Being relaxed about your toddler's daytime sleep helps create healthy night-time sleep patterns

Parents often receive worrying messages which aren’t true or helpful about their toddler's sleep. Two things might then happen when you're worrying a lot about your toddler's daytime sleep.

• Your attention might narrow down onto sleep. It's easy to find yourself wearing a sleep lens, thinking of the whole day's plans in relation to sleep, always wondering when your toddler should next be napping. After a while, this narrowing of attention worsens exhaustion, and is miserable.

• Long daytime naps can make the nights unnecessarily broken in a few weeks time, disrupting your toddler's body clock.

I’d like to invite you take off the sleep lens and live the days wearing a sensory motor lens. This means turning your attention to thinking about your little one's sensory motor needs, as well as your own sensory enjoyment and emotional needs.

It means focussing on pleasurable activities outside the house which are satisfying to you, usually with plenty of walking thrown in, all the while experimenting with your two toddler sleep superpowers, flexible feeds (depending on how you're feeding milk and the age of your toddler) and rich sensory motor nourishment, to dial your toddler down.

This way, you're not trying to get your toddler to sleep, and you're not trying to keep your toddler asleep. You're able to relax into creating the most enjoyable days possible for yourself (outside the home), as you let your your small child's sleep look after itself.

So many parents have said to me over the years that their toddler simply never goes to sleep on his own without dialling up, or without them making an effort. They are quite astonished when they put in place these strategies from The Possums Sleep Program, and suddenly their little one has quietly dropped off to sleep in the high chair, cheek down in the food, or in the middle of some other activity!