Sleeping, 1934 – Ursula Wise responds to a reader concerned that she is spoiling the child if she stays with him until he falls asleep. Is it a slippery slope?

April 4, 1934 in Nursery World

Sleeping

“Happy Nannie” writes: “I have noticed several times in your pages when you answered queries as to how to manage children who cry when put to bed, you have advised the mother or nurse to stay in the room until the child falls asleep. I wonder how many mothers and nurses have insisted that once one starts to do that one has to go on literally for years? I thought that myself until recently – and I thought it might perhaps interest you to hear of my experience. I have one charge, aged nineteen months. He cannot walk yet, and does not talk very much, but clearly understands all that is said to him, and also is clever with his fingers. He was fairly good at bedtime until, unfortunately, a few weeks ago he had to have an operation for appendicitis. While he was in the hospital he was very good (all the more remarkable as in the usual way he cannot bear strangers), and I believe he never cried until I went to see him three days before he was coming home – and then he cried when I left him. After he came home, he grizzled and cried at bedtime. I never stayed with him then, but he used to stay in the next room where he could hear me. Also every night at some time he would wake up screaming – and I could only quieten him by walking up and down with him. He would stay awake for two hours or more, and if I attempted to put him down, or even to take him into my bed there would be more screams. This went on for a wee, and then we came to stay with his grannie. I felt that it was impossible to let him cry at all at bedtime in someone else’s house, and so on when I put him to bed, I gave him his two favourite soft toys as usual, and then sat in the room – not too near him, but where he could see me – until he went to sleep. I did that every night, never taking any notice of him – and not only did he always go to sleep happily, but there was no screaming in the night. Sometimes he started grizzling, but stopped and settled down again as soon as I spoke to him. And now he mostly sleeps through the night quietly until he wakes at 5 a.m. I am now very pleased to be able to tell you that after staying with him until he went to sleep every night for a week, I then started leaving him alone again, with happy results. He talks to his toys happily until he falls asleep. I also had trouble with him over his daytime sleep, but that was overcome by staying with him and it is now possible to leave him alone again.

            I am not at all surprised to hear that the help you gave your charge when he was struggling with the great anxiety due to the operation and hospital experience has helped him to settle down happily and become serene again. I have found over and over again that this sort of help, given in the right way when the child most needs it, does not make the child dependent on the adult permanently. Indeed, it gives him independence and contentment far more quickly than leaving him to scream, or staying with him under protest and in such a way as to make him feel he is bad for wanting it, will ever do. And this applies just as much when the child’s distress arises from other causes too - not only such severe experiences as an operation. Sometimes a temporary anxiety, that shows itself in night terrors or in inability to settle to sleep without mother or nurse, may spring from some source of emotional conflict – jealousy about the new baby or other children, or the child’s fear of his own angry impulses, as well as from really frightening external causes. Sometimes it is hard to discover the cause. But whatever the source of the anxiety, it has been found by wise mothers and nurses that the quickest and easiest way to help the child over it is to give the comfort of their presence freely and ungrudgingly for the time the child needs it. This is no more a case of “spoiling” a child than giving him a special diet or a suitable medicine for a physical ill is “spoiling him”; or than it “spoils him” to help him sit up before he can walk.


It does “spoil” him when it is given grudgingly, as the outcome of a tussle between the adults, so that the child knows there is little love with it, and feels he has no right to it. Then his guilt about forcing his will on the adult makes him all the more afraid, and so he has to go on seeking this comfort longer than he would otherwise do. It is the attitude of the mother or nurse that makes the most of the difference. If the child is sure of the feeling that the love of the mother or nurse is unshakenly there, he can soon learn to do without their physical presence. But if he feels he has turned them against him, made them impatient and angry, then he becomes tyrannical and petulant until he gets his own way. A quiet, calm, assured willingness to help him whilst he is at the height of his fears does not have this effect. It is true that children differ in the length of time they take to get over these attacks of anxiety. Your little charge obviously has very great powers of recuperation, and many children would take longer to get free form the frightening experience he has just had, even with such skilled help as you gave. But whether or not any child becomes tyrannically dependent on the presence of mother or nurse does depend to a much larger extent than is commonly realise on the way in which such help is given.