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Requesting Parenting Advice: How to tell toddler she can't sleep in our bed anymore
Romantic Undead
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Registered User regular
Hi guys!
We have a four year old girl and this morning my wife and I woke up to a scene that broke our hearts.
For context; the last few weeks, our daughter has been coming into our room in the middle of the night to sleep with us. She has a history of night terrors, and generally fights us when bedtime comes but, for a time, she didn't have a problem sleeping through the night in her own room. She would often wake up before us, but not to a ridiculous degree.
Howevere as I mentioned, the last few weeks she has been coming into our room to sleep with us at around 2 or 3 am, which normally wakes us up, and has had a negative effect on the quality of our sleep.
Cut to last night, where we told her that she couldn't do that anymore, that she had to sleep in her own bed, and we put her back in her own room. However, when we woke up this morning, we found her curled up, sleeping, on the floor at the foot of our bed. This made my wife cry and made her feel like she was a terrible mother.
So anyhow, have any other of you parents out there had to deal with similar situations? How did you approach it? We don't want to put a lock on her door, that feels cruel, but I don't know what else to do that won't feel like we're making her feel she's unwanted. Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!
We have a four year old girl and this morning my wife and I woke up to a scene that broke our hearts.
For context; the last few weeks, our daughter has been coming into our room in the middle of the night to sleep with us. She has a history of night terrors, and generally fights us when bedtime comes but, for a time, she didn't have a problem sleeping through the night in her own room. She would often wake up before us, but not to a ridiculous degree.
Howevere as I mentioned, the last few weeks she has been coming into our room to sleep with us at around 2 or 3 am, which normally wakes us up, and has had a negative effect on the quality of our sleep.
Cut to last night, where we told her that she couldn't do that anymore, that she had to sleep in her own bed, and we put her back in her own room. However, when we woke up this morning, we found her curled up, sleeping, on the floor at the foot of our bed. This made my wife cry and made her feel like she was a terrible mother.
So anyhow, have any other of you parents out there had to deal with similar situations? How did you approach it? We don't want to put a lock on her door, that feels cruel, but I don't know what else to do that won't feel like we're making her feel she's unwanted. Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!
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In combination with that, I've heard of parents sleeping in the child's room when they go to bed and moving where they sleep closer to the door each night. Eventually you're outside the room and then she's got a light to tell her when she can come in. If she sleeps in her bed then she gets to come into yours 15 minutes before you get up for a cuddle with mom and dad.
Best of luck, Bud.
If you want her to be able to come in (for infrequent things like waking up scared or something), you can turn the sleeping on the floor thing into a not-terrible-feeling arrangement. When I was little, if I got scared or something my parents would let me sleep on the floor in my own little spot with a blanket and pillow...it let everyone sleep better and let me be close to them and feel like I had a special place to be (so no one had to feel badly about it).
So, once you understand that, you need to understand that it is a process. If you want her in her room at night, you need to move her back each time she comes in. Always be loving and patient. You may need to stay in her room with her until she falls asleep at first before you move back to your room.
Not easy, I agree... sleep deprivation is banned under the Geneva convention, so technically my kids are war criminals.
No punishment, bribery is fine, consistency is the key. Just talk to her and let her know she is safe in her room. The world is a magical place where all things are possible for a little kid, including monsters. If she has a bad dream she can absolutely come and wake you up and you will go and tuck her back into her room. But that staying in your room all night is not an option. After a few weeks she will get it.
I tell you this as the dad of a 5 & 3 year old that come into my room maybe 1 or 2 times a week on average. We have the clock that lights up. we have night lights. They have flash lights. We have tried everything, and it is never "fixed". Also, there is no such thing as quality of sleep with a kid. If they are not waking you up at night as kids, then they get older and are keeping you up worrying about them!
for something like 2-3am you might need to do a progressive thing starting early but then keep moving it back.
Don't start something that will be hard to break later. like sleeping in her bed with her. that will create a headache later.
Mom and I sat down with little one after supper yesterday evening, I told her that her mom and I both loved her very much, but we needed to talk to her about coming into our room at night.
I played up that her room was her own, special, place that mommy and daddy set up just for her to sleep in, and we asked her (instead of telling her) to please understand that when she comes into our bed at night, it wakes us up and that while we love snuggling her, mommy and daddy need sleep so we can go to work the next day, so we would very much appreciate it if she stayed in her room at night. I asked her if she understood, and she nodded, albeit a little sadly.
