How to help a FOMO baby sleep: the lamp round that shows the house closing for the night

At 7:32 every evening our three-year-old turns off the kitchen light herself, and that is most of how to help a FOMO baby sleep. Let the child watch the house close for the night, keep the goodbye short and the same every evening, and put a slow story last so the final thing that happens is quiet. A FOMO baby, in the phrase parents pass around, is the small child who fights sleep not because they are not tired but because the rest of the house is still going on without them. Ours used to appear in the kitchen doorway in pyjamas, holding one sock, asking what we were doing. The NHS says separation anxiety and fear of strangers "is common in young children between the ages of 6 months and 3 years, although it can last longer." The children I write about here are two to five, the top of that range and a little past it, which is where the word FOMO starts to fit better than the word anxiety.

Why does a FOMO baby fight sleep when they are clearly tired?

For a long time I looked for sleep fixes: earlier bath, darker room, a longer story. None of it helped, because the child was not arguing about sleep. She was arguing about the kitchen. From her bed she could hear the tap, a cupboard, two adult voices at normal volume. Every one of those sounds was evidence that the day was carrying on and she had been removed from it.

Seen that way the behaviour is reasonable. A two- or three-year-old has no inner clock that says the evening is nearly over. They have their ears. If the ears report activity, the evening is not over, and getting up to check is the obvious thing to do.

The second half of it is the separation itself. The worry is less about the dark than about the two of us being in a room she is not in. The American Academy of Pediatrics page on separation anxiety has one line that I think applies to bedtime as much as to the nursery door: "If you linger, the transition time does too. So will the anxiety." A long goodnight full of one more question, one more drink and one more tuck is lingering. It feels kind, and it keeps the day propped open.

What does the lamp round look like on a real evening?

Here is what we do, in order, with the clock times from a normal weeknight.

1. 7:15, bath, as before.
2. 7:30, the house is finished before the child is. Dishwasher already running. Television off. Phones face down on the shelf, not in pockets. If a task is still open, it waits until after goodnight. This is the part I had been skipping.
3. 7:32, the lamp round. She walks through the flat and turns off, or turns down, each light in the same order: kitchen, hallway, the big lamp in the living room, the bathroom. At each one she says the same thing, "Kitchen's asleep," "Hall's asleep," and so on. Four lights, three minutes. A parent walks beside her but never touches a switch.
4. 7:36, the story, in her room, with only her lamp on. We read The Fox and the Last Lamp, in which Pip the fox trots into the village and turns the lamps low one by one while Olive the owl counts along, until only the last lamp at the end of the lane is left. It is the same shape as the walk she has just done, so the story confirms what she saw with her own eyes.
5. 7:44, last lamp and the same words. She turns her own lamp down. I say "Last lamp. House is asleep. Love you." Then out, and the door stays where it was.

The point of the round is not the switches. The point is that the child has personally verified that there is nothing left on. There is no kitchen to go and check, because she closed the kitchen.

A child who has watched every lamp go out has nothing left to guard.

We kept a tally for the first week. "Trips" is the number of times she got up after goodnight; "quiet" is the minutes from the last lamp to the first silence that held.

Night three was a guest staying for dinner, which meant voices and a kettle after the round. I include it because it is the clearest evidence we have that the round only works if the house stays closed behind it. Night seven's one trip was a cough. These are our numbers from one child in one flat, not a result to expect elsewhere. If the trips are still coming after a couple of weeks of a closed house, the quiet walk-back with the same words every time is the next layer.

How short should the goodnight be?

Shorter than feels natural. The NHS sleep guidance for young children puts it in one line: "Set a limit on how much time you spend with your child when you put them to bed." The same page asks for "a calming, predictable bedtime routine that happens at the same time and includes the same things every night." The AAP page says "Create quick goodbye rituals" and "keep the goodbye short and sweet."

What that means in our flat is that the affection goes in the round and the story, where there is time for it, and the goodbye itself is six words. The same six every night. She can say them along with me now, which is a sign that the ritual has become hers rather than something done to her. A fixed goodnight also makes walking a toddler back to bed easier on everyone, because there is nothing new to negotiate on the way. We do not sneak out while she is distracted. The one time I tried it she came looking for me, and the FOMO child's whole fear is of things happening out of sight.

Consistency is the other half. The NHS page says "Try to be consistent" and, a line later, "You may have to repeat this routine for several nights." Our table shows that: the first two nights were not much better than before, and a child who has checked the kitchen for a year will not stop after one good evening.

The mistake was the frame. I had been trying to make a wide-awake child sleepier. What she needed was to be sure the day was over, and the only person who could convince her of that was herself, one switch at a time. The house closing is not a trick to get a child into bed. It is the answer to the question she was getting up to ask.

Sources

• Separation anxiety · NHS
• Sleep problems in young children · NHS
• Soothing Your Child's Separation Anxiety · American Academy of Pediatrics, HealthyChildren.org