How To Get a Toddler To Stay in Bed (ALL NIGHT!)

Are your kids getting up multiple times throughout the night? Perhaps your five-year-old is going through that classic phase of being afraid of the dark, or your four-year-old is having night terrors or nightmares, or maybe your toddler's just not used to being in their own bed and still looking for you throughout the night. And maybe you just don't have the patience for it. After a long day of parenting, you need a long night of good rest. And you are not wrong for wanting that for you and for your child. I know there is so much guilt mixed up in teaching children to sleep independently, and I want to put your mind at ease. Maybe for you, like for me, sleeping in the same room or the same bed as your child means a compromised quality of sleep for you both. And we all know the more tired you are, the harder life is. I want to tell you that it is absolutely okay to hold high expectations of your child to be able to sleep through the night, and preferably in their own bed. Maybe in their own room. It is okay to hold high expectations of our children. In fact, children need us to hold high expectations of them. What we need to understand is with high expectations comes high support. So if you want your toddler or young child to stay in their bed without disrupting you throughout the night, we need to set them up for success. Let's look at these three key ways. Number one is clarity. Look, it's really hard to achieve any goal when you don't have clarity over what that goal is. And it's impossible to hold high expectations when we don't know what those expectations are. You need to think, what is your expectation? And take into your considerations your child's temperament, their age, the structure of your house, your own resources, emotional and otherwise. How many adults are there to help out? How many other children there are? Your expectations of what your child can and can't be held to with regards to sleeping in their bed throughout the night will depend and change as they go through stages of development. Maybe your expectation is that your child can come into your room when they have a nightmare, but not into your bed. They need to sleep on a mattress next to you. Or maybe it's the expectation that they need to stay in their room, but it's okay for them to call you. Or it's not okay for them to call you, but you'll leave them a nightlight and whatever else they need, a lovey or a stuffy. Maybe your expectation is that you'll sit with them while they fall asleep at night, but then they stay in their bed and you go to yours. Or maybe your expectation is that they co-sleep with your partner, but they don't disturb you while you're co-sleeping with the baby, for example. There is no right and wrong when it comes to expectations. And of course, we all need to parent at night. It's part of parenting. But you can set your child up for success if you have clarity over which expectations you establish and hold. If you're changing your rules from day to day, and sometimes telling them one expectation and then changing it because you're too tired to implement it, you're never going to make headway. So crystal clear clarity is necessary whenever we want to establish a new habit and make a behavior change. What is the goal you're working towards? Maybe it's an incremental goal of first sleeping next to you, and then moving to their bedroom with your partner, and then moving to their bedroom without your partner. Whatever it is, is okay. Depending on your child's age and needs, you need to have clarity on what it is that you're expecting. Number two is creativity. Based on your clarity of expectations, you can start to get creative with the solutions you can come up with to troubleshoot, right? Because your child is going to have resistance, and maybe your child has fears, or they just don't prefer this sleeping arrangement. In which case, we're going to need to support them with solutions. Remember, high expectations, high support. So how can you support them? Maybe you're going to play games and engage in playful parenting to act out their fears, like sweeping away any spiders, or putting on a nightlight to, you know, banish the dark. Maybe you're going to make a monster spray and spray the room so that there are no monsters here. What can you do to help them solve the issues that they're facing? They are real issues that they're really struggling with. That doesn't mean we can't expect them to overcome them. We can and we should. We shouldn't tell them and teach them that they're too timid, that they can't be brave in the face of their fears, or that they can't overcome those challenges. But we also shouldn't leave them to struggle alone. We need to get creative and find solutions with them. And finally, our third C is consistency. You have clarity on your expectations, you've creatively come up with solutions. That means you have high expectations and you're offering high support. Now, you need to show up for your boundary that you've set. And this is the hardest part for us parents. Because on this night, the baby's sick. And on this night, we have a lot of work and we just want to get it done. And on that night, we're too tired. But if we don't show up consistently for our boundaries, you can be sure that your child won't either. If you want them to consistently establish a new and healthier habit of staying in bed, you need to be consistent in your reaction. For example, consistently returning them to their own mattress when they come into your bed. Or consistently being boring and unengaging and switching yourself off when it's bedtime. So you don't engage in power struggles, you don't go round and round with one more book and one more glass of water and one more trip to the potty. You've done all of those and now you switch off and you're consistently just sitting there, boring and sleepy and waiting for sleep to occur. Maybe you need to be consistent in returning your child to their room and staying with them when they fall asleep, even if that happens multiple times. There are no rights or wrongs except for being inconsistent when you're really trying to establish a new habit because it can't get established that way. Remember, hold your own boundary consistently and your child will eventually follow suit. There is always an uncomfortable threshold that we have to get through when we are weaning a child off of something, when we are moving into a next stage, when we are establishing a new expectation. You have to go through it, not avoid it or you'll never get to the other side of a healthier, more established, better sleep routine. Kids will stay in their bed and sleep consistently through the night when we show up consistently with high expectations and high support to help them do so. So make yourself a plan right now. What is an actionable, optimized sleep plan that you can start to implement in your family or gradually work towards? How can you communicate these expectations with clarity to yourself, your partner and your child? I sometimes print out or write out what our rules are going to be and stick them on the door so that in the middle of the night when I have no patience and no willpower, I remind myself of my goal to stay consistent. And then how can you show up creatively to troubleshoot and find solutions to whatever resistance is coming up? And then how can you hold that boundary consistently until you see the results that you and your child desperately need and deserve of a healthy, long, deep, good night's sleep?