Putting her to bed last night was a pretty standard affair:
- Get some water from the bathroom (which she did on her own, with my supervision)
- Spell and read her name on her door (we do this every night, at her insistence)
- 10 daddy lifts (fun for her, small workout for me)
- She picks a story, daddy reads
- Tuck, kiss, goodnight
Last night she decides only after the tuck-in that she needs to go to the bathroom. I say "ok, but daddy has already done your tuck-in, so go to the bathroom, but that means you then have to go back to bed by yourself, ok? Also, do you remember what we talked about before, about coming into mommy and daddy's room?" She says yes, so I go back downstairs as she's going to the bathroom, saying goodnight as I go.
We did hear her scream from what I presume was a night terror at some point in the night, but we decided to stay in bed and ride it out and see what would happen (despite wanting very much to run to her). Result: she appeared to calm down on her own and stayed in her room.
I wake up this morning with my alarm; no kiddo in the room. Take my shower, come back to room, there is the kid, in bed with mommy, all smiles. I decide that this is fine, as I'm already up (though mommy most certainly was not, and begged me to take kiddo to daycare. I refused, on account that that's mommy's responsibility since daddy can't take kiddo to daycare and make it to work on time. Mommy groaned, but I'm sure she'll be fine.
So there you go. Relative success for now. We'll see if it keeps up.
This would probably be harder to pull off now, but mom got me a walkman at the time and a bunch of tapes of lullaby and and kid show songs. It was really nice to fill the silence and dark with sound, but it wasnt a screen or a light, so it would eventually lull me back to sleep. Its still my coping mechanism to this day, I listen to podcasts if I cant sleep.
I'm not sure what the advice would be for this now, but I would snoop around for any tips on giving her some agency in calming herself down. Having a tool to help made a big difference for me.
It sounds like you've got things sorted for now, so no advice here, just wanted to extend my sympathies and say it sounds like you're doing a great job.
I also have a 7 yo and a 4 yo who went through the same things (moreso with the 4 yo though).
Thundrykatz pretty much nailed it, patience and consitency are key. If you keep bringing her back to bed when she comes for a middle of the night visit, and sit with her until shes asleep again, she will start staying in bed more often eventually. At the same time, i think its important to also let the kid know that if they really need you they can always come get you. Keep in mind that a kids definition of 'really needs you' is going to be quite different than your own, and expect to lose a bit of sleep until she gets through this phase.
Good luck! Seems like you have a handle on things for now, at least. Kids do get past all this eventually, my 7 yo never gets me up in the middle of the night anymore unless its an actual emergency (like "hey dad, i just plastered my bed and/or walls with a fresh coat of vomit, can i sleep with you?").
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Back to Bed, Ed!
We haven't had the crawl-into-our-bed problem, but we did have a come-into-our-room-and-talk-to-us problem. The color-changing clock mentioned before has served us very well. Now each morning we wake up to "My clock turned green! My clock turned green!" which is alright with us.
We did ours as a long term payoff, framed as "you can have this big kid thing you've been asking about if you can stay in your bed all night like a big kid until your birthday"
We were gonna make a big show of marking it off on a calendar, but it worked like a charm.
(It probably helped that the youngest watched the eldest do this, and that they share a room for an added security buffer. Fallback advice: Go back in time two years and have another?)
Is there any evidence that this style of parenting proposed in this thread leads to "spoiled brats"? This is very contradictory advice to the OP, so would be helpful to be supported
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With my younger one I never worry about this stuff, and I'm much more likely to go "it's fine." Now she's got an entirely different personality that I feel like I have to worry less about, but my point is that your wife is not a terrible mom, and maybe remind her that this stuff is all really new to her. Other kids do this, and it's fine. I ended up in my parents' bed well after I went to bed in my own room, especially if I wasn't feeling well. I think I did it till I was five or six, and they didn't love it, but they put up with it as long as I went to bed just fine in my own room and it was after a certain hour. One of the things that helped me was a night light that did stuff. It had little pieces of foil or something in some liquid, with a small light bulb under the glass container. As the liquid heated up the little sparklies started to move in the liquid, and it was neat to watch that happen and watch the shadows on the wall behind it.
Separation is hard especially the first time, but having her go to sleep in her own room is a far cry from abuse, and I really think that as you start to enforce "go to sleep in your own bed" she'll bother going to yours in the middle of the night less and less because she'll get used to the sight of her own room.
Saturday night into Sunday was bad. Mini Dead fought us to go to bed, sneaking out while we were downstairs to go into the bathroom to play with her bath toys. She was sneaky, so we didn't hear her at all. At one point, we felt we heard a noise, so I went up to check, only to surprise Mini Dead, topless, having dragged her stool to where mommy kept her scissors, (which we erroneously thought were way out of reach) and cutting off Molly's (from Bubble Guppies) hair.
I stayed calm, and asked in my best dad voice:
"Hi Mini Dead, what are you doing?"
"..."
