Cleaned and Formatted Transcript
[0:00 – 2:44]
Meg Faure (Intro): Today is an awesome episode for those of you who’ve got two little ones. But before I tell you what is coming up, I’m going to ask a favour of you. We’ve got lots of new people joining our podcast and listening in and it is my passion. We don’t get paid for this, we just do it because we really do love to bring you sense. So I’ve got a favour to ask from you. Please won’t you go and subscribe to the podcast because when you subscribe we start to rank and when that happens other mums can find us too. So let’s dive into what is on Sense by Meg Faure today. Well if you’ve ever tried to juggle two little ones, manage nap schedules and still find time for yourself, this is one that you’re going to want to listen to. Today we’re joined again by Nina Clark, our regular mum to now five and a half month old Josh and three year old Max. And we have an amazing chat about parenting two kids under four years old and we talk about sleep wins to mum guilt and everything in between. A couple of things that you’re going to learn about. We’re going to talk about sleep progress that you’re going to want to copy. There’s some really great nuggets there. I gave Nina some advice in a recent episode and she adapted my advice to fit her own rhythm and I really love what she did with it. We talk a little bit about managing guilt and juggling attention and then we talk about why boredom is so good for your child. Yep, you heard me right. We explore the surprising benefits of less structure and how a little boredom can boost creativity and independence in little ones. So three takeaways from today, you’re going to learn how to gently guide your little one towards independent sleep without tears. We’re going to look at how to ease the guilt of parenting when you’re trying to split your attention between siblings and also why unstructured time might actually be the very best thing for your little one. So tune in now for a dose of wisdom, empathy and some real world parenting support.
Announcer: Welcome to Sense by Meg Faure, the podcast that’s brought to you by ParentSense, the app that takes guesswork out of parenting. If you’re a new parent then you are in good company. Your host Meg Faure is a well-known OT, infant specialist and the author of eight parenting books. Each week we’re going to spend time with new mums and dads just like you to chat about the week’s wins, the challenges and the questions of the moment. Subscribe to the podcast, download the ParentSense app and catch Meg here every week to make the most of that first year of your little one’s life. And now meet your host.
Meg Faure: Welcome back mums and dads, always good to have you join us. And today we have our regular guest Nina Clark who has joined us. She has little Josh who is five and a half months old, can’t believe how the time is flying. And she’s going to be sharing a little bit with us around Josh today and also around the juggle of two. Welcome Nina.
[2:44 – 3:00]
Nina Clark: Hi Meg.
Meg Faure: It’s always good to have you back. How is the life of a mum of two, including a five and a half month old?
Nina Clark: Yeah, so we have just come out of school holidays now and there were quite a few days that I was on my own with them and it was a big time juggle.
[3:00 – 8:52]
Nina Clark: I must say I am incredibly grateful for the couple of hours that Max goes to school in the mornings. He loves it, so there’s that, thank goodness. But it does also just mean that I have a little bit more time to just really focus on Josh and then I can give my focus to Max in the afternoon. I think I found the two biggest issues for me with the juggle was A, the guilt and especially towards Max because Josh is now at that age where he really needs full-on attention the whole time and physically but also like stimulation-wise, emotionally, he just wants to see people the whole time. And as we said previously, he is such a social butterfly, so don’t put him in front of like something that’s not a person, that’s not going to fly. And he wants to be in the action, so as soon as he is looking at a person’s face or like Max running around or whatever it is, he is as happy as a clam. So there’s been a lot of carrying him around in the carrier during the day just so that he can like see everything that I’m doing. He just, he won’t be left on the mat on his own. It’s yeah, it’s pretty full-on. So the guilt is that there’s constantly me having to go, Max, you need to just go do a little bit of self-play. Mommy needs to do XYZ with Josh or you know, can you just get your food, like sort yourself out or whatever it is, you know. So I constantly feel like I’m having to, you know, have the big brother, like bigger than he may be. On the other side, I also just struggle with the naps and like, especially because Max is still on and off naps sometimes, so