393. Q&A: Is letting my anxious child sleep in my bed helping or making their anxiety worse?

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:02):

Ever wonder what psychologists moms talk about when we get together, whether we’re consulting one another about a challenging case or one of our own kids, or just leaning on each other when parenting feels hard, because trust me, even when we do this for a living, it’s still hard. Joining me each week in these special Thursday shows are two of my closest friends, both moms, both psychologists, they’re the people I call when I need a sounding board. These are our unfiltered answers to your parenting questions. We’re letting you in on the conversations the three of us usually have behind closed doors. This is Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions.

(00:41):

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Beyond the Sessions segment of the Securely Attached podcast. Hi, Dr. Emily Upshur. Thanks for joining me again this week.

Dr. Emily Upshur (00:53):

Hey.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:55):

So, okay. If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen me post a question box recently. I was asking parents to send in their questions for us to answer on the show. And this mom sent in something that Em, I know you and I are going to have a lot to say about. So are you ready?

Dr. Emily Upshur (01:10):

Yep. Let’s do it.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:12):

Okay. So this mom wrote in, “Is letting my anxious child sleep in my bed, helping them feel secure or making them feel worse?” So, okay, where do you think we start with this?

Dr. Emily Upshur (01:26):

I’m going to give my lawyer a response. It depends.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:31):

It depends. Which is so funny because I feel like what every lawyer says, but it’s also like when I was in grad school, I feel like every single time my advisor, my political advisor, we would joke that all she ever said was like, “It depends.” Exactly. Right. And it’s so true.

Dr. Emily Upshur (01:47):

Well, what I want to say to the listeners is you’re not going to mess up anything you do by one thing you do, right? So it’s like, I just want to take the pressure off a little bit. I’m so glad this person is being thoughtful about it, about their choices and discreet decisions make an impact, but I don’t want them to get too caught up on, am I doing it all wrong if I let my kids sleep in my bed? Or is that going to damage them if I don’t, if I hold the line on that? So it depends.

Dr. Sarah Bren (02:19):

It really does depend. And obviously we have little information to go off of, but we’ve got an anxious child. The mom is trying to figure out what the impact of having that child sleep in their bed in terms of the fear. I think what she’s referencing is, we talk a lot on this podcast about space and treating anxiety and OCD. Space is an acronym for supportive parenting for anxious childhood emotions. It comes out of the Yale Child Study Center. It’s a really useful protocol for helping parents of young kids or parents of kids of any age really. But I find it super helpful for parents of young kids because it’s just working on parental changes to the accommodations that we make as parents that end up inadvertently kind of rescuing our child from feeling anxiety. And so if you have a child who’s anxious and is pulling in their anxious, panicked, distressed state, for you to do something or stop doing something that allows them to feel relief from the anxiety, like letting my child sleep in my bed so that they don’t feel anxious about being alone in their room at night, then we would actually stop doing that in space. We pull accommodations in space systematically and very intentionally. It’s not just like a blanket like stop accommodating. It’s you really map out all the accommodations you’re doing and you pick one at a time and you inform the kid that you’re going to stop doing this because you literally say like, “I’ve realized that pulling you into my bed every single night isn’t making you feel any less anxious at nighttime.” And so it’s not actually helping and it’s not helping you to feel like you can handle feeling scared at nighttime or anytime, whatever, and be more articulate than that, but like you let the kid know what you’re doing and why. And so from now on, we’re going to try this thing instead.

Dr. Emily Upshur (04:38):

But I think like the linchpin in that is, even if you kind of have to fake it, is I am not worried about you being in your bed alone. I’m so not worried about you being in your bed alone that I’m not going to bring you into my bed, right? I think it’s the confidence on the parent side that this is an important thing that they feel their kid can do, even if they’re stretching a little bit to totally believe that. I’ve done that as a parent a million times. I’m like, “Yeah, I totally believe you can do it. I’m not really sure, but I totally believe it. ” And I think that’s like the question that I’m hearing in this listener’s thing is like, “Is that right? Should I believe my kid can do it or should I like help my kid not have to do it if it’s too hard?”

Dr. Sarah Bren (05:29):

Right. And this is the thing, like I think one of the issues with the sort of intense barrage of information that’s kind of reduced to sound bites for parents is that there are a lot of messaging that parents are getting that says, “Letting your child sleep in your bed, if they’re anxious is making them feel worse and more anxious.”

