Help! No One Is Sleeping In Our House! - Weekend Wisdom

Question: We have two children adopted through the foster care system as infants - an almost 10-year-old (AudHD) and a 4.5-year-old (neurotypical). They both come into our room every night in the middle of the night, and it really disturbs my sleep and my husband's sleep. It seems like we've tried everything to get them to stop. Recently, we told them we were going to start locking our door, but then they just come and knock and knock until one of us gets up. If we try to put them back in their own beds, they make us lie down with them until they fall asleep - then I can't get back to sleep after that. Not sure how to handle this situation.

Resources:

• Sleep Issues with Adopted, Foster, or Relative Children
• Why Won't My Child Sleep?! (And What Can I Do?)
• Help! My Newly Placed Child is Regressing on Sleep

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

Welcome to Weekend Wisdom. I'm so glad you're here with us today. We're talking about sleep, probably one of the most commonly asked questions that we field from our community of adoptive and foster parents and kinship caregivers. My name is Tracy Whitney, and I'm the content director and podcast host for creatingafamily.org. Our listener named Rachel wrote in recently to ask us this question.
We have two children adopted through the foster care system as infants, an almost 10 year old with autism and ADHD and a four and a half year old who is pretty neurotypical. They both came into our room every night in the middle of the night and it really disturbs my sleep and my husband's sleep. It seems like we've tried everything to get them to stop coming in.
Recently, we told them that we were going to start locking our door, but then they just come and knock and knock and knock until one of us gets up. If we try to put them back in their own beds, they make us lay down with them until they fall asleep. And then I can't fall back to sleep after that. I'm not sure how to handle this situation. Thanks so much for considering us.
Hi, Rachel. Thank you so much for your thoughtful and honest question. I want to start by acknowledging how tough this is for you and your husband and your kids. Middle of the night wake ups can be...
exhausting and they can wear down even the most patient of parents. And when you've tried so many different things or you feel like you've tried everything and you still feel stuck, it's completely understandable that you are feeling frustrated on top of exhausted and you're kind of confused about where to go from here. Before we dive into any specific strategies or tips to help you out, I want to assure you that
It's okay that you and your kids are doing the very best that you can do right now. There's nothing wrong with what you're doing or what you've tried. You deserve to remind yourself of that. You've done the best that you could do thus far. Hopefully, we can talk through some suggestions and practical strategies that will help you all get some rest and continue improving the skills and tools that you've already demonstrated.
And the first thing that we want to start with is that you have described two very different children with very different needs and very different challenges. A nearly 10 year old who has autism and ADHD and a four and a half year old who's pretty neurotypical.
It makes sense that they have different needs and challenges and different responses to your sleep routines and your efforts to help them sleep. What's going to work well for one kid may not be what works well for the other.
That can be unsettling and confusing for you and for the kids. So we're going to talk about some kind of basic principles around the issues of sleep for neurodivergence, for trauma, and how they kind of all converge into strategies that you would implement in your home. And the first key principle that you want to remember is that your expectations should be ability-based, not age-based.
especially when we're talking maybe to parents who've not struggled with some of these things, we often hear them saying things like, well, they should be old enough to dot, dot, dot, or at this age, they should be able to dot, dot, dot.
But when you're working with neurodiversity and trauma history in the mix, your expectations of sleep and all the other parts of your parenting need to match the child's individual nervous system and life experiences, not the calendar and not developmental charts. So your 10-year-old with ADHD and autism
may have some sensory or executive function needs that make falling or staying asleep harder than, say, your four and a half year old. Your younger child may feel some insecurity or anxiety and may need connection overnight. The darkness of night can be very triggering and lonely, especially for young children.
Both of those responses that your children are having are actually very human and very typical for their life experiences and the other challenges or layers that are involved in their life story, even if it's resulting in an inconvenience of sleep deprivation for you and for them. So instead of thinking they should be sleeping through the night, try instead to think,
What does safety and rest look like for each individual child right now? The second important principle to think about around sleep and neurodivergence and trauma and so on is that habits, both good and bad, are contagious. You've already noticed something pretty important about that when you mentioned that when one child comes into your room, the other follows. Kids are experts at pattern recognition.
And they learn sleep habits by watching other people's sleep habits. So that means that setting or resetting one child's sleep patterns can potentially influence the other child for better or for worse. And you're already seeing some of that. This is especially true if both kids are light sleepers or if they're disrupted sleepers or if they're sharing the same room. Right now, their habit is nighttime waking.
