Finally putting a price on the priceless gift of sleep

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There’s a new book out that stretches to all of 26 big pages and is largely made up of photographs, but with some critically important words – simple words, simple sentences but by virtue of its phenomenal sales, parents have already dubbed it the greatest book of all time.

Because this is a children’s book that will work wonders for adults; it’s not that it’s boring – but it almost guarantees that your child will fall fast asleep in minutes.

The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep uses psychological techniques to send children to sleep quickly and it’s already top of the Amazon charts, outselling Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman and Paula Hawkins The Girl on The Train.

The brainchild of Swedish behavioural psychologist and linguist Carl-Johan Forssen Ehrli, it relies on psychological and positive reinforcement techniques to help children relax, focus and eventually drift off.

In other words, this isn’t just about reading words in the sort of monotone voice that you associate with sermons from old priests on a Sunday – no, parents are also  instructed to yawn frequently, emphasise certain words and speak in a slow and calm voice when reading words in italic

The author described it as ‘the verbal equivalent of rocking a baby to sleep’ and the book has already been translated into seven languages.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever spent what seems like hours of their life pleading with a small child to go to sleep when they have as much sign of tiredness as they have of going out to get a job.

Every parent remembers walking the floors with them in the small hours of the morning, cuddling them, singing to them in the key of flat, imploring them to just doze off, reasoning with them that you have work in the morning – and all to no avail.

When mammy or daddy enter the room and pick them from the cot, it isn’t bedtime – it’s additional playtime in the middle of the night.

As they get a little older they equally view sleep as the refuge of the old and weak; from around the age of ten until presumably the age they finally leave home, night-time is seen as the time of day when you come alive.

Having spent the morning threatening them just to get them to wake up, you spend the end of the day pleading with them to go to bed, using that wonderful logic that the reason they’re tired before school in the morning is that they don’t go to bed early enough at night.

But that’s far too logical for young minds because we all know that the best things in life are the things you’re not supposed to do – and that includes conforming to established patterns of sleep.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.