(05:55):

Sometimes that is not untrue. They’re also getting, the same parent is getting simultaneous information that’s saying not letting your child sleep in your bed is going to damage their attachment to you and you are going to hurt your relationship and your secure attachment with your child if you don’t let them be close to you and soothe them when they’re distressed. And so this parent is in this perfectly … In the intersection of these two competing communications, right? And not knowing which way to go. And I think that is a really, really common experience for parents where they’re like, “Well, shoot, I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t. I don’t know which way to go because people are telling me if I do it this way, I’m going to hurt my kid. If I do it this way, I’m going to hurt my kid.” And I just really, I think to your point at the very beginning was like, it depends because every single child and parent dynamic and how we got where we are in this moment and all the things that like are contextual and like unique to this situation that your kid and you are experiencing is complicated

(07:08):

And there isn’t a one right way to do it. And sometimes there are things that you prioritize in the short term to like reduce an anxious, like an anxiety symptom. And we need to feel like, okay, I can stretch my child’s distress tolerance and help them build some confidence in their ability to cope with feeling worried or feeling uncomfortable. And I don’t need to be worried that I’m going to damage my attachment relationship with my kid in order to do this, right? Allowing my kid to stretch in their distress does not mean that I am not creating a safe relationship with my kid and that my attachment relationship is on the line. I feel very strongly that that’s not how attachment works and I think it does a disservice to parents to make them think that. I also think it is okay to choose to let your kids sleep in your bed and not worry that it’s going to make them an anxious child and that they’ll never learn to separate because I also think that’s not true.

(08:14):

I think it also depends on the family system and what the needs are. I let my kids sleep in my bed all the time and I stretch them in other ways when it comes to distress tolerance and coping with anxiety. And if I was doing none of that and my kids had a lot of anxiety, I would have to really look at that. Is that serving them? Maybe not.

(08:43):

You got to really zoom out. It’s not just sleep. It’s not just these one isolated points of day or night. It’s the global aggregate of the parenting relationship and how much are we allowing anxiety to run the show? How much are we prioritizing resolve, like rescuing them from distress? Let’s not conflate that with security and secure attachment.

Dr. Emily Upshur (09:14):

Yeah. No, and but I also think that zoom out is also, how much are you doing this for you, right? As a parent, because I just can’t, I need to go to sleep. I’m so tired. I just can’t deal with this kid. It’s going to take me three hours to try to not get them to sleep in my bed and I just can’t do that tonight, right? And is that causing long-term damage? No. No. No. No. But I do like the idea of like the demand pot. I talk about that a lot with clients, right? How much is going into the pot? Are you stretching them in all these other ways and maybe just that sleep that night in your bed is like not the moment to choose to stretch again? I think you have to look at the whole, the aggregate and really try to put that together.

(10:01):

And I think personal preference. I’m a parent who barely has my kids sleep in my bed ever and that’s just also because I can’t sleep if my kids are in my bed. And frankly, that makes me not show up as a parent who can stretch my kid anyway else because I’m tired.

Dr. Sarah Bren (10:19):

Also you’re probably working on ways to soothe their distress and nurture that attachment relationship in other times of the day. So it’s like, because we’re basically, we’re talking about two … I think people understandably, but inaccurately, position these two buckets as competing. Distress tolerance and stretching distress tolerance to reduce the impact of anxiety as in direct competition with the attachment relationship and my ability to soothe my child when they are in distress. And people think that they are kind of opposing forces and I have to choose between one or the other. And if I go with one, I’m damaging the other, and if I go with the other, I’m damaging the other one. And I really think it’s important that we kind of break that myth open.

Dr. Emily Upshur (11:08):

It’s not true. I mean, that’s exactly right, because that goes back to that confidence piece I was sort of saying earlier, which is like, I don’t let my kids sleep in my bed, but I’m pretty confident in my attachment with them. And so it allows me to stretch them in lots of different ways that aren’t competing, right? We’re not getting into a battle of if I stretch them, is my attachment with them jeopardy. No, that’s not even on the same chapter for me, right? So I think that that’s partly a protective factor in the confidence that like, when I say you’re going to, it’s going to be okay. I’m not saying like you’re not going to feel anxious. I’m going to say you’re going to be okay in the world, right? And that comes from a deeper, more intense place of like, “I believe you are going to be more okay in this world.” And that I believe is a little bit what we’re sort of confounding, but maybe people are confounding.

(12:01):

Am I okay all the time? No, I don’t have to be okay all the time to have a secure attachment. That doesn’t mean that I’m okay all the time if I have a secure attachment. It can mean that I’m in distress and it can even mean I have a really secure attachment. If I can be in a lot of distress and my attachment figure can tolerate it, that could be that I’m also okay.

Dr. Sarah Bren (12:23):

Yeah. The presence of distress inside the parent child relationship, right? Like, “Mom, I am feeling distress and you’re not rescuing me from it and I am mad at you for not rescuing me from it. ” That’s still a secure attachment right there.

Dr. Emily Upshur (12:44):

Right.

Dr. Sarah Bren (12:45):

There’s nothing damaging the attachment relationship in that scenario.