leading to the family bed or the family room or a parent present for sleeping and then falling asleep together at the same time. Once these patterns are established, it becomes kind of their expected way to calm and go back to sleep. It becomes what their body and their brains know. So abrupt changes, such as locking your door, can trigger their distress signals.
repeated knocking and the anxiety and the escalation of the knocking and the yelling at the door and let me in let me in and it feels like resistance to you but inside the child's brain and body it may say I don't know how to feel safe right now
And I don't know how to calm myself down right now. And I need mom, but she's behind that locked door. And that's very distressing for a child. So instead of fighting these behaviors directly head on like that, I would suggest that you maybe consider gently shifting those patterns over a long period of time towards something that still feels safe for them, but supports more independent sleep for all of you.
Which leads to the third thing I would like you to consider, and that's a gentle reset of your nighttime routine. When any of us are stuck in a pattern, a full routine reset can help communicate a couple messages pretty clearly. And in your kid's case, a nighttime routine reset can tell them we are safe, we are preparing to rest, and this is what calm looks like for our family in this time of the day.
So a reset isn't really about punishing them or holding a rigid routine. Instead, it's about creating patterns of predictability, patterns of calming for everyone before bedtime and communicating clearly to each member of the family that everybody should know what to expect next. And I'm including you and your husband in this because your ability to model a calming reset routine.
of taking everything down a little bit, making predictable habits every single night kind of gives a boost to what you're trying to teach them. So they're seeing it in you and they're practicing it in their own bodies. And so when you practically implement a...
reset, here's what you might consider including in that reset. Number one, probably the most important, is establishing a consistent bedtime every single night, even on the weekends. And this sounds a little bit boring and this sounds a little bit...
kind of monotonous. But in this season, while you're trying to hit that reset button and reestablish healthy sleep patterns, it's really important. So establishing a consistent bedtime every night, even on the weekends. Second thing would be to create longer, more intentional wind down times that last 30, 45, even 60 minutes before bedtime.
That would include some calming activities that everyone in the family participates in. So that would be dimming the lights, quiet instrumental music, quiet conversations all snuggled up together about the day, very low sensory activities like reading out loud a chapter book, rocking in a rocking chair, cuddling on the couch.
Each parent performing specific parts of the routine to establish consistency and predictability and trust, offering a comfort object or some sort of transitional object that stays in their room and is specifically designated for resting time and sleeping time. For example, one of my children had a blanket that...
was specifically in the bedroom all the time just for resting time. Another child had a stuffed animal that they loved. Some families use pacifiers. Some people use those weighted stuffed animals or those weighted blankets. And then also include a simple reassuring phrase that you repeat every single night. You are safe. We are resting now. I will see you in the morning.
Any of those kinds of scripts that you can repeat every night as you're winding them down to a slower, gentler pace before the bedtime. This kind of reset doesn't...
guarantee immediate results. And it certainly doesn't guarantee perfection, but it does start to create some new internal rhythms or internal habits that tell your child nighttime is for rest. Mommy and daddy need rest too. Our bedroom is for sleep and I can have anxiety or big feelings, but I'm safe. Those are the kinds of messages you want your nighttime routine to communicate to your child.
A fourth thing to consider is to address just one element at a time. It is really easy because you're overwhelmed and sleep deprived to feel like you just have to change everything all at once. But the problem is that that can be really jarring for their little brains and bodies while they're trying to.
find their way forward and please you and get rested and participate in this process. So our big problems often need really small sequential fixes. Moving the needle just a little bit at a time will most likely yield more lasting changes because it doesn't throw any of you into distress or survival mode. And remember,
Kids who have experienced trauma or have neurodivergence or prenatal substance exposure, whatever, they often have higher levels of resistance or struggle with stress or discomfort or transitions, any of those things. So instead of trying to solve all of these.
big sleep challenges at once. Just pick one thing that feels most manageable and start there. Then be very consistent in how you address that particular challenge. So maybe your first focus would be to set a longer wind down calming routine every night. Take it from right now, it's 30 minutes. So next week, you're going to make it 40 minutes. And then the week after that, you're going to make it 45 or 50 minutes.
That would be the time that you're doing the slower, quieter music, quiet time before bed, a warm bath. The next could be to focus on your responses to their nighttime waking. And that would involve developing a very predictable script that both mom and dad consistently repeat, agree in advance with your partner that this is.
where you put them back to bed. This is how you put them back to bed. And this is how you talk to them about putting them back to bed. You could then, you know, take it up a notch and maybe include how to fade out your parental presence once you've put them back in bed. It could be that the first night or two, you stay in the room, kind of snuggled up with them. Maybe then the next night you just snuggle.
