I am having alternate feelings of success and guilt today. My baby finally slept through the night. She did have a little help though in the form of chamomile tea.
I had better clarify that my baby is 13 years old. To date, she has never had a good night’s sleep. She has had chiropractic care that helped a little, but mostly I have spent the last 13 years trying to force her into bed at night, and trying to get up up in the morning just a few short hours after she finally fell to sleep.
Because we homeschool, I have been able to allow her to follow her own rhythm, but in recent months her rhythm has become extreme. Left to her own devices, she would go to bed around 2 am and get up at noon. There is no way the rest of our family could exist around such a schedule, regardless of how “nocturnal” she claims to be.
The situation has recently become urgent as we must wake up at 6am once a week to get her to her homeschool program, on the other side of the county, where she has a FULL DAY of Fine Arts classes. The day starts with Women’s Chorus at 8am and ends with Drama Club around 7pm. There is no way someone with her sleeping habits could get through such a day and stay alert… In fact, she hasn’t.
A brief conversation with the director made it abundantly clear that intervention was necessary. Her suggest was to try chamomile tea or melatonin, two herbs she had been giving to her children and her mother.
I will say that I don’t believe in excessive medication, but after 13 years of her not getting much sleep, I was willing to try. So last night I went to the grocery store and picked up some sleepy time tea with chamomile and sent my daughter to bed with a cup at 10pm. To my astonishment, she did not spend the next few hours wandering around the house, clunking around in the kitchen, and going in and out of the bedroom. She went to sleep.
On top of that, when I woke her at 8am, after 10 hours of sleep, she was bright eyed and bushy tailed, and not in the least bit groggy or tired.
In an ideal world, we will be able to use the chamomile tea to move my daughters sleep cycle to something more normal, and not to use every night to artificially put her to sleep. I would hate to get her into the habit of taking supplements to go to sleep. All I can envision is the tragedy of Micheal Jackson taking anesthesia to go to sleep, which ultimately killed him. I don’t want my daughter in that position in 40 years. Still, I could not ignore the fact that she needed some intervention now.
~If you liked this you should also read my other posts at the home blog, the homeschooling blog, the parents blog, and the frugal blog. You can read my recent posts here.
Also read: Why won’t my teens go to sleep?
Do your kids have trouble falling asleep, and what do you use to help them?
Do you believe someone should give children supplements to put them to sleep?
At what age it is appropriate?