There are some things about being a parent that have come easily to me and others that remain a mystery. Soothing my children after they get a boo-boo: EASY! Getting my toddler to sleep through the night: MISERABLE MYSTERY! Oh, I've read the books and tried it all and some of it works some of the time, but none of it works all of the time.
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Ugh! The worst part is that every time I see the written promise of successfully getting my toddler to sleep through the night, I gobble it up only to be terribly dissatisfied. In the June issue of Pediatrics, the article: "Genetic and Environmental Influences on Daytime and Nighttime Sleep Duration in Early Childhood,"shares the results of a study done in Quebec, Canada. Guess what useful information I gathered from it that I can apply to getting my kid to sleep through the night? Nothing, nada, zip, zilch!!!!
Basically, I learned (again) that some sleep patterns are genetic and that environment also plays a factor. Oh for crying out loud, tell me something I couldn't have figured out on my own!
Supposedly this childhood sleep study provides the "first indication that early childhood daytime sleep duration may be driven by environmental settings, whereas the variance in consolidated nighttime sleep duration is largely influenced by genetic factors with a critical environmental time-window influence at ∼18 months." No kidding!
I don't have a Ph.D. or anything, but I kinda of sorta know that if I put my child down to nap in a comfortable dim room with maybe some white noise going on, that they will be more prone to taking a nap than if I put them next to a jackhammer in bright sunlight.
What a waste of my time!
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