If you’d rather read than watch, here’s a transcription of the video…

This week’s question comes from Maureen. She writes:

“We’ve rocked our 15 month old twin boys since birth. I haven’t particularly minded because they did take good naps and sleep well through the night. However, I’m now ready to try teaching them some independent skills for sleep. My problem is that they are in separate rooms, so I’m not sure if I should just put them both in their crib and walk away, or what will be the best approach?”

Okay, so there’s a lot of people out there who have twins or are even trying to establish good sleep habits for more than one child and that can be a difficult situation when you can’t be in two places at once, which is fair enough. And so, what’s the best approach?

Well, let’s just start at bedtime and if you’re on your own, that’s okay, but if you have your partner to help at bedtime, then the best approach would be to setup their bedtime routines so that they know when bedtime’s coming. Good examples are a bath, into pajamas, a bit of milk, and then into the crib.

And because rocking has been such a part of their strategy up until now, I suggest you just get rid of the rocking altogether. Maybe instead you’d consider a brief cuddle time for a hug and a kiss and then they will go into their cribs awake.

Now, if you’re both home, I would suggest that dad stays with one and you stay with the other and then alternate nights. So the best strategy would most likely be the “stay in the room method” for the boys, and then you would switch so that each child got used to the same rules applying for both parents.

Now, when its naptime and you don’t have that same support, there’s really only one solution to that problem and it’ll have to be to do a little bit of a naptime routine with them both. Maybe in somebody’s room you read a couple of stories together or just sing a couple of songs just to indicate naptime’s coming, and then really you’re going to have to put one in his crib, take the other one to his crib, and then you’re just going to have to do an alternating back and forth between rooms.

So maybe you stay with one boy for 3-5 minutes and then you go to the other boy for 3-5 minutes, and back and forth, and back and forth until they both finally fall asleep. And I think you’ll find as the days go on, you might find that one strategy is working better than the other, meaning you’re having fairly good success with that when you’re alternating back and forth, but maybe nights aren’t going as well because perhaps your presence in the room is just aggravating them further. So decide which one’s working better and if it’s better to alternate, then go ahead and do that for bedtime as well.

Obviously if it’s not working as well at naptime, you’re just going to have to persevere with the strategy that you have to use and just know that naptimes do tend to be the hardest part. They take a little longer and you might find your nights are coming along within a few days, but you’re still struggling a bit with naps and that’s fairly common and I would encourage you to just remind yourself that that’s common and keep going.

And given their age, I would say that they should be on just one nap a day, so it would fall somewhere just after lunch hour and off they go to their rooms for their own nap. So I think it’s a good decision. I mean it’s been nice and I get the feeling that you’ve enjoyed the rocking time you’ve had with them, but now that you’ve made the decision to say goodbye to that and teach them a new strategy, I think that’s a good choice on your part.

So thanks a lot for your question… and sleep well!