Gently Changing Children’s Behaviours – While they sleep!

One of the most frustrating things I hear about from parents – is the helplessness they feel when confronted with a small child’s challenging behaviour. It may be anything from a 2 year old biting people, a 7 year old sucking their thumb, a child new to school not using the bathroom… the list goes on. 

One of the most helpful, and gentle ways to change these behaviours is found in the use of “Sleep Talk”.  Sleep talk is where the parent reads a customised script to the child while they are asleep – repeating it over 5 nights.  The script is short, loving and caring, and impacts on their unconscious mind while they are asleep.  The result is usually an end to the problem behaviour, and an increase of confidence in the child. 

A recent case – a young 2 year old was biting people at the childcare centre, and at play with other children.  The parents also had a new baby to contend with and this newly emerging biting behaviour was causing a lot of stress, and a lot of irate caregivers and parents of the children this little chap was biting.

Putting any reasoning about the ‘why’ aside,  I created a personalised script and the parents were given the simple procedure to follow over the next 5 nights.  The result was that he stopped biting all together.  

Another case – a young girl had recently begun school and was soiling and wetting her pants as she didn’t want to use the school toilets.  A personalised script was created and the mother went about reading it to the daughter.  On the second day the girl, unprompted said to mum “I will be ok at school now mum, I can use the toilets.. I’m ok” and that was the end of it!  One night of the script had done the job.  A few months later the mother again approached me, and we created another script around taking risks, and having a go – the daughter was showing perfectionistic tendencies i.e. expecting to do something once and being great at it.  This script was also successful.  I also discussed with the mother how children model behaviour on parents fears and imprints, and suggested she work on her own self esteem so to model some great coping and learning strategies to her daughter.

I learned this process and modality from Sleep Talk, by Lois Haddad – and I recommend this book or you can contact me for personalised scripts for your child’s challenging behaviour. zoew@xtra.co.nz   Sleep Talk by Lois Haddad www.sleeptalk.net