sometimes he does need to go down for one. So it’s, you know, and then Josh, he’s still on usually three naps a day, sometimes two. You know, that means that there’s a lot of like putting down of kids during the day and it’s often not at the same time. So like logistically organise that with like trying to take this kid for a play date and you know, then this one needs to sleep in the car and da da da. But yeah, no, and the juggle is real and you know, you speak about a couple of things there that make me think. The one is the maternal guilt and unfortunately that is just, it’s absolutely rife when you’ve had a second baby because that second baby takes up so much of your time, you know, and I think on a couple of fronts, one thing is that Max had you, I mean, really unadulterated for so many years, you were so focussed in on him and so he got a really good chunk. So I think, you know, you always need to remember that and you also need to remember that the gift of a sibling is that they bring companionship as well. So while they do split your attention, they bring other advantages, which are not evident yet because Josh can’t play with Max, but it will come. But yeah, that maternal guilt is really, really rough. You know, a couple of things that I actually can maybe just give you some ideas there. The one is, I know, I think you and I have spoken about it before, but if we haven’t, I have spoken about it before in the podcast and that’s watch, wait and wonder time. And it’s a time of the day where you just do 15 minutes with one, with a child, just one-on-one with no cell phone. And it’s an incredible theory. It was developed by a psychologist called Elizabeth Muir. And it was actually developed as a play therapy strategy to help children who had behaviour difficulties and emotional engagement issues. So it wasn’t actually developed for typically developing children, but it is just such an incredible technique. What you do is you create a little box that is Max’s box. And it is the things that go in are just his most special things. And you can decorate it and make a little activity out of it and ask him what he wants to put in. And then at a certain time of day, usually when Josh is down or when your nanny’s there and you’ve got another set of hands, you say, right, it’s Max’s time. And you literally get down the box. You put your cell phone out the room. That’s really important. And you just watch him and let him play at whatever he wants. So you don’t kind of pick up if there’s dinosaur in there. You don’t pick up the dinosaur. You just watch him. And when you look at the videos of mums doing it, they find it incredibly difficult the first few times because we have this such a sense that we have to direct play and make play happen. And when you don’t actually make it happen, the first thing Max will do is he’ll look at you like, what do you expect from me? Why are you just sitting there? And then as he gets going, he’ll start to share things with you. And that’s the watch. And the wait is wait for him to draw you in, which he will do. He’ll pass something to you and then wonder at what he’s thinking. And if you just do 15 minutes of that every day, it’s an incredible strategy. And it’s been proven to help. I know that he doesn’t have sleep problems, but it’s been proven to help with sleep problems, with separation anxiety, with sibling rivalry, and then also just with emotional engagement. And you might just see a little bit of a shift in, first of all, maybe how you feeling and second of all, how needy he is as well. So I think that’s an awesome thing to put in. And then the other thing is that you mentioned that sometimes you say to him, he needs to go and play by himself or have self-play or whatever. There’s actually a great strategy for that. And that is, you know, sometimes we, we often feel, and particularly mums actually of only children, but obviously he’s not an only child, but we often feel like that we have to permanently be entertaining them. But what is quite cool is that if you actually give him an imaginary play box of some sort, like a dress up box or whatever it is, and you actually take five minutes to sit with him and give him an idea in his head, you’ll find that he’ll actually take it. So you can say, let’s build a farm with these blocks and let’s bring the animals. And you just spend five minutes doing the setup. And then you leave him with a few questions like, what can the animals do today? And then you get quiet and then you watch him as he starts to play. And then often they’ll actually take it on their own. And it’s usually with imaginary play at this age. It’s not with things like puzzles usually, because that’s too tricky. But certainly with imaginary play, they can often get going if you are able to do that.
[8:52 – 12:56]
Meg Faure: Have you, I don’t know if you’ve tried any of those two techniques.
