Laura M Food, Sleep and Separation Anxiety Testimonial

32Luca has been a very good sleeper since 10 or 11 months old, albeit that to my horror he was an early dropper of the lunchtime nap, at just 2 years old.

Nonetheless, his nighttime sleep remained good, even when his new baby brother arrived.

A few months later we noticed he was starting to take a bit longer to go to sleep in the evenings, singing and chatting to himself, or getting a book and “reading” it, in the dark, but it wasn’t impacting us at all and so we let it go.

However, aged about 2 years 8 months, it all changed. It started to take him literally hours to go to sleep, and he was running out of the room and along the corridor (including into his baby brother’s room to wake him up!), screaming and shouting and hitting and tantruming. He has always been a force of nature – wilful and determined and very able to express himself, but this was something else entirely, distressing and enraging and just very confusing.

We tried all the usual tactics – promises of rewards, threats of toy confiscation (both of which we followed through with), more time with him in the evening, less time with him and an earlier bedtime, sleep inducing food in the evening, screen bans – none of it worked.

My husband works long hours so evenings are usually just me, and with a baby that woke repeatedly and a toddler who wouldn’t go to sleep, and would shout and scream and hit me, it was a nightmare.

Amanda worked with us with both boys simultaneously and the results have been genuinely life changing.

My baby started responding to her programme straight away but Luca was a harder nut to crack, and I honestly thought it wouldn’t happen for us, as Luca is just such a forceful personality, but we perservered and we are now back to having a toddler who goes to sleep on his own in a matter of minutes, and sleeps all night.

What I particularly appreciated about working with Amanda with regards to Luca were the following:

1. She is experienced in working with children of all ages, not just babies and young toddlers. This made a massive difference to us as Luca was doing several things which are less common in 2 year olds displaying separation anxiety (in particular, screaming at us to go away, and that he didn’t want us), but she knew this to be common in slightly older children with separation anxiety, and so she was able to reassure us.
2. She adapted the programme quite a lot to make it work for Luca – she incorporated certain elements from her typical 2 year old programme and others from her programme for older children, due to his particular behaviour, and I think it was this combination that worked for us.
3. Despite the fact that we were on her platinum programme, when I had one absolute shocker of an evening with both boys on night 3 of Luca’s programme (think as bad as you can get, and then imagine worse still), she was totally there for me ALL eve offering constant with very useful suggestions over whatsapp and just being so kind and reassuring.

I honestly cannot thank her enough for that night (and more generally!).