on the floor next to their bed, and then move closer to the door every couple nights, and then outside the room so that this child knows that you're still present, you're still involved, they can count on you, but they don't need you in the bed with them to get the rest that their body and their brains need.
These small, manageable changes can be sustainable for sleep-deprived parents, meaning you can do this, and they can also allow your child's nervous system to adapt and adjust slowly rather than reacting quickly and harsh and abruptly, which, again, would send that child's central nervous system into fight, flight, or freeze kind of survival mode.
The fifth thing to consider is how to communicate messages that your child needs to internalize. What we say, how we say it, and how we show it matters a lot to our kids, especially kids who are
pretty hypervigilant or have a higher responsiveness to stress and anxiety. So when they're working from a place of fear, or again, that anxiety or a difficult attachment process, or they're very dysregulated, they need to hear, you are safe. They need to hear, sleep is very important for your brain and your body. They need to hear, it's okay for you to rest in your own bed. And they need to hear, mommy and daddy need rest too.
And this is an important way we're all going to get some better rest. Messages like stop coming in or I'm going to lock the door on you feel like very simple statements to us and pretty straightforward solutions to a problem. However, our kids may interpret them as punishment or abandonment or neglect when their nervous system is completely dysregulated.
You want to aim for those messages that connect first and then guide them towards change. And number six, try to remember that progress is slow, but it's okay that it's slow. Real change of things like the strongholds of a nighttime habit, especially when they're tied to attachment or trauma or regulation, rarely happen overnight.
Excuse the pun. It's not a failure on your part. It's a signal that you're working with a nervous system rather than trying to override it or control it. Some nights you're going to see great progress. Other nights are going to feel like you took two steps back. And that's part of the process. And you have to just figure out how to get okay with that internally and just tell yourself, I'm in it with this kid for the long haul.
And I want this child to learn good, healthy sleep habits. I want to model good, healthy sleep habits. And so I'm going to be with them in the process of learning.
learning that and learning takes time. Through it all, try to remember sleep habits can and do change. Try to remember that your children are learning. Try to remember that you're teaching them intentionally how to be safe and how to rest. And try to remember that any small gains are true, real gains and that you can make progress with this. The goal is not to fix this child.
The goal is to get some sleep and you want to teach them how to feel safe and calm at night so that everyone can sleep. That will take patience and love and steady, consistent presence. You've clearly shown that you have that by hanging in there with them for so long, even while you're so sleep deprived. And I get it. It's so hard. But in the meantime, you need to remember to take good care of yourself.
Parenting from the deficit of sleep deprivation can make everything about parenting so much harder. Give yourself permission to ask for help. Get somebody who could do a grocery run for you so you can stay home and take a nap. Get somebody who might...
Put some extra meals in your freezer for you or a trusted friend or relative who can take the kids to the park. Every Saturday, you can nap. They can get pleasantly and comfortably exhausted. And then that gives you all kind of the steam to work through the next step of this reteaching process.
I hope this helped, Rachel. I remember a season of our adoption journey when my little one would only sleep with me wrapped around her. She slept on my chest and she needed both of my arms wrapped around her.
Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep that winter. She did. She slept great. I didn't get much sleep. And I felt like my shoulders and my neck were constantly knotted up in intense bunches. But she had some pretty significant medical trauma that we were working through. And those days that were most meaningful through it all.
were when I did let myself ask for help and I had friends who lifted the load with dinner or when my sister invited the kids over for an afternoon to play with their cousins so that I could take a nap while the toddler was taking a nap. So try to remember that this season doesn't last forever. Let other people in to help you where they can help you so that you can focus on resetting that nighttime routine. And thank you so much for your vulnerability in writing in to ask for help with this.
very hard sleep issues can be very polarizing for parents to talk about and so I just want to affirm that you're doing a great job you're doing important work one night at a time and I hope that you and your kids can get some good rest soon
Listeners, thank you for joining us today. If today's episode about sleep and sleep challenges resonated with you, I would love it if you would leave a comment about your own journey by tapping the response link wherever you're listening. Or if you're watching on YouTube, there's a link in the show notes. Let us know about your sleep journey with your adopted foster or kinship kids. Let us know what was the easy part of learning new sleep habits or what was the hardest part of learning new sleep habits.
We love hearing from you and we use your comments and your responses to help us continue to create relevant content for all of our listeners. So thanks for listening and I will talk to you all next week.