Nina Clark: Definitely, definitely. And we’ve actually tried to, I think towards the later parts of my pregnancy, my husband especially was very good about like trying to foster the self-play thing, because as you said, I had so many like good years with Max, where it was the two of us, as he calls it, with-play. Mummy, can we do with-play? Where the two of us play together. And I think he sort of foresaw that we, that I obviously wouldn’t be able to do it as easily going forward. So there was a lot of like, you know, trying to just sort of create a space for him to do self-play. And now he has actually become so incredible at that. And the one thing that I find that like actually extends his self-play quite a bit. So we bought him a Tony box about a year ago and he wasn’t, wasn’t like massively into it in the beginning, but now the past couple of months, it is just incredible how if we put a Tony on for him, that sort of goes on in the background. And then it just extends his, because he’s listening to that and he’s pottering around. And I think it also just like, you know, fosters more and more imaginative things going on in his head that he can go on for ages. And actually yesterday morning he woke up early and he didn’t even come into our room. He literally, which I was like boggled by because that would be a go-to, but he put a Tony on because he got some new ones yesterday and he just like plotted it out right around in his room, I think for like a good hour and a half.
Meg Faure: I didn’t want to mention Tony box because it’s not accessible to everyone, but I want to, now that you’ve touched on it, I want to tell people what it is. It is my absolute favourite toy. And so if, you know, if any mums are looking for a gift for their one year old, because it can start from one year old for their birthday, it is an investment, but it’s probably one of the best investments you can make. So mums, I have always treated it as a go-to because it’s a real opportunity to take children away from screen time without you having to be fully involved. So what a Tony’s box is, it’s a little red box with a little magnetic section up on the top that is almost like a holding point, but that holding point where you put the story doesn’t have a shape. So a one year old and it has a magnet. So literally you can put any of the stories on top of that little magnetic spot and it’ll start playing the story or the songs. So it’s incredible in that it doesn’t need high level cognitive and fine motor control. It really doesn’t. You can start from super little. And then a Tony’s box will then play. So each of the little stories has its own little character. So you can get all the Julia Donaldson characters and Winnie the Pooh. I actually was listening to, funnily enough, I was listening to Winnie the Pooh last night because I’m with one of my friend’s children and she’s one and a half and she has used it since she was a year old. We actually bought it from her from the UK. But it is just the most fabulous thing. And then you can put a Peppa Pig on or you can put a Frozen character and it’ll either sing the song or it’ll give you the story. And it is a fabulous thing. So mums, if you’re looking for entertainment for your children that is not screen-based, this is it. I absolutely love Tony’s boxes. They’re fabulous. So good one, Nina. Very good.
[12:56 – 15:46]
Meg Faure: And you know, it’s also, how old is Max at the moment? Is he two and a half or three?
Nina Clark: He’s three and three months now.
Meg Faure: So he’s also, what’s also awesome about him at this age is that his imagination has kicked in. And so he’s able to do that self-play. I really loved his word with-play and then self-play. Like that is, I mean, I’m definitely going to be writing a blog on that. With-play is, it actually is the secret sauce to developing self-play because as I said, you give them those five minutes and then they can then take it. So I do think as much as it’s tough for you and you’ve got the maternal guilt, I think you are doing a great job, Nina. But I think I have told you that before. I think it’s just sometimes we don’t always remember that. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it was quite interesting, Nina. I have to just tell you an interesting story. I started a Substack about three weeks ago. For people who don’t know what a Substack is, it’s basically a blogging platform. It’s a social media blogging platform. And I have started now blogging daily. So if you don’t want to be spammed, then don’t subscribe to me. But if you do want to have some wisdom that comes through, you can always delete it. It comes into your email inbox and it really has been a very cool process. But I was going through other people’s Substacks this week and there was a mum on Substack who basically said she wrote a blog about her week and she’s a single mum and she said, like, I’m failing at motherhood. That was what her blog was about. And she wrote this thing about how she’s failing at motherhood. She has events scheduled for every day for her child. She never gets to take them. She’s at home with him. He must be bored. She went through this whole sequence of all the ways that she was failing. And I just went back and I said to her, my gosh, nonsense, you’re so winning. Because actually, by not overscheduling them and by just having boredom time and time with them at home, even when they’re not being stimulated, it’s such a gift. So, you know, I think it’s tough in the school holidays because we feel like they need to be entertained and we feel like we need to be doing something with them. But actually, sometimes less is more. So, yeah, I think I said it to her that she’s winning and I think you are too.
