Getting your Toddler to Sleep Through the Night
The Missing Ingredient to Getting Your Toddler to Sleep Through the Night
It seems like every parent goes though this problem at some point during the infant or toddler years. If you are dealing with a child who won’t stay in bed, or wakes up in tears throughout the night, then I really hope this article helps you.
If you read the conventional advice on parenting, you’ll see very reasonable advice. Usually it goes something like this:
- Be consistent.
- Get your kid to bed earlier rather than later.
- Don’t let your child fall asleep while nursing or rocked. Have them fall asleep in their own bed.
- Don’t “give up” and bring your child into your own bed if you are not in a habit of co-sleeping.
- Put your child to bed when he or she is showing signs of drowsiness, but not already asleep.
What’s the Missing Ingredient?
If this seems really simple to you after reading it, you have my permission to laugh out loud. Here it is: Your child has to have an emotional feeling of comfort from his own bed. If your child feels comforted, warm, cozy, loved, and safe in his or her own bed, sleep issues go away completely.
Yes – completely.
I was reading “The Good Child Guide” by Dr. Noel Swanson the other day and he makes a great point very early on in the book when he says that children do what they do because they WANT to.
If you are a Tony Robbins fan, you know this better by the terminology “pain” and “pleasure”. People seek pleasure and they avoid pain. Their behavior consistently targets these desires. When I started learning about NLP and hypnosis in the late 1990s, Tony Robbins was a huge source of my learning.
When a child won’t stay in bed it is because he either feels that he is missing out on pleasure (playing with Mom and Dad, or doing something fun), or he feels that being in his own bed is painful (scary, boring, cold, etc).
Your job is to fix this problem.
Let’s talk about the “pain” problem first. It’s unlikely that your kid is too cold unless you aren’t dressing him or her properly. If your child is old enough to feel bored in bed, then maybe it’s time for the mid-day nap to stop. But these are NOT the big issues most parents face.
Most “pain” comes from the child being scared or somehow emotionally uncomfortable. You need to take this pain and turn it into pleasure. You want your child to feel so comfortable and safe in bed that he simply LOVES the experience (just like we adults do).
How do you do this?
Establish a routine of preparing your child for bed. Get in the habit of doing things that are calm, relaxing, and enjoyable for your child prior to bed. This sets up an “anchor” so that your child will be in the right frame of mind when going to bed.
Spend “cuddle time” with your child in bed. Snuggle together, talk about things, or read books. This maintains the comfortable state that we talked about above.
Tell stories to reinforce the comfort. This is where the magic happens. You need to learn how to tell stories that have embedded messages in them. I often told my daughters a story about a little bunny rabbit that had fun playing all day, and enjoyed crawling into his comfy bed at the end of the day, snuggling with Mommy and Daddy.
Use “future pacing” in your stories. Future pacing is a way of having your child imagine something that will be happening in the future. In this case we’re talking about the NEAR future, i.e., the next morning! If you are telling a story about a little bunny rabbit, talk about how the bunny lies in bed and feels happy about how much fun he’ll have in the morning when the family has breakfast together, or whatever else you want to put in the story.
Language and Delivery is the Key
If there is anything I want you to really understand, it’s that you need to help your child feel the pleasure of sleepy time and take away any pain. If your kid won’t sleep through the night, or won’t go to bed at all, then you are dealing with an emotional problem. You can’t solve it with logic. You have to solve it by addressing the emotional issues. You need to be involved in the solution by helping do things, and talk about things, with your child, that make him feel comforted and safe.
If you do this, good sleep will follow. I promise.
My audio course, Talking to Toddlers, shows you many more language techniques to solve this kind of problem. I think you’ll find it to be an incredible resource.
I also think Kim West’s website is worth looking at for sleep issues.
Click here to subscribe to my Free Newsletter and get a complimentary audio lesson that teaches you 3 language techniques.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
This is very timely information for me as we are constantly struggling to keep our 3 year old in his bed. Thanks for the tips!
Thank you. Realy I was in need to read this techniques.
Great post and I agree completely — i will say, too, to include GI distress amongst the pain — our child was having clear issues with sleeping; partly very likely emotional (he is adopted) — that said, extreme sleep behaviors hit and no emotional support in the world was working. Turns out he had an ulcer and serious reflux, making going to sleep (laying down) the most painful position… but no way to tell us that other than to fight going to sleep and waking up frequently.. Medications and time resolved that, and very very emotion based serious routine/structure (knock on wood) seem to be resolving the emotional pain (likely both from his past as well as his recent “true body” pain)… Chris – I love you work and approach. thanks so much and please keep it up!
my 3 yr old wont sleep till i drone on n on for a particular story he wants..n hew wants a different episode everyday..maybe i will try this…n will help..thanks chris.