Dr. Emily Upshur (12:49):

That’s right. And I think sleep in particular, I don’t know why. It’s so crazy, right? We’re like, if we don’t let the kids sleep in the bed, if we let the kid cry it out, if we … It’s like so, so confounded with attachment. And I think that’s really important to separate those things out too, just as much as we separate out distress and attachment is sleep. Since when do we make sleep so important to attachment, right? I think it’s really important to not overlap those two things. You can have your kid be in distress and sleep and it doesn’t mean you’re damaging your attachment. There’s lots of other ways. People don’t feel the same way about not giving their toddler the blue plate as they do about sleep. It’s the same concept. It’s distressing across the board.

Dr. Sarah Bren (13:34):

Or dropping them off at daycare, right? They’re going to be upset about that and we can say, “It’s hard. I know this feeling is overwhelming and this feeling will come and go. It’s a safe feeling and you’re safe and I’ll see you when I get back and I can’t wait to hear about your day.” Peace. And then they cry, you cry in your car. It all happens, it’s painful and that’s really not that different from saying goodnight.

Dr. Emily Upshur (14:08):

Yeah, that’s exactly my point.

Dr. Sarah Bren (14:11):

Yeah. And it’s not going to make or break. Again, like I always use this metaphor and I’ve probably said this a million times in the podcast, but I do think it’s a really important visual to understand just how the magnitude of what goes into the attachment relationship. If you think about knitting, like a blanket or a quilt or something, every single stitch is like an interaction you have with your child. It can be a big one, a little one, like a glance, a touch, like, “I’m really soothing you. I’m picking you up. I’m holding every single interaction where we attune to our child or misattune to our child is like a stitch in a giant, giant blanket.” And we can drop stitches, we do drop them and it’s just in the amount of moments where we are interfacing with our child is just so immense that like if you’re doing it generally attuned most of the time, dropping stitches isn’t going to destroy the integrity of that blanket.

(15:30):

And when parents are thinking about this and paying attention to it and worrying about it, it tells me they’re probably for the most part doing a lot to attune to and meet the needs of their kids and like you probably got a pretty intact blanket. It’s okay if we’ve dropped stitches along the way. It’s not going to matter in terms of like our capacity to have attachment security and like the research backs this up.

(15:58):

I think as I’ve seen it in different numbers and different studies, but like 45%, as little as like 47% attunement still was predictive of a secure attachment relationship, like that means we can get it right less than half the time and still have a secure relationship. Think about parenting in the aggregate. It helps so much when we’re weighing these like moments and we’re like, “Ugh, is this going to break things?” And it’s like, probably not. Really probably not. The answer is almost always probably not.

Dr. Emily Upshur (16:36):

Yeah. Yeah. I agree.

Dr. Sarah Bren (16:39):

But it’s good you’re asking that question again, like that’s the point. You care enough to be thinking about this. If you are thinking about this, you’re probably hitting it more than you’re not.

Dr. Emily Upshur (16:51):

Right. And like if you were to come into our office, we would ask a bunch of interesting questions that would help you get to the bottom of this. Why are you letting your child do that? What do you think that serves them? You might have really good reason, right?

Dr. Sarah Bren (17:10):

Other questions we would ask would also be about the anxiety, right? How much is the anxiety interfering with functioning? How much is the anxiety interfering with sleep? How much is the lack of sleep interfering with functioning?

Dr. Emily Upshur (17:22):

Well, and also like, can your child sleep on their own or do they prefer not to? Right? Those are different things, right? The capacity versus sort of a preference, which is just different ways that I think we can get you to start thinking a little bit more about this person is already doing that, but challenging their sort of automatic thought process around this and stretching themselves a little as a parent.

Dr. Sarah Bren (17:45):

Right. And another thing I always say to parents when I’m doing space, especially when there’s a sleep piece involved, is sleep is not usually the first accommodation I pull for a couple reasons. One, we as the parents have the least amount of resources available to us energetically at three o’clock in the morning or at 9:00 PM at night when we really are exhausted. If you are truly dealing with an anxiety presentation or OCD and the sleep issues are one part of a larger systemic anxiety picture, chances are you can pull a whole lot of different accommodations before you have to go to the sleep piece and that will have an impact. And so I like to start elsewhere usually with families because it’s also nice to have like a win at the start of space treatment. I like to pull an accommodation that is relatively a lighter lift for the parents to pull and is an easier win for the kid to kind of get over the … Because the whole point of pulling an accommodation is not to slowly chip away at every single accommodation we do.

