Hi, Dana here. Let me ask you if this scenario might sound familiar to you. You tuck your cute little toddler into their bed at night, they fall asleep pretty peacefully, but somewhere around midnight, they are in your bed.

They either demand to be in your bed or they sneak into your bed so skillfully that you don’t even notice. And you wake up in the morning and see there’s a little person who has spent half the night in your bed. Now, the second scenario doesn’t sound that bad, because it didn’t interrupt your night, you didn’t even notice that they came in.

But here is where it’s problematic, and it’s for the child’s quality of their nighttime sleep. Sleep in childhood is the most perfect time that sleep will ever be beautiful. Childhood sleep is hands down the best time in your life that your sleep will be optimal. And it’s just a hard reality. It starts to decline from the teen years down, and you know, it ends in your old age where sleep is not great at all.

So my goal has always been to make sure that children are having the best quality sleep that they can have, because that’s what they deserve, because that’s the time in their life when their sleep is gonna be so beautiful. So if you’ve got a little person who’s waking up halfway through the night to come to your bed, they’re having a fragmented night, they should be just sleeping really relatively straight through, with maybe a couple of little brief wakings in the night and sliding right back into another cycle.

So the fact that they’re waking up, getting outta their bed, coming to your bed, getting into your bed, getting settled again, I mean, that’s probably gonna be at least a five minute commute to come find you, and then settling back into sleep again. And that’s a fragmented night. And we know that the more fragmented nights that you have or the more fragments in the night that you have, the worse you feel during the day. The quality just declines rapidly with every actual wake up that you experience.

So I don’t love it for your child because I know that he or she is not having the best quality sleep that they can have. So I’ll give you a few tips on how to prevent this.

So first of all, we wanna make sure that our little person is learning to fall asleep independently. So that means you’re not laying with them, you’re not sitting in the room. If you’re stuck in that cycle of either laying down with or staying in the room until they’re asleep, then pick up a copy of the Sleep Sense Program, because they have a great strategy in there for getting you outta the picture, teaching your child how to fall asleep independently, having confidence around falling asleep independently, which will help with these night wakings.

And then if you don’t notice they’re coming in, then let’s figure out a way to make it more noticeable for you. I suggest to a lot of my clients that they hang a little bell on the door of their bedroom so that when the door opens or is pushed open, the bell will ring, and hopefully that will be enough to wake you and help you realize your child’s in your room and return them to their own room, and setting up some rewards for the child.

Listen, it’s really important that you stay in your own room through the night. It’s good for your own sleep. It helps mommy and daddy sleep better or the parents sleep better. And just teaching them that it’s really not okay to come to your room in the middle of the night. And so just putting a little alarm bell on it that you can respond to and be like, halt in its path, no, no, no, this is not happening. We’re gonna return to the bed, and just keep returning them to the bed. A, giving a positive reinforcement for staying in the bed is gonna be helpful. And if needed, maybe consequence in getting up.

So if they wake you up one time in the night to try to get in, you return them, let them know that if they do that again, there’s gonna be some sort of consequence for that behavior, and see if that helps, squash it, and keep them in their bed through the night.

But the key to any toddler or older child learning to sleep well and solidly through the night is that independence component. So can they confidently get to sleep by themselves at bedtime without much support or assistance from you? That’s the goal in teaching anybody, but especially these little ones, how to sleep well and all the way through the night.

Thanks for watching. Sleep well.