Having a Social Life After Sleep Training
Congratulations! You’ve taught your little one some independent sleep skills and they’re finally sleeping through the night and taking long, restful naps during the day. This is a life-changing achievement and you should be absolutely thrilled!
Only… what now? Do you seriously need to plan your entire life around your baby’s sleep schedule?
Teaching your baby the skills to fall asleep independently is the all-important first step, but there’s an ongoing commitment afterwards that you really need to take seriously. Carving out your schedule to accommodate for consistent, scheduled bedtimes and naps is, in some ways, more challenging than those first couple of weeks when you’re camped out next to the crib.
True, your baby’s not waking up five times a night anymore, and they’re going down for naps like a superstar and sleeping for hours at a time, and the whole family’s getting the rest they need, but it can still be a bit of an ordeal to carve your entire day out around your baby’s naps and bedtime.
It might be helpful to think of the initial stages of sleep coaching as a sprint, and the months that come after as a marathon. Those first couple of nights can be intense but they’re over quickly. After that, it’s time to settle into a groove and establish a consistent, maintainable pace.
I know that this little analogy might sound a little daunting to some people. After all, running a marathon is grueling work, but it also comes with big rewards. (Or so I assume after watching some people on Instagram go through it.)
So here’s the truth, both the unpleasant and the glorious sides of it.
Yes, your baby’s sleep schedule is going to be pretty restrictive, and you’re going to have to honor it if you want to keep up with those wonderful, restful naps and protest-free bedtimes. Overtiredness will sabotage your little one’s sleep in a hurry and it can spiral out of control pretty quickly, with one bad nap leading to another one, leading to a lousy bedtime, and so on.
That could mean you’re going to have to miss out on some fun stuff. Fun stuff for you, fun stuff for your baby, fun stuff for the whole family, you might have to push a fair amount of it to the side in order to maintain your little one’s schedule. No sense trying to sugarcoat it, that’s the part that sucks.
But that doesn’t mean, in any way, that you and your family are chained to your baby’s crib. It just means there are going to be a few trade-offs.
For example, let’s say you’re arranging a playdate with a friend and their only availability is during your baby’s scheduled naptime. You might be tempted to try and rearrange your little one’s schedule to accommodate the activity, thinking that they’d rather enjoy the activity and companionship in exchange for a slight shuffle in the schedule.
But what’s that playdate going to look like? If your little one’s tired, and likely overtired by the time they’re halfway through their playdate, are they really going to be having any fun? Are you? In my experience, it just ends up in a lot of fussing and tears. Neither child has any fun, and neither do the parents because they’re too busy trying to settle their kids down. If you could see ahead of time that this was going to be the scenario you skipped naptime for, you’d probably stick to the schedule and arrange the playdate for another time when your baby can be rested and alert.
The same can be said for holidays and special occasions. A day at Disneyland can seem like such a great idea, and an experience you want your child to have, so much so that you’ll have a jam-packed day with a skipped nap. But chances are high that you might end up with a serious meltdown on your hands. Kids never see these experiences from the same rose colored lenses we do… They typically end up overstimulated, overtired, and in desperate need of a nap.
There’s always going to be a tradeoff. It exists for every scenario.
What I will say though, is that after a while, depending on a whole bunch of things I’ll share below, as well as a bunch of other factors, you can get away with missing/delaying nap/bedtime occasionally.
Some of those include:
What kind of child you have in regards to how they react to schedule changes and lack of sleep (among other things)
What their age is/ how many naps they have per day
How long they’ve been sleep trained
How you plan to adjust their sleep schedule to make up for the missed/delayed nap
I will share that right now, my kids are 3 and 21 months, and most Sundays, we go do an activity and naps do not happen at home. Sometimes, they’ll fall asleep in the car, sometimes they don’t. I try to make it so that we get home and get to an early bedtime, but that doesn’t always happen either. I deal with the consequences. Sometimes, those consequences are just a lot of tears/pushback at bedtime, and sometimes it is them waking earlier the next day. I try to plan ahead and aim for early bedtime Monday nights as well. At this stage in my life, and in my kids life, I am prioritizing activities for Sundays, and not their naps. And I’m okay with that. I’m comfortable in my ability to reroute them as needed. You may feel differently, and that’s okay.
Remember, that tradeoff will always be there, and it has to be worth it to you. And if you feel like it’s not worth it, but you have no choice, well you can always reach out to me to work out a plan for what you’ll do to manage :)