"I can't help but notice you're not answering my question, so I'll ask again: what are you doing?"
"I don't know..."
"You don't know, hunh? And what are you going to do next?"
"Go to bed?"
"Yes, you're going to go to bed, turn off the light, and stay in bed until morning, understood?"
I thought that would be the end of it, so I clean up the errant doll hair and put away the scissors somewhere FURTHER from her reach.
Fast forward to about 11:30 PM. Wife and I are in bed, not yet asleep, when we hear blood-curdling screams coming from Mini-Dead's room. Screams were too bad this time for us to be able to "ride it out" like last time, so I went in to check on her. She's hysterical, claiming that her ankle hurts. I feel around, doesn't feel off, nothing obviously wrong, my only thought is that we're dealing with growing pains. I get her some children's tylenol in the hopes that that will calm her down and do my best to soothe her.
It takes a while, but she eventually calms down enough to take her medicine, and I'm able to coax her back to sleep. By the time I get back to bed it's about 1:00 am.
Next morning, she wakes us up at about 7:30, all smiles, like nothing was wrong. I ask her how her ankle is feeling and she says "fine!
Anyways, I'm a little frazzled, but I guess that's life for us right now.
This seems more about whether or not bribery is your only go-to for teaching good behavior; followed by the framing and the nature of the reward. This is why we did a long term reward framed as a privledge of being a big kid. This had the added benefit (I feel) of teaching to plan against long term goals.
When their birthday finally came, we made it clear the reward was in celebration of the milestone, not for "doing what you're told."
Had they fallen back into their old habits we could have always revoked it, but because their birthdays had been several months away, this meant that their good behavior had become routine before the reward ever came.
Big mistake, erased almost all progress.
A recommendation for this situation. Get a sleeping bag for the kiddo and let him "camp out" on your floor or similar. They get an adventure but don't associate with being in your bed. This has worked well for vacations and visitors to our house for us. More for one of our kids than the other, but overall positive.
I suppose that's possible. If that's the case, however, what's the solution? Throw out the bed a buy another one? Invest in air mattresses and sleeping bags?
And I mean it was only an issue until my fear of "under the bed" began to overtake the fear of falling off the bed.
Well she's only ever fallen out of the bed once that I can recall, so I would be surprised if that was it. We're doing all we can to try and be as comforting and supportive as ever, while making sure to be firm enough in our explanation as to why she can't stay in bed with us. Ongoing situation, I guess; one day at a time and all that.
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He actually stopped coming over to my side of the bed, as I would always put him back in his bed. Mommy on the other hand... she was letting him stay.
But after a couple months of this (yes, yes, we should've stopped it a long time ago) we're now both on the "stay in your own bed bus".
In an attempt to combat the "lonely" aspect we even let the kids have "sleepovers" in each other's rooms. Nice five bedroom house, all three kids sleeping in the same room. But, they don't get a lot of sleep that way, as they talk and play all night.
Then, at some point my oldest decided he wanted to sleep in the "big bed" in the guest room. Then all three ended up in the guest room (two on floor, one in bed). Again.. big five bedroom house, kids sleeping in the guest room...
We've put our feet down on the guest room and sleepover stuff though. Only on weekends. During the week, everyone in their own room. Stay out of mommy and daddy's room.... at this point my wife and I are up and down at least twice a night putting the little boy back in his bed.
Totally our fault for not stopping it sooner....
So we called her bluff last night and let her cry for like an hour until she fell asleep.
I thought for sure that bedtime would be a horror show, because she was hungry, but, suprisingly, nightime passed without any major incident.
Remember when we asked if you wanted to eat dinner or go hungry? Well, you chose to go hungry. Tomorrow you can choose to eat dinner.
I watch our friends do it, and I want to end their very obvious misery, but ArbitrarySpouse advises me to not offer unsolicited parenting advice.
Our oldest didn't stop this until her younger sibling was old enough to sleep in the same room, and really didn't all the way quit until she was like 8?
Middle and youngest never had the problem at all. Parenting is hard, yo.
Keep snacks out of reach because after I got kicked out of the bed room I got hella enterprising and less afraid of the dark. Mom didn't keep very many snacks in the house, so I'd just eat a confusing amount of hot dog buns, and mom would be unsure why we seemed to run out. Even more frustrating, If I was actually eating a hotdog, I wouldn't finish the bun.
Anyway, sticking to your guns is the right choice, I never harbored any malice later in life for being broken of sleeping in my parents room, or eating food other than mac and cheese, I'm sure she wont either.
if I aquiesce will it give me more of a headache? things like providing food alternatives while they work in the shorttime will be a nightmare later on and if anything make things like pickey eating worse.
we give a few optionss and that is their choice if they want to eat.