Yes, You Too Can Promote Good Sleep Habits From an Early Age

All too often, I speak with parents who complain of getting little sleep because their 2 year old kicked them all night in bed. If they never had allowed their child to hibernate in the same bed with them in the first place, this obviously wouldn’t be an issue now.

Parents do enough for their children. They wash them, feed them, change them, wash their laundry, coddle them, play with them, etc. Why do they have to sleep in the same bed with them too?

It’s dangerous for a baby to be sleeping in bed with parents as much as it is denying them good independent sleeping skills.

Where do you draw the line?

It takes consistency and a little firmness. Kids need to understand from an early age that nighttime is for sleeping. They do not need you to be in their room “rocking” them to sleep, holding them while they fall asleep, or patting their backs to fall asleep. They just need to sleep. And so do you.

There’s no reason a 4 month old baby needs to have a midnight bottle of warm milk to get back to sleep after waking. Babies this age generally do wake up in the middle of the night, but it’s up to you to teach them that night time is for sleeping and not crying or playing.

A 4 – 6 month old baby should be in his own room, in his own crib, sleeping without the help of you “rocking” him to sleep at night. If the baby has colic or is sick and needs comforting, that’s a different story. Both of these reasons are acceptable for comforting the baby in the middle of the night. I’m talking about all the rest of the time.

You have to do what works for your family. Sometimes things just don’t work, and it’s impossible to squeeze blood from a stone. There can be variances in child rearing that are not taken into consideration with many families. There are traditions, folk tales, fallacies, old wives tales, and even our own parents and grandparents “remedies” for babies. Everyone has a suggestion, comment, and interpretation of what is the “right thing to do” vs. what probably is not.

Maybe you have a 2-3 year old child that you co-slept with from birth for a few years that is “normal” in every sense of the word, not clingy, not insecure, not needy, etc. What if you have the opposite? The thought is that once the child is sleeping with you, he will never want to go to his own bed. That might be too generalized of an opinion, but on the other hand, it might be true.

What if you have your second baby and decide you aren’t going to co-sleep with this child and the child turns out to be independent, self confident, and a good solitary sleeper? Personally, that sounds like the winner to me. Would you repeat this action if you had a baby number three? Or would you go back to co-sleeping like you did with the first one?

What about SIDS?

Figure out what you’re afraid of. Are you afraid your child is going to silently succumb to SIDS while you’re catching Z’s of your own in the next room? Do you feel guilty while listening to your baby cry because he doesn’t want to be sleeping? Are you a nervous parent anyway? You need to assess what the problem is and take action. It will only benefit you, and your child, the sleep you both need.

They do make SIDS monitors. It’s been proven that, more often than not, babies suffocate while in bed with their parents who are keeping them there to “protect them” from immature death. SIDS monitors are very effective by having motion sensors to detect the child’s breathing while in their crib. It works the same way as a regular baby monitor would, so there’s no reason to not have one if you are concerned about your child’s safety while not in their presence all night.

But sleeping in the same bed brings us family closeness

In my opinion, whether or not you are doing “attachment parenting” is not a good enough excuse to keeping a child in the same bed you are sleeping in. There are always exceptions to the rule for many different plausible reasons, but typically speaking, a child should be in their own bed at night. There’s plenty of time for baby to be close to you during the day. This is another sore spot for many and has caused many heated debates over the political correctness of it.

For some families, maybe it really does work. For others, it simply doesn’t. Does it make you a bad parent if you don’t do one or the other? In either case, absolutely not. In fact, I’m sure for some, attachment parenting is something they have perfected and have found great success with, and their children have turned out wonderfully because of it. It just wasn’t an option for us.

How it worked for us

Matthew was four months old when he went to his crib in his own room. He was in a bassinet from birth for about 6 weeks, then moved into his crib which stayed in our room. Once he was able to turn and see us and know we were there whenever he wanted something or didn’t want to sleep, he would start screaming. That just didn’t work for me. I made the decision to then move his crib to his own room.

We decorated the room with a Teddy Bear theme and hung stuffed animals in corner hammocks and put posters up to give him things to look at. The late night bottles had stopped long ago, so he was already used to not being fed in the middle of the night.

We had a SIDS monitor set up in his crib and left our dog outside his door at night. We darkened the windows of his room so he didn’t wake up at the crack of dawn in the morning. We bought a humidifier for his room, and added a nightlight and a little stereo system. Things were good.

I think he liked having his space.He would lie in his bed and “talk” to himself. He would stare at and bat around his crib toys. He had things to look at, music to listen to, and a comfy room.

Of course, there were nights he would cry because he didn’t want to go to bed. His bedtime was 7PM, and that was when he was put down in his crib for bedtime. If he cried, he was patted on the back for a few minutes and gingerly told, “good night” and we would leave the room. Sure, there were nights he wouldn’t stop crying, but I didn’t think going in there to “soothe” him was going to do anything at all but get him riled up again, or lead him to false hope that we were going to stay, or bring him into the other room with us.  So, we made the decision to stay out.

It worked for us, and it is what I would personally suggest to any parent. I think most babies are going to cry when put into their cribs – it’s a normal communicative reaction when they want something else.

I just didn’t believe in sacrificing our sleep, or our child’s independence, and his ability to learn to self soothe, to go comfort or pick him up when he cried in his bed at night.

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