Five Tips for Sleepovers at the Grandparents
/“What are you looking forward to most?”
This is usually one of the questions I ask parents when I start working with them. It helps them visualize what life will be like in just a couple of weeks when their baby is sleeping well through the night and taking good naps.
For most parents, they just want their baby to get the sleep they need to be happy and healthy, and naturally, they are also looking forward to sleeping more themselves!
However, once they’ve moved past the first few blissful mornings when they wake up feeling well rested and unstoppable because their baby is actually sleeping, they start discover that having a baby that sleeps well brings a whole host of other opportunities!
And number one among them is usually the ability to leave their child overnight with the grandparents or a family member.
There’s something special about sleepovers for sure. Spending the night somewhere outside of your home has a very intimate quality to it. Whether you’re a young kid spending the night at a friend’s house, the first time you and your partner sleep in the same bed, or the first time you stay in a hotel on your own, sleeping somewhere forges an emotional connection, and for grandparents, having their grandchild sleep in their home is special. It’s a reminder of their days as new parents and a chance to just soak in all that love when there’s a baby in the house.
For parents, this is an opportunity to go out on a well-deserved date night! Most parents I work with haven’t enjoyed that luxury since the day they brought baby home from the hospital, whether that was 3 months ago or 3 years, so taking advantage of a reliable, enthusiastic, (and usually free!) overnight babysitter provides them with a chance to reconnect in a way they haven’t enjoyed for far too long.
But before we get too ahead of ourselves, there is some groundwork to be done here before you drop your little one off at your parents’ place. You’ve completed stage one, coach your baby, so now it’s time for stage two. Coach your parents.
So obviously some grandparents are going to be completely awesome, wonderful, and fully compliant with whatever you tell them to do with their grandchild.
But not all of them.
Some grandparents have very, shall we say, entrenched views on parenting.
It can be a bit of a balancing act to insist that your parents respect your little one’s schedule and sleeping arrangements while still respecting their role as experienced and awesome caregivers, so today, I’d like to give you a few tips on how to do exactly that so your whole family, including those beloved members outside of your home, can benefit.
1. Respect Your Elders
Above all, remember that these are not rookies – they have been through everything you’re going through now, so even though you may need to establish some ground rules, don’t approach it the same way you would a teenage babysitter. Demonstrating confidence in their abilities will help ensure that, whatever rules you do lay down, they’ll be adhered to.
2. Be honest!
I see so many parents trying to play parenthood off as if they’ve always got everything under control, even with their own parents. I mean, if anyone knows how tough raising a child is, it’s grandparents, so don’t be shy to let them know how difficult it was to function when your baby was waking up every hour at night and how hard you’ve worked to remedy the situation. Understanding the emotional investment you’ve put into teaching your little one to sleep well will help them feel a personal commitment to the cause.
3. Explain the Incentives
Grandparents crave interaction with their grandkids. And who could blame them…smiles and giggles from a baby are wonderful to anyone, but to that baby’s grandparents, they’re simply the best. As such, they tend to want to keep baby awake for longer than recommended. (This is especially true in the case of newborns, who can typically only handle about 45 to 60 minutes of awake time before they need to go back down for a nap). My suggested approach to this situation is to explain the “long game” incentive of keeping baby on their schedule. In short, if every time you pick baby up from their house, they’re cranky and overtired, you’re going to be reluctant to leave them there! If, on the other hand, baby is happy and rested every time you pick them up, you’re going to hand that baby over to them pretty much any time they’re willing.
4. Share Your Experience
If you’ve already got your baby sleeping well at night and napping well during the day, then you know what a difference it makes to their overall disposition. Personally, I could not believe the improvement in my babies moods once we had gotten the whole sleep situation figured out. Parenting was exponentially more enjoyable when my little one was basically always content. So, make sure you let your parents know how much more enjoyable their whole day and night with their grandchild will be if they just adhere to the schedule. Laying down the law and making ultimatums around bedtime and nap schedules is much less effective than appealing to their caring, nurturing tendencies.
5. Liken Sleeping with Feeding
If there’s one thing a grandmother can’t tolerate, it’s a hungry baby. Putting sleep on par with feeding priority-wise can help ensure that the same level of dedication gets devoted to getting baby down for naps and to bed on time. Therefore, when you’re going over the babysitting guidelines, try to avoid getting into too many fine details and just stress how important those two things are when they’re taking care of their grandchild.
Bonus tip! Help them set up the room where baby will be sleeping to ensure the sleep environment is as ideal as possible. If you’re baby uses white noise, bring it! If they wear a sleep sack, bring it! Make sure the room is as dark as possible. You can put up garbage bags on the windows if needed, buy travel blinds, or invest or rent a SlumberPod (from moi!)
One last thing I’d like to mention because I think it’s super important. There’s a good chance that even with all your prep work and their best intentions, your parents might end up sabotaging things a bit. If baby wakes up at night and cries, for example, they might respond immediately and feed them back to sleep. Or they might allow your toddler to sleep in their bed with them. They may hold them and rock them to sleep at bedtime.
I know this can cause some anxiety for a parent who’s invested a lot of time, effort, and emotional capital into establishing those great sleep habits. However, I want to reassure you that there’s typically no need to panic and call off any future sleepovers. Children, even young babies, are surprisingly good at recognizing different sleeping environments and compartmentalizing their sleep, so just because they get rocked to sleep at grandma’s place doesn’t mean that they’re going to revert to that expectation when you get them home. If they’ve developed some strong independent sleep skills, they should back to normal pretty much immediately.
So don’t lose your mind if your mom tells you she let baby fall asleep on her chest. A gentle suggestion that she does not do it all the time, combined with the concession that you know how hard it is to resist a baby falling asleep on you, should be all that’s needed.