Nina Clark: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think you’re so right. I think for the mums, less is more. But for the kids as well, I think sometimes when their days are very full and they’re getting encarted around to all the things that we think that they want to do, but actually they don’t want to be around.
[15:46 – 17:58]
Meg Faure: And, you know, to that point, I mean, I actually have a little rule of thumb that I use with mums as advice. And I always say to them, only schedule one external activity per year of the child’s age. In other words, if they’re one, just have one extra activity, like one mums and tots or one aqua tots. If they’re two, only two. And if they’re three, only three. And, you know, I think the temptation ends up being that we think, oh, they must be bored. So then we’ve suddenly got swimming on a Monday, play ball on a Tuesday, clamber club on a Wednesday. And, you know, Mandarin lessons and stupid things. I don’t know. We just do overschedule them. And actually it’s frenetic for us. And actually they often do better when they’re not having too much. The difficulty comes and, you you know, we always knew this when we went on holiday with our kids, we went to every year of our children’s lives, we went to a farm that had absolutely no technology. And our rule was all phones, except for one for emergency purposes, were left in the cubbyhole of the rental car that we’d driven to the farm with. And then when we, and that was left at the clubhouse, then we get into a Land Rove and we go down to our lodge. And so our kids literally had no technology. And for about 24 hours, the irritability, bickering, fighting was just untenable. It was so difficult. But once you push through that, that’s when the magic happens and they can move into, you know, and that’s why I’ve always said to mums that boredom is the biggest gift you can give your child because boredom breeds mischief and creativity. And those are two things that we want in our children. So, yeah, it’s as hard as it is at the time, sometimes just letting them be bored, they get up to nonsense and it’s a good thing.
Nina Clark: Yeah. I love that mischief. Yeah. So true. So sweet.
[17:58 – 20:25]
Meg Faure: And I know that on our last conversation and this podcast will play quite soon after the last one was recorded, although you and I have had a little bit of a break because we’ve both been away. But we were we had encountered quite a tough time with Josh’s sleep. He didn’t want to be put down for any day sleeps. He would only do contact naps in the day that he started to. Well, he’d always wanted to be rocked to sleep and held to sleep in the evening. And then he started to wake up for that in the middle of the night. And we had quite a brutal session in some respects in that I kind of laid down the I want to say gold standard, although there’s not really a gold standard. It was it was but it is the route to get the one sleeping. And I know that that advice was probably didn’t sit comfortably all the time. And it doesn’t for a lot of mums. And I just wanted to know a little bit about what your sleep journey has done over the course of the last few weeks.
Announcer: This episode is brought to us by Parent Sense, the all in one baby and parenting app that help you make the most of your baby’s first year. Don’t you wish someone would just tell you everything you need to know about caring for your baby, when to feed them, how to wean them, and why they won’t sleep? Parent Sense app is like having a baby expert on your phone guiding you to parent with confidence. Get a flexible routine, daily tips and advice personalised for you and your little one. Download Parent Sense app now from your app store and take the guesswork out of parenting.
Meg Faure: And I just wanted to know a little bit about what your sleep journey has done over the course of the last few weeks.
Nina Clark: Yeah, no, it has been a while. And I was actually trying to think back to like what was happening over the first couple of weeks after our chat because it has not changed. Obviously, that sleep journey is never linear. I’m almost hesitant to talk about it because I was saying to a friend the other day, you know, the minute you say, Oh, no, you know, actually, everything’s going quite well now. You know, if things are going to go to the supper game, excuse my language. But anyway, but we’ll talk about it. He did go through a patch still, I think, after our talk where it was up and down. I must say, being the sort of, you know, unstructured, fly by the seat of my pants kind of parent that I am, I, as per usual, sort of took the things that I felt that I could implement logistically quite easily. And that I was happy to implement as well. And then some of the things I didn’t. And potentially, that meant that it took a little bit longer to rectify the situation than what it would if I was sort of, you know, sticking to the recipe. But the few things that I did do was, and I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily putting him down drowsy, but awake, because I do feel like I can sense when he is, has like actually fallen asleep, you know, like the breathing starts going deeper, and the eyes are closed. He probably is, you know, still drowsy, she’s not like in his deep sleep. So I still like rock him a little bit to sleep, but it’s never for a long, maybe for a minute tops. And then he is, let’s call it drowsy, but not fully, fully asleep. And then I have been putting him down. So I would say that’s probably the biggest change. And one that he’s actually taken to really beautifully. So he is now mostly sleeping on his own.
