two daughters where I had to figure out, I mean, I think we all need to figure out who we’ve been given in each little body, right? And not say, the way I parent, this one is the way I would parent all of them, right? I mean, you could try that, but it doesn’t always work as well, especially if you get one of these alert, intense live wire kids, because all bets are off on what you did with your quote unquote easier baby. And so with my older one, she napped way longer than the average. You know, I had to wean her off at five years. She could pretty much nap anywhere. Like it was amazing, you know. I mean, does she have her own sensitivities? Yes, but sleep was okay for her, you know. And then I get my younger one who is like, you know, spitfire, who if I didn’t have her in bed by and asleep by two o’clock in her room, nobody else has a pack and play in some other house by two o’clock, there would be no nap. Then mommy’s cranky because the kids are cranky and it’s all about that, you know. And so it didn’t it meant like not that I’m a big camper, but I know there are lot of parents who with these live wires want to go camping. I’m like, you can try it, but good luck. know, they just need to have it be more, you know, their set place, their set routine. had to, I couldn’t rush the bedtime routine or the nap routine, you know, she had to talk for 30 minutes before she, know, by herself, but you all of these things where I didn’t feel like I guess I could say, that’s a struggle. She’s going to have her whole life. I felt like it was more that’s who she is. So how can I help create an environment, a schedule, a home that supports her being able to still sleep well? You know, so I meant that sorry guys, gotta leave the lunch or the playground. Cause you know, and they would be like, gosh, Kim, you’re being so rigid. You know, I’m like, yeah, but make my life better. and my kids let you know. And so I, and here she is now, you know, 27, she likes her particular ways and her little things she still likes to sleep with and her kind of pillow and this, that and the other, but she’s figured it out. She knows herself. So just like for your 20 year old, if she or he knows that they’re particularly sensitive and you know, they have to go to bed around this time and they need these kinds of sheets and not that kind of sheets, well, that’s okay. Right? We all have to do that for ourselves. So I don’t know. I’d like to not look at it as a problem.

Debbie:

Yeah, I appreciate that.

Macall Gordon:

I kind of, with my daughter and I tell people this all the time, they’re like, but she just lays like you said, lays there for 30 minutes and talks and sings to herself. And I’m like, may not be able to change that, but at least you don’t have to be there for that. Right. There are some kids, my daughter took forever to fall asleep. Once she was asleep, she slept through the night and it was great. My son would fall asleep right away and then be up every 45 minutes. So I had two different styles, but I think my daughter’s probably still that way. She’s not, and neither am I, one of those people who gets in bed and conks right out. Like it just doesn’t, it just doesn’t do it. I tell people to look around on an overnight flight and you’ll see the different kinds of sleepers, right? Right? You know, yeah. You, those people who can just lean back and do this like that. Like who are those people? Like I’m definitely like eye mask, earphones, blanket, special pillow. I still can’t sleep. No.

Debbie:

That is relatable. So there’s so much that we could talk about. I do want to squeeze in this one last question, then we’ll start to wrap up, because I hear from a lot of parents who have those really early wakers. And you address that in the book, too, like the kids who are up and wake at 5 in the morning. And the parents are like, my gosh, like what do I do here? So could you just spend a few minutes talking about early wakers and maybe share information that would be helpful for parents who have such children.

Kim West:

You want me to do it? Okay. This is a hot topic, early rising. So I always tell parents like, let’s look at the typical causes of early rising because it’s not logical. Right? So the first one is, well, real quickly, the easiest time to learn to put yourself to sleep is bedtime for all of us. Right? So, they have to be going to bed early enough, not overtired where the body secretes all these alerting hormones, which then will make it take them longer to go to sleep. They’ll tend to wake up in the middle of the night and they’ll tend to wake up too early. Like that’s not logical. Me, I’m like, I’ll go to bed late. Hopefully I’ll sleep in, which back in the day could do no longer. But it doesn’t work like that for our children. So if they go to bed too late, they’re more likely to be up at 5 a.m. And it’s really the most important thing for parents to hear because they will be like, I’ll keep them up later and then they’ll sleep in. No, don’t do that. Right. So if they’re nap deprived, like they didn’t have a nap when they usually should have a nap, that will also create that overtiredness, right, which will then lead to more difficulty going to sleep and staying asleep if they’re awake too long from their afternoon nap to their bedtime because the bedtime is too late and if they are put to sleep, you know, or put down too drowsy so they didn’t really learn the skill of putting themselves to sleep at bedtime and so they really can’t apply it at 5 a.m. which is I don’t know about you but for me when I wake up at 5 boy it’s hard to go back to sleep, especially if I’m awake too long for my mind to start going, then all bets are off. So it’s very similar for children. And just like also a little side note, you know, there are some medical conditions that also can cause early risings such as sleep apnea. So that’s also an important factor that often gets forgotten. So, and then I’d say lastly, you know, sort of behaviorally, if you as a parent, which I get because it’s hard for you and I to function at 5 a.m. Our body is secreting hormones to keep us asleep. So we’re feeling a little drugged and it’s hard to be consistent. But if we have sort of allowed them to start their day at 5 a.m. and whatever, bring them out into the living room, turn on the TV, give them something to eat or a bottle or bring them into your bed and everybody crashes back to sleep, then you know, they don’t understand time. mean, they don’t really understand time for many years, our kids, you know. So what’s the difference between 3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m. about what, how, you know, I don’t know how my parents are going to respond. So I’m going to give it a try. So if, you know, once you’ve kind of looked at that other list and said, okay, I’m going to address these things. And then you go to say, now we’re going to be really kind of strict about what we do at 5 a.m. Just know it will take a few weeks, right? Because of that, well, they’ll give up, they’ll change their mind, they’ve done it before. For it to be, you know, the new norm, hopefully that you wake up after six. And also parents, if one of you is a morning bird, and I don’t mean at 5 a.m., I mean, you wake rested and like to start your day at 6 a.m., then it’s possible that you could have a morning bird child once they’re sleeping through the night. And so I always say, can the morning bird parent be on duty?

Debbie:

That’s great. Great. Thank you for answering that. I just want to mention for listeners that you do address overtiredness problems with the lead up to lights out, that the parent is that required part of the go to sleep. You have these key things that tend to, what you call them, the big four sleep tankers, which I found so helpful. Your book kind of helps people identify where the problems might be and then shows you how to apply the strategy, for, for what’s going on. I, before we say goodbye, I just want to mention that I was so appreciative that at the end of the book, you have a chapter putting gas in your tank and you are talking about self care, which is something I talk about all the time on this show, but that was so nice to see it in there. Why was it so important for you to include that in this book?

Macall Gordon:

boy, because I just think, I think self care, number one is hard for moms for sure, moms and dads, but really moms more. And with these kids, it’s even harder. It’s even harder to go, well, I can’t go out and blah, or I can’t, I don’t have time. don’t have, and your tank just gets more and more empty. And we also know I did some, I thought, kind of startling research on parental burnout among parents of these kids. And in the group that responded, was 75 % were in burnout. That’s shocking. Not surprising really, but alarming because burnout leads to a lot of really not great situations. You know, parents have, moms essentially have to prioritize getting tiny little breaks where they can. And getting a little, because if you’re empty, if you’re completely empty, you cannot think straight. You cannot problem solve anymore. And so it’s tricky and it’s hard, but my goodness, it’s just possibly one of the most critical things that these parents can do, I think.

Debbie:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just, right before we jumped on the call, I was writing in my newsletter about yesterday’s daily episode, which was about the parents are not all right. And it was talking specifically to parents of all children, not just neurodivergent children who are doing this intensive parenting and are just really struggling. So and again, sleep is such a core issue and we put so much pressure on ourselves to get it right and to figure it out quickly. And so I just appreciate the approach, the gentle approach and really doable and respectful approach that you guys share in your book. So before we say goodbye, where would you like listeners to learn more about your work? And again, the book I’m just gonna say is called, Why Won’t You Sleep? A Game Changing Approach for Exhausted Parents of Nonstop Super Alert Big Feeling Kids. Where would you like listeners to go?

Macall Gordon:

Well, they can order it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. There’s several other places too, so probably lots of spots. Yeah. They can go to my website, littlelivewires.com. They can go to sleeplady.com as well for more information and also Kim’s other books, because you do have others. Lots of places.

Debbie:

Great. Well, will listeners as always, I will have an extensive show notes page for this episode and I’ll have links to all the resources, all of Kim’s books, all the places you can connect with Kim and Macall. So thank you. I know we went really long. Unfortunately, that’s not a rare occasion, a rare situation for me, but I appreciate you sticking with me and really taking us inside the book and sharing all this with us today.

Macall Gordon:

Thank you, it was great.