Classical Conditioning

Every parent needs to know what classical conditioning is.

Classical conditioning is the creation of an emotional (or bodily) response to a trigger. The trigger can be a thing, a face, a sound, a room, a motion, almost anything!

Here are some examples:

1) Food makes you salivate. Mom calls "dinner time!". You start salivating to the sound of "dinner time!"

2) You are scared of spiders. You enter an apartment you are thinking of renting and you see a spider. You now make an unconscious excuse why the apartment isn't good.

3) Your kid does something annoying. You get mad and make an angry face or talk very tensely at them. They think you can be scary.

Babies and young infants are subject to a lot of classical conditioning. They can't have solid conscious thoughts (they only think in pictures and moments, not words, which have an ability to store information).

I used classical conditioning to teach Henry to go to sleep in his crib. He's a pretty good sleeper.

I had heard from other parents and books that if your baby learns to go to sleep with you or they learn to be rocked to sleep, they won't sleep on their own. So I started with the goal of him going to sleep by himself, in his crib.

I picked a 'trigger' to sleep... it was reading books in his rocking chair, listening to music and then being placed in his crib, awake. I then began to pair it with him sleeping.

How did I know he would sleep? I used the well-known pattern of Eat, Activity, Sleep (created by the Baby Whisperer, Tracy Hogg). After he had done Eat, Activity, I always knew he was sleepy. That way I never had to guess.

You can also watch for body language such as rubbing eyes, yawning, and of course the best predictor of sleep, that long stare. If he was fussy or full-on cranky, I learned that I had missed the cues and waited too long for sleep. I would then burrito wrap him, rock and sing to him and probably would not get a successful sleep-on-your-own trial.

No worries! There are always set backs, but as long as I kept on towards the goal, I knew classical conditioning would do its work.