My daughter, from the ages of 2 to 3, did not like sleeping in her “big-girl” bed or sleeping through the night…this was her first year in the bed too. She would either scream for my husband or me to come into the room and stay with her or she would run into our room and crawl into our bed. This habit finally changed when we read her the children’s book, I Sleep In My Own Bed, (www.isleepinmyownbed.com). The book is very cute and it taught my daughter that her room is safe and made just for her. She loves the book especially the illustrations. She now sleeps in her own bed by herself. The book is even part of her bedtime ritual now. I recommend it to anyone with a toddler who gets fussy at bedtime.
Valuable post. My daughter and son in law kind of worked through getting my sixteen month grandson to bed in his own bed with some challenges. I wish I had come across this article before then.
The art of “future pacing” is a very useful tactic that will rouse the child and place them into expectation mode of after I sleep what will tomorrow bring.I will definitely recommend the tips to mums I come across in my professional life who are faced with the above challenge.
I wouldn’t say this is a great post. I’ve heard all the mumbo jumbo techniques like these on countless other websites. What if nothing works? Literally. I’ve tried all of the suggestions listed above and was very consistent for a long time. My little guy has got to be the most stubborn child I’ve ever encountered. VERY hard headed and does not care one bit what the consequences are, like sleep deprivation. I feel bad for him as he is only 23 months old and I know he is sleep deprived, poor dude needs his rest but he refuses to stay in his bed and refuses to go to sleep. I need a friggin break!
If “nothing” works, try something else. Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. And when you say “nothing” works all that means is “nothing you’re doing yet works”.
Erin – keep in mind I wasn’t offering you a specific set of things to do to solve the problem. I’m offering you a MODEL for how to solve the problem. The problem is that your child sees more pleasure (and less pain) in getting out of bed than the pleasure he gets from staying in bed (or pain from leaving bed).
You have to attack both angles.
I’ll give you a very recent example. My 7 year old got in a habit of leaving her bedroom recently to come downstairs and tell us that she can’t sleep, or that she hears noises, or that she wants us to be more quiet (she’ll make up any excuse in the book). The solution was simple. Establish more pain for her to get out than if she stays put. Her 8pm bed time turned into 7pm if she continued this patter. She was calmly “warned” about the logical consequence. She continued and we calmly put her back to bed. The next night she was quite upset about her 7pm bedtime, but only until I reminded her that she made the choice, not me. Still, she got out for 2 more nights and ended up with a 7pm bedtime for 3 nights in a row. Following that, problem solved. No more after-bed interruptions from her.
The trick was to make this her choice and her solution. We did not punish her. We laid out a logical consequence, which is “if you give up your needed sleep by getting out of bed, then you’ll have to make up for it tomorrow by going to bed early”.
Erin – obviously at 23 months old the solution is different than what I described for my 7 year old, but the principles are the same. Email me more specifics if you like. I’ll do my best to help you.
My daughter is 20 months old and we are still getting up with her at night. She is in bed by 8pm, we sit with her in her rocker for about 10 min then lay her in bed she falls asleep with know problems. Come midnight she starts yelling screaming at us so after a min of that one of us head in there to tell her its still night night and tell her to go back to sleep. This happens about 3 or 4 times a night. We’ve tried to let her cry it out but her yelling at us gets worse if we don’t. What do we do???? I’m out of ideas! We have never put her in bed with us! Our bed time routine is wonderful its never a fight. Please we are in major need of some advice!!!
Thank you….
I am not a fan of letting kids cry it out. I think that if they cry, you go deal with it. But you use the opportunity to train them to fall back asleep on their own.
I recommend Pinky McKay’s book “sleeping like a baby” which is available here:
http://www.pinkymckay.com/pinkyshop/sleeping-like-a-baby
(She is a fantastic person too, and was one of the first to review Talking to Toddlers).
One tip that I recommend for the middle-of-the-night wake ups is to use “excuses” to leave the baby’s room but with the idea you’ll be returning shortly.
So … baby wakes up and cries. You go in and calm him/her down. Your baby is trained to expect you to stay. Instead you gently say “I’m going to the bathroom for a minute. I’ll be back”. You slowly increase the length of time you are gone every time these wake ups happen. Before you know it, your baby is trained to calm back down on his own. Very little intervention needed.
But, bottom line … kids do wake up. They do cry. And we must deal. We all go through it and we all get through it. It just helps to have a few tricks.