[20:25 – 22:45]
Nina Clark: And I actually feel like he sort of tends to, you know, for the days that I’m like, oh, I don’t know, should I be holding him a little bit longer? Or, you know, I sort of just get comfortable holding him. I feel like his body starts almost like pushing him out, himself out a little bit, or he’ll then wake up after 20 minutes if I do put him down a little bit further on in the sleep. So if I do it, as soon as he drops out, then he will do a 45 minute or an hour and a half nap on his own. The other thing that I was doing was not feeding him to sleep. And again, it almost felt like that was a natural transition, because I would have still been quite happy to do that. And to be very frank with you, I do still do that during the night, even though he’s mostly just doing sort of two, two wake ups a night, so two quick feeds, and he goes back down again. But for his dropping off to sleep, feeds or parts of the day, I don’t actually feed him to sleep anymore. So I’ll feed, and then I’ll put the dummy and do a bit of rocking for a minute. And then he tends to settle down.
Meg Faure: Well, that’s incredible, Nina, that’s a huge shift. I mean, compared to where he was, that is really a huge shift. Because that feeding to sleep is actually, that’s the trickiest.
Nina Clark: Yeah, yeah. Because then, because then it’s as you said, you know, he’s so used to like the comfort, the moving of the body, the heat of it and all of that. So he just wants that for the whole sleep. The other thing that I’ve also been doing is maybe just to lean into the fact that I feel like his wake windows are longer than what the sort of average recommended wake windows are for his age. I know that he’s going up to the six month mark where it feels like two to three hours is now more the case. He seems to sit on the three, sometimes just over three hour mark. And that I felt like he was also being properly tired instead of me trying to like force the issue by getting on at the recommended time. And then this oak was just not interested.
[22:45 – 24:37]
Meg Faure: Yeah. And of course, he is a social butterfly. And so social butterflies, I think they do have slightly longer awake times. They do. But they also do not give signals of tiredness because they just they’re so wired so that what happens with them is that if you are extending the awake times and they’re coping well with it and they’re settling, then go with it. But if they’re becoming overstimulated and more difficult to get to sleep, then pull it back and go more with the book. But, you know, I think a couple of things that I love about what you’ve done and I knew you would is you’ve definitely made it your own. And it’s so interesting because we have another mum who I’ve been who’s been one of my regular guests. And and she has a very different style of parenting. That’s Julia. And she is much more by the book and much more not go by the fly by the seat of her pants, you know, as you do. And I love that, you know, you both illustrate that both parenting styles are absolutely fabulous and you will get there with the sleep as well. So that is really, really good news. And then I just wanted to pick up on something that you said just now, and people couldn’t see your body language, which you said that sometimes when you’re rocking him, it looked to me like he sometimes maybe arches his back and is ready to go down. And that is such an incredibly important signal to watch for, because we often miss that one. And so mums, if you if you do have a little one who needs to contact nap or rock to sleep, try and watch for it’s almost like a little arching. And that’s often your signal that now is the time to put them down. And we often overshoot that because now we reposition them and we try and kind of rock them further. But if you can watch for that very subtle signal, it’s a great signal that right time for them to go down, which it sounds like you’re doing.
[24:37 – 26:40]
Nina Clark: Yeah, the other thing before I forget that I am also doing that you recommended was to if I hit the way the end of the wake window and he still doesn’t seem like he’s tired, then I’ll give him the dummy, put him in the cot and and just, you know, give him a kiss and just bail, basically. And that often because sometimes he still needs another 10 minutes in his cot where he’s chatting. And he usually does, you know, he’s happy as Larry playing with his little bunny faffing around. And then at some stage, he’ll start crying out. And even if I leave it for 30 seconds or so, just for him to have that little bit of like a tiny upset, I’m into the rain. And then suddenly he’s like, OK, now I’m ready. It almost just, you know, that’s just that little bit of like that last bit of tiredness to push him over the edge. So I’ve been doing that as well.
