We tried stickers and treats and praise for successes. We tried explaining why it’s not a good idea. We tried locking our door. It’s been years and nothing really works: every single night our daughter, now 5, wakes up and wants to sleep with mummy.
Even if we take her in for the sake of getting back to sleep faster, her sleep is troubled, she cannot fall asleep again easily, and so keeps me from sleeping, and that had a horrible effect on me over the years, and on our relationship too.
When this was an issue for us, my wife would start the night in my daughter’s bed.
Which would at least solve your problem – being kept from sleeping, complete with the “horrible effect” on you – and, in my experience, tapered the kid off too.
Talk to the kid about why she can’t sleep.
If she’s afraid of the dark, leave a light on, and slowly reduce the brightness over weeks and months until you get to a nightlight.
If she’s just afraid to be alone, you or your wife may need to sleep in her room for a while. All night at first, then just for a couple of hours, then just until she falls asleep.
In our daughters case a combination of these two worked, plus making sure the curtains are closed so that there isn’t this dark view of the “woods” out the window (just a stand of trees in the yard)
Oh, yes and a new mattress. We didn’t realize how uncomfortable her mattress was.
You could try the following (might work, might not though): set her up in her room with her own little pup tent or decorated cardboard box castle, with stuffed toys, pet, audio (but not video) device with her favorite jams.
I remember having the same problem - not as a parent, but as a little kid. When my parents did the just-don’t-let-her-in thing, I’d bring a pillow and blanket and camp outside their door. For weeks. Eventually it was a combination of my mom falling asleep with me, then leaving, and not turning the lights off (I actually slept with bright lights on well into adolescence - yay for embarrassing facts about yourself!). I agree that isolating what the problem is helps, as well as some iron-hearted use of the word “no”.
[ul][li]Accept that for the next week or so, your sleep will be interrupted.[/li][li]Lock your bedroom door.[/li][li]Ignore her when she tries to get into your bedroom. Do not yell, do not explain, do not request. Ignore her. [/li][li]If you have to leave the bedroom during the night, and you see her on the floor outside your room, ignore her. No touch, no talk, no eye contact, no instructions. [/ul][/li]Regards,
Shodan
I think you let your wife start the night with her, sitting on her bed until she falls asleep. If she comes in, repeat. Or you could tell her there are monsters under your bed.
For fuck’s sake, being concerned about your child is not “being doormats”. The o.p. has already described locking their bedroom door not dissuading the child. I suppose he could be like my mother and threaten to injure or kill his child if she won’t go back to her room, but I don’t recommend it for a number of reasons.
To the o.p.: While it may just be co-dependence and/or a lack of maturity on the part of your daughter, there may be some deeper underlying problem such as night terrors, sleep anxiety, some other emotional disturbance, a dietary issue, or some environmental cause such as even a slight noise or air current which is keeping her from falling asleep. Children has often unappreciated rich interior lives which they are ill-equipped to share or describe to a parent but which may offer some explanation, and thus, a means of resolving it, such as eliminating distractions, making sure your daughter is comfortable and not overstimulated at bedtime, and that there are no underlying emotional issues.
I used to have frequent night terrors (as in 5 to 7 nights a week) combined with anxiety over abandonment (e.g. that i would wake up and find nobody home) which was exacerbated by the emotional turmoil of being in a family environment where one parent was a pathological narcissist and the other was likely severely depressed. That was a fairly extreme situation but the point is that it is important to figure out the root of the problem and address it rather than just push it down.
It is worth noting that throughout human history and development, the notion of having one’s own room, much less a small child sleeping alone, is a rare ‘luxury’. We are social animals with a long rearing period, and the trappings of modern society often work to artificially enforce a separation between mother and child that would be virtually impossible in pre-agrarian societies. This isn’t wrong or bad; just an acknowledgement that activities for children like “going to school”, “entertaining yourself”, and “going to sleep in your own room” are learned skills, not instinctual behaviors. As with any skill, shildren learn those behaviors at different rates and sometimes have an emotional or conditioned block that they need help to overcome.
This sounds like a sleep problem, rather than a wanting-to-sleep-with-you problem. It’s not that she refuses to go to bed in her own room, right? It’s that, when she wakes up in the middle of the night, she wants to come in with you. So if you get rid of the waking up, you’ll also get rid of the problem.
With babies, if they’re waking up at the same time every night, you can try the wake-to-sleep thing: if the baby’s waking at three every morning, then for a few nights you go in there at two o’clock and poke the baby just enough to make it wriggle and resettle. In theory, that resets the kid’s sleep cycle so it’ll sleep through the time when it was in the habit of waking. It worked twice for our older kid, never worked for our younger one, and I don’t know whether it would work on a five-year-old, but it might be worth a try.
If our six-year-old was waking up in the middle of the night, personally I’d tell her to read herself back to sleep, but that totally depends on the kid.
I didn’t describe it to earn your backhanded sympathy but to illustrate the point that what adults often describe in children as being “difficult”, “bratty”, et cetera, are often signs of an underlying problem that should be addressed rather than just responding with a punitive or adverse manner. Of course, some children are just difficult or bratty and should be dealt with corrective punishment, but the of actions that the o.p. describes (“stickers and treats and praise for successes…explaining why it’s not a good idea…locking our door”) none really address the root cause of the problem; they just attempt to address or offset the behavior. Blithely assuming that this is just the result of willful misbehavior on the part of the child without first looking for a cause may just create more problems. Most children do not aim to misbehave most of the time; they’re just expressing distress or dissatisfaction in the only way they know how. Sometimes that calls for a rigid and forceful approach (such as learning safety rules or polite behavior) but ignoring a problem like having difficulty in getting to sleep is just setting the stage for a lifetime of sleeping dysfunction.
No one has suggested anything punitive. Locking a five year old out of your bedroom and ignoring her attempts to get in is not punishment.
In a word, horseshit. This is not a psychological crisis, it’s a five year old trying to get her way.
It is, in fact, the exact opposite of setting her up for sleep dysfunction. It is teaching her how to put herself to sleep.
If you want more of a behavior in a child, you reinforce it. If you want less, you don’t. If you reinforce the behavior of giving in and letting them into the bedroom, you are going to get more of it, especially if the reinforcement is intermittent.
If you make a big deal over every example of immature behavior in a five-year-old, you won’t have time for anything else.
Get her a walkie talkie so she can talk to you when she is scared. You can coach her through it with everybody still in their respective beds.
Get her a flashlight.
Picture of mom and dad on the nightstand.
On top of added security, the WTs make it fun for the child.
Have you spoken to her doctor about her sleep issues? You might need to adjust her pre-bedtime habits. You may need to give her something like melatonin. She might have some other problem related to sleep…not just waking you up (like mentioned upthread).
Shodan is correct. It will be a tough week or two, but every time she leaves her room you gently, but firmly direct her back. Explain why she must sleep in her own bed. She will argue, she will fight, but she has a physiological need for sleep. You will win. And the battle is worth it.
We went through this with our daughter. When she came into our room at night, I would get up and escort her back to her room. At first I would lie on the bed with her until she fell asleep. Then I would sit in a chair in her room until she was asleep. Then, I left while she was still awake, so she could learn to fall asleep by herself.
You have to be consistent with this. Every single time she came into our room, I brought her right back to her room. Sometimes it was 4 or 5 times a night. It only took about a month before she stayed in her own bed for the whole night.