Dana Obleman: Hi. I’m Dana. Welcome to our video blog. Today, I want to talk to you about “Sleep training when you have other children in the house.” That’s actually one of the top five questions I get asked, “What am I going to do? I’ve got more than one child in this house. How am I going to do this with as little disrupt as possible?”

Really, what it often does is postpone the whole sleep training or sleep change task, because there is so much fear around this baby waking up that baby, that people don’t do anything.
I’m going to give you some tips here today to help minimize this. First of all, the hard truth people is that “Yes.” Your baby is going to wake up the other child. Unless you live in a house that is so large that you can literally have them on one end and the other, there is really no place to hide from a crying baby.

The good news is that if you’ve got an older child that is sleeps well and you should I’d start with that. If you’ve got a toddler who is not sleeping well, then that is your number one priority, to get that toddler sleeping well and then work on the baby.

If you do have a toddler that is sleeping well, then just explain to that child what’s going to be going on, that you’re going to start putting some change in place for the baby, that they might hear the baby cry in the night, not to worry because they love this little person.

It makes sense that they might be concerned something’s wrong, but just put those fears at ease. Say, “This is what I’m going to be doing and I don’t want you to worry. If you hear the baby, please just go back to sleep.”

That’s what we would all do. You’re husband’s going to do it, your nanny’s going to do it. If a siren goes by in the middle of the night, an ambulance, we wake up, perhaps. We acknowledge the noise and then we go back to sleep. Which, hopefully is what your older child will do.

You can even put some reward in place for that older child. Something like, “This is going to be a hard few days. If you can handle it well and you stay in your own bed, and you don’t come visit mommy, then you can have a reward in the morning.” That might put a little positive spin on it for your older child.

You really just kind of have to get over it. This idea that one child is going to wake up the other, and just throw up your hands and say, “Oh well.” That’s the price that has to be paid to get both children, or all of the children sleeping well in the long run. Really, it’s a short term for a long term great sleep for everybody in the family.

Now, if the children “Room share” and you’ve got an older child and a baby that you need to deal with, my advice,again, only if the older child is a good sleeper already, then I’d either move the baby out into your room, for example, in a pack and play, or move the crib in for a couple of weeks until you get baby sleeping well. Then move them back.

If you’ve got an older child that sleeps well and you think that that child could cope with a small bit of change, and move them out for the short term, then that’s another option as well. I wouldn’t do that with a child under the age of three, though, because toddlers are very habitual and protective of certain things. They’re not really going to respond that well to that kind of change, so better to move baby out in that case.

I hope that gives you a little bit of motivation. You’re just going to have to deal with it . Yes, it might be a rough couple of nights when both kids are up or all three kids are up. Again, it’s just for the short term with a long term reward being that all kids are going to sleep brilliantly.
Thanks so much for being with me here to day. Sleep well.

Transcription by CastingWords