Meg Faure: And I remember that very, very clearly with my baby, number three, who was my more tricky one. She had terrible reflux and actually had some dairy intolerances or dairy allergies, actually. And so she was of my three little ones. She was my most unsettled, not terribly, but she was. And I can remember making the call of 12 weeks that I would do that. And it was a game changer. And so, you know, for mums who’ve got 12 week olds, it’s such it’s really such a clever thing to do. You put them down at the end of the awake time. You if you do have a cot vibrator for your cot or for your pram, a little wobble, wobble machine of sorts, there are lots of different ones. Put it on and then let them let it kind of rock them a little bit and leave them completely alone. And as I said last time, one of two things will happen. The one is that they actually will surprise you and fall asleep, which if you started at 12 weeks, you can then avert the whole sleep regression thing because they’ve learned to self-soothe. Or option two is that they do exactly what you’re talking about, Nina, and that’s that they start to cry. You listen for it, but you go and you comfort them and then they’re really ready to go to sleep. So it is a very good, like almost like a little mental defrag. So, yeah, very good idea.
[26:40 – 28:56]
Meg Faure: And then two of the things I just thought that that I’ve mentioned that I haven’t been able to do that you did recommend. So we haven’t actually moved them out of our room yet. I think it’s just I found we tried to and then I just found the going to his room to do any kind of a feed or a settle. And this was actually we tried to do it during a point where he was still waking up more often than twice a night. This was so much harder for me. Then I was just totally awake when I was getting up and going to another room. But I think we also found that actually he wasn’t waking up when we were coming into the room and, you know, putting on a light or whatever to make our way into bed. It was actually late in the night. And so we sort of made the call that actually it doesn’t feel like it’s us necessarily wake up and interrupting his sleep. And then the other thing that I’ve really been struggling with is to go into the room quite a bit earlier. I can remember you were sort of giving a time frame of like try for an hour before his bedtime at night to go into the not to leave the room, no distractions and for 15 minutes before the nap. And I find that very hard because especially because him and Max tend to actually go down at the same time. So there’s a lot of them bathing together and, you know, still loudness from the toddler while the baby’s calm down with that. But thankfully, it doesn’t seem to have really affected his sleep. But those things that I’ve been struggling with.
Nina Clark: Yeah. So I mean, to do it to do it with a room that your child sleeps in. I mean, that’s that whatever works is absolutely fine. Certainly, you know, to follow through on that. I do think that sometimes our social butterflies are the ones who are going to wake up. So you just do need to watch it. And at some point, you’ll know when your gut will tell you when you’re ready for him to go into his own room. And in that defrag time, it is a difficult one, particularly if you have a first time mum. I mean, not a first time mum, a mum on your own, single single mother, you know, that you haven’t got a nanny around or dad around for bed bath time because it’s impossible. You have to do both kids together then. So, yeah, I mean, I do get it. I do think, though, that I mean, and especially for social butterflies, if you can keep him in his room, even if it’s for half an hour, it will make a difference because long term social butterflies get more and more tricky with leaving the room like they don’t want to go down because the world is too exciting. So, you know, if he thinks that the world still exists after he goes down into his after bath time, he is going to push the boundaries and it’ll become increasingly so in the toddler years. So even if you can do 30 minutes, you know, maybe bath them together, maybe do a story for in Max’s bed for them both, then put Max’s, give him his Tony box to listen to another story and then go and do your half an hour on your own with Josh. If you can do that, you know, just you really don’t want you don’t want him to know that there’s like a TV on or anything like that on that he can actually escape the room for.
[28:56 – 29:32]
Meg Faure: You know, it does get more tricky because I think their personalities are actually quite different. And my sense is, is Max a slow to warm up or is he a settled baby?
Nina Clark: He’s not actually slow to warm up usually. You know, obviously, if he’s tired or hungry.
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