​Quick, without looking it up, what’s the opposite of “nocturnal?”

We all know what nocturnal means, right? Animals that sleep in the day and do most of their activities at night, bats, owls, and raccoons being some familiar examples. 

It always surprises me that we’re not nearly as familiar with the term diurnal (that’s the answer, in case you didn’t know.) since, as humans, that’s what we are. 

​Our eyes don’t adapt to the dark all that well, we don’t have the echolocation skills of the bat, and we rely on the sun for our vitamin D. Since evolution is a painfully slow process, that’s the way it’s going to be for another couple million years, at least. 
But there are some really sweet benefits that come with being daytime creatures, and one of my favourites is a little thing called the circadian rhythm. 

The circadian rhythm, as you may already know, is the internal clock in the human body that prompts us to wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night, and much like a clock, it has a LOT of moving parts, only instead of gears and springs, it’s made up of stimuli and hormones.

Two of these hormones are going to play the starring roles in our story, and those are melatonin and cortisol. If you’ve got a baby having a hard time sleeping, you have undoubtedly heard a lot about both of these guys.

Melatonin is produced in the pineal gland of the brain, and its role is to help the body relax, both mentally and physically, and help us get to sleep and stay asleep. So when your baby gets an 11-12 hour stretch of glorious sleep, you can thank their pineal gland for firing up those melatonin pumps. 

But you can also thank the daylight because exposure to the sun stimulates melatonin production. Production, mind you. Not secretion. We’ll talk about that in a second, but the buildup of the hormone itself is stimulated by exposure to sunlight. So it’s not just an old wives tale. Getting your baby outside during the day really does help them sleep better at night!

This whole intricate dance between light and dark, cortisol and melatonin, awake and asleep, evolved over an incredibly long time, and it worked like magic up until, relatively speaking, very recently, when we discovered that we could pass an electric current along a filament and “artificially” illuminate our surroundings. Before that, we relied exclusively on fire, which emits very little blue light.


Depending on their hue, light bulbs emit quite a bit of it. And TVs, LEDs, computer monitors, iPads, smartphones, and all of those other screens that surround us today, absolutely flood our eyes with it. Unfortunately, all of that blue light coming at us in hours when we would normally be enveloped in darkness signals the brain that it’s still daytime and inhibits the release of melatonin, making it harder to get to sleep.


Since we can’t reasonably get rid of all of the sources of blue light around us, the best thing to do for our little ones’ sleep is to turn off those really intense sources, like TVs and smartphones, a couple of hours before they go to bed, and make sure their sleeping area is as dark as we can get it. I’m talking real dark. Like, can’t see your hand in front of your face, kind of dark. Some blackout blinds can be a game changer, especially if you live somewhere where the days get exceptionally long in the summer. 


So that’s the story of the circadian rhythm and its daily heroic effort to keep us running at peak performance. It really is a fascinating little piece of our physiology, and with just a little support from our side, it can work wonders in getting us out of bed with energy and enthusiasm and helping us feel relaxed and peaceful when it’s time to sleep. Work with it instead of resisting it, and I guarantee you’ll start seeing and feeling the results immediately. ​

Before discussing attachment theory and its influence, it is vitally important to define it. There has been significant confusion about the meaning of the term since the introduction of the “attachment parenting” philosophy, but they’re two completely different things.
 
What is attachment Parenting?
“Attachment parenting,” a term coined by Drs. William and Martha Sears which refers to a specific parenting approach advocating, among other things, baby-wearing, bed-sharing, and breastfeeding on demand.
 
The popularity of Dr. Sears’ book has caused some confusion about the differences between this parenting style and the scientific notion of attachment theory1, and because of Sears’ adherence to co-sleeping, nursing on demand, and responding immediately to a baby when they’re fussing, it’s easy to see how some parents arrived at the conclusion that disregarding these tenets by helping their babies learn to sleep independently could damage the “attachment” between a baby and their caregiver. But again, attachment theory and attachment parenting are in no way related to each other in anything other than name.

What is Attachment Theory?
Alan Sroufe, a developmental psychologist at the Institute for Child Development at the University of Minnesota, defines attachment as “...a relationship in the service of a baby’s emotion regulations and exploration. It is the deep, abiding confidence a baby has in the availability and responsiveness of the caregiver.”2
 
At its origin, attachment theory was developed by British psychologist John Bowlby, and greatly expanded upon and tested by American psychologist Mary Ainsworth. In its current understanding, it states that there are four categories of attachment between a baby and their caregivers: secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure- resistant, and insecure-disorganized.
 
Children with a secure attachment to their primary caregiver feel safe expressing distress or discomfort, and will explore unfamiliar areas around them confidently so long as the caregiver is nearby. They tend to become distressed when their caregiver leaves the vicinity, but respond positively when they return.
 
Children with insecure attachments avoid their caregiver when distressed and minimize displays of negative emotion in their presence, presumably because the caregiver has responded to previous displays of distress and negative emotion in negative ways, such as ignoring, ridiculing, or becoming annoyed with the child. The infant learns quickly that displays of distress provoke negative emotions from the caregiver and therefore avoids exhibiting them.