Getting up to your little one all through the night
can be really, really exhausting,
especially if your little one is getting up themselves
and coming in to you.
Today, I am answering your sleep question,
"Do you have any suggestions for getting
my two year old to stay in their bed during the night?"
And the good news is, yes, I have some suggestions.
So stay tuned.
But first, tell me in the comments,
how is your two year old sleeping?
Are they getting up all night long
and if so, what did you do about it?
Hi, I'm Nicky.
I am a mother to three beautiful children,
and one of the founders of Little Ones.
At Little Ones, we specialise in infant
and toddler sleep and nutrition.
We are passionate about helping families
improve their little ones' sleep
and overall wellness through establishing
healthy sleep patterns.
We would love to help you and your family
through our comprehensive sleep programs
which are housed inside our custom built app.
We would love to help you and your family
toward better sleep, so please visit us
at www.littleones.co.
Right, so if your two year old is getting up
repeatedly throughout the night,
it sounds to me like they are already in a big bed
and no longer in their cot.
We would actually always recommend
keeping your little ones in their cot
as long as you possibly can, as long as it is still safe
for them to be in there, i.e. they're not climbing out,
because it does alleviate the issues
we generally see around this age,
where they are getting out of bed millions of times a night,
because quite simply, they can.
At this age your little one's level of comprehension
and ability to respond to negotiation and bribery
is a lot lower than it would be around three years old.
A three year old you can quite easily convince
or bribe to stay in their bed.
A two year old, not so much.
So let's look at what you can do for you two year old
to make sure that they are staying in their bed
all night long.
So the first thing I would really suggest
is to make it not worth their while to get out.
Your little one is getting out of their bed
because they can and probably also
because they are rewarded by some kind of reaction from you.
They're doing it because they're getting
something out of it, even if you are negatively responding
to their getting out of bed, if you're getting grumpy
at them or frustrated, then that is still a reaction,
they're still getting that attention from you
which they will always perceive as positive attention
even if it's delivered in a negative way.
So they're getting something from you.
Maybe you're getting them a drink,
maybe you're letting them watch a bit of TV
so they'll fall back asleep,
maybe you're letting them snuggle with you
in your bed for awhile, whatever is happening
when they get up, they're being rewarded
for getting out of bed.
So the first thing we need to do
is make it really boring for them
and make it so that they are like,
"Oh, there's no point getting out of bed.
I'm not getting anything from this ordeal."
So what we would do is what's called a silent return,
which is where you simply without speaking
or any kind of real interaction, you take your little one
back to their bed, put them in their bed,
and then go back to your own bed.
You might need to do this a thousand times at least
for the first few nights, until they really understand
that they're not getting anything out of this bargain,
that you're not gonna give in and give them
what it is that they're seeking,
which is attention or reward,
so simply returning them back to their bed
in silence, don't turn the lights on,
nothing is stimulating them,
and they're gonna eventually think,
"Well there's no point, because she's just gonna
take me back there, and it's really boring."
So they will in theory stop getting out.
The other thing that you probably want to start looking
at at this age is to, I mean, your child might be
getting out of their bed because they can,
but they might also be waking that many times a night
because there's something causing natural waking
in the first place.
So the most likely thing causing that kind of waking
at that age is what is happening
with their daytime nap, so at two years old
it's quite common that our little ones
have turned into really good nappers,
and so at this age because they're just a hurricane
of energy and chaos, we generally quite like them
to nap for hours and hours at a time
because we get a bit of a break from them
and a chance to tidy the house and what can end up happening
is they're napping for a bit too long,
and so that starts to impact the quality
of their nighttime sleep and their ability to stay asleep
in a deep sleep overnight, so if your little one
at two is napping for really much longer
than an hour and a half to two hours,
you might want to trim that back.
If they're having like a three hour nap,
it sounds heavenly but that is possibly
what's causing them getting up all through the night.
So trim back that nap
and you definitely want them to be waking up
from their nap no later than 2:30, 3:00 in the afternoon
because napping any later in the day than that
is also potentially contributing
to those multiple overnight wakes.
So I hope this helps answer your question
of how you get your two year old
to stop getting up at night.
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and I'll talk to you again soon.