One Christmas, just before our son’s second birthday, we went to stay with my in-laws. “He’s never going to learn to sleep through the night if you keep going in to settle him every time he cries”, my mother-in-law implored when we emerged late for breakfast – exhausted after another sleepless night. “You’re making a rod for your own backs” she told us, before offering to show us how to “sleep train” him the next night.
As the years went on, my husband’s parents probably thought we should open a rod-making factory. Not only did our son, Josh*, need us to help him sleep until he was five. Now he’s almost 10, he still won’t sit at the table with us to eat, he won’t stop playing on his iPad when you ask him to, and he won’t quietly and politely do what he’s told if he doesn’t want to.
What we know now is that Josh has AuDHD which means he meets the criteria for both Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism – a neurodevelopment condition that affects how the brain develops and processes information. Back then, when we stood on the landing outside his room while he wailed and wailed inconsolably for hours, and my mother-in-law physically held my husband back from going in to check on him, we felt completely powerless.
