There are two questions dominating my life right now:
1. How do you get a 6-month-old to sleep for longer than two hours at a time at night?
2. How do you motivate a 7-year-old to strive for her personal best, rather than just doing only the bare minimum to get by?
Does anyone have any suggestions, because one of these is keeping me up at night (literally) and the other is consuming me during the day?
I am amazed at how much my daughter is affected by sleep. Some babies can have a day of poor sleep and it takes them a day to get over it. Not my little one! She has a day of bad sleep and it has taken us a week now to get over it! The poor little girl is sleep deprieved and making it worse each day with crappy naps and terrible night sleep. Plus she’s up at 5:30 a.m. everyday now that daylight savings time has ended. Oh my aching head. Lack of sleep is tough enough, but now my semi-cold/cough is getting worse because I’m just not able to get enough sleep to kick its butt. I have tried to read everything I actually have time to read on the subject of sleep and it’s a complicated topic. Our bodies need sleep to survive and yet we oftentimes have to be taught how to get good sleep. It reminds me a little of my favorite book, Insomnia, when Joe Wiser says that doctors will tell you that lack of sleep will not kill you, but what really goes on the death certificate is much worse.
The second item plaguing me recently is motivation. My daughter is incredibly bright. She is above grade level in reading, remarkable at spelling, and capable of learning just about anything. However, she received a low mark on her report card. Her teacher has her pegged and realizes that she is just not striving for her personal best. She does just enough to get by. She is asked to write in her journal, so she does so for about ten minutes and then declares that she is done. She is asked to read for 20 minutes each night, so she does and then immediately closes the book and moves onto something else. She does not seem engaged to the point of wanting to learn or discover more. She is not engaged enough to want to push herself to the next level. I am completely internally motivated, so I am at a loss as to how to effectively motivate my daughter. Do I reward her for accomplishments? That hardly seems to be a good way to push her, because then what happens when we no longer provide her with a reward. Do I challenge her by letting her know that her levels are not as high as we thought they were? Her teacher actually told me that her first reading test put her right at grade level. She retested her and was able to get a higher and presumibly more accurate score. I’m assuming that she just flat out didn’t try the first time. Is the problem that she has been told so often that she is very intelligent, so she beliees she doesn’t have to try very hard to succeed? Is it possible she has “too much” self-esteem?
I’m at a loss.
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