(19:07):

It’s an exposure, right? It’s in not rescuing my child from anxiety in this moment, by doing this thing they’ve gotten used to me doing, and if I stop doing that thing, they have to feel the anxiety. And in feeling the anxiety, they eventually discover upon surviving that anxiety, that one, that anxiety doesn’t last forever, it goes away, and two, they survived it, and they can handle the feeling of anxiety without whatever thing they think was going to happen happening. Like basically, this isn’t their conscious thought process, but basically innately they’re like, “I’m going to die.” Like, “I will not survive this feeling.” That’s the fear. And so if you get to the other side of the anxiety and say, “Oh, that was really uncomfortable, but I am okay. I made it. ” That’s the whole point of pulling the accommodation is to increase … I always say treating anxiety isn’t about decreasing anxiety, it’s about increase our tolerance for anxiety.

(20:19):

And so we have to feel anxious to understand, “Ah, I can handle this feeling.” That’s the whole point of pulling accommodations in space. So when we pull an accommodation, we are having our child inadvertently have an exposure to the anxious feeling and discover they can survive it, increasing their tolerance for anxiety. We don’t pull 50 accommodations in space. We usually pull three in a protocol, like in a treatment. It generalizes because the kid then understands, “Oh, okay, I could survive that feeling here.” And then you do it again. And so with the parents, I can survive my feeling, my kid feeling anxious, and I didn’t have to rescue them.

Dr. Emily Upshur (20:58):

Yeah. And then that parent is able to have more confidence and present with this subconscious and sort of interaction with your kid that your kid isn’t sensing that you don’t think they can do it, right? You think they have a better tolerance than that. You know they have a better … You’ve seen it before.

Dr. Sarah Bren (21:18):

Which is why I like to do those first before going to sleep because sleep is tough. It is charged. We have a lot of fears around it, hence this entire conversation, but also we are tired and we would like to also get back to bed. And we have a lot of urgency and pressure coming from us outside of this sort of anxiety stuff. So I always like to say to parents, “That’s not where you have to start even if your kid is anxious. We can get there, but we don’t have to start there.” So if you’re like, to this parent is letting my anxious child sleep in my bed, helping them feel secure, making them feel worse, we might say, “Hey, it is possible that it might be … ” And also, I don’t think just letting them sleep in your bed makes fear worse.

(22:07):

If you are saying to them or inadvertently communicating implicitly to them that they can’t handle being in their bed or you can’t handle them being in distress about not being in their bed, and so we’re just rescuing them from that and like, “Okay, fine, come sleep in my bed.” The second they feel distress, we are kind of potentially in communicating to them, “Oh, I don’t think you can handle this feeling.” It’s so dangerous that I have to rescue you from it, which isn’t helpful. It does teach the child on some level that that feeling is not safe, and that’s really what we’re trying to work on. But that said, if this mom is worried that having them sleep in their bed is making them their anxiety worse, you can start working on anxiety outside of bedtime if that’s not something you want to give up, and that’s totally fine. And alternatively, you could tackle it, but again, like, it depends.

Dr. Emily Upshur (23:09):

I’ve done both. I agree. I was going to say, it depends because I’ve done where I tackle sleep first because it’s the big, scary, hairy animal in the room, or I tackle it last. It really depends on … Some parents have energetic resources, then some don’t. We really have to be able to do something that’s effective for your family system, right? Yes. We’re not going to do something that’s in isolation.

Dr. Sarah Bren (23:37):

Yes. So what I will say to this parent in closing, one, you’re asking really important questions and you are articulating a intersection, I think, that so many parents feel because they’ve been told that these are mutually exclusive options and they’re not. You can do both. You could support your child’s anxiety and their attachment and let them sleep in your bed or not have them sleep in your bed. All of it can work together. Really, it’s about kind of zooming out a bit further and looking at the larger picture. Getting help with this is productive. I recommend it. It’s something that we do a lot at our practice, but a lot of practices do this. So getting a therapist that can help you navigate this is not a bad idea. If your kid has anxiety, this is what therapists specialize in for a reason. It’s hard to do this.

(24:41):

You aren’t your child’s therapist, you’re not supposed to be your child’s therapist, you’re their parent. And so yeah, I think know this makes sense. There are lots of ways to succeed at this. They got to fit your family system and you can get help. You don’t have to do it by yourself.

Dr. Emily Upshur (25:00):

Yep.

Dr. Sarah Bren (25:02):

Yeah. Thanks, Em.

Dr. Emily Upshur (25:03):

Yeah. Sweet dreams.

Dr. Sarah Bren (25:05):

Sweet dreams.

(25:06):

Thank you so much for listening. As you can hear, parenting is not one size fits all. It’s nuanced and it’s complicated. So I really hope that this series where we’re answering your questions really helps you to cut through some of the noise and find out what works best for you and your unique child. If you have a burning parenting question, something you’re struggling to navigate or a topic you really want us to shed light on or share research about, we want to know, go to drsarahbren.com/question to send in anything that you want, Rebecca, Emily, and me to answer in Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions. That’s drsarahbren.com/question. And check back for a brand new securely attached next Tuesday. And until then, don’t be a stranger.