Our two-year-old, Azad, just mastered the mechanics of the standard door knob. With her trespassing skills newly unlocked, nighttime for her parents has become a series of short, stressful naps, punctuated by the telltale sounds of creaking bedroom doors:
My toddler isn’t the only one who’s giving “sentient raptor,” though. When I talk to other parents, close to 100% of them express frustration about the overnight peregrinations of their children, which often end with bed sharing.
The topic of bed sharing is divisive (as is the broader category of little kid sleep). On one end of the spectrum, there are parents who love and welcome the crowded mattress. Their foils at the opposite end take a no prisoners approach to keeping kids in their own beds, by any means necessary. It’s hard to assess the prevalence of bed sharing as a practice, in part due to the complexity of disambiguating consensual, habitual co-sleeping, from passive, exhausted acquiescence to a determined little bridge troll with door skillz; that said, the NIH thinks more than 1/3 of all young children in the United States co-sleep, with more than 20% doing so habitually.
I’m not here to take a position on the medical, psychological, or sociological benefits of different sleeping formations. I do want to express the “Hot Take,” though, that A) everyone in your family deserves to sleep through the night, and B) it’s worth investing time and energy building habits that contribute to overall family sleep quality.
Beyond that, I want to encourage more honesty, greater transparency, fewer euphemisms, and less dogma in parental discourse about sleep. “Sleep training” - which is code for locking a door while your child screams - works for many families, … even if its core adherents make Cross Fit enthusiasts seem humble and taciturn by comparison.1 On the gentler side of the spectrum, there’s a hodgepodge of conflicting advice; as I type, for example, Sheila is reading a PDF of sleep tips she finessed from a parent in our neighborhood WhatsApp group, which describes a “more humane” approach than sleep training’s “extinction” process. The document describes an escalating series of parental bedtime scripts, wall charts for documenting performance, reward-based incentive structures, and side missions. When she asked if this whole rigamarole worked, the parents who shared the elaborate framework demurred.
“We tried it for a week,” they said, “before installing a ‘child entry prevention mechanism’ to the bedroom door.”
*Stares at the camera and blinks* … sooooo a lock?
I don’t judge other parents for their choices around toddler sleep, just like I know that a mom who’s doing this move has already done tried everything else:
That said, let’s call a “lock” a lock.
Habit-building is hard enough, especially when accounting for the most irrational human behavior imaginable. We don’t need to make it any harder with obfuscation and code words.
I want to hear from you, though! What’s your experience with kiddo sleep been? Share in the comments below!
Like, I’m glad that your kid starting sleeping like an angel, my guy … but I’m not sure you deserve a trophy for locking the door while your kid screams for three nights in a row, only to rehire your sleep consultant a few months later when they have another regression.
This father of someone “close” to “Spinning Plates” remembers a certain author who along with his sister quite often slept in the same bed with their parents. And when his pre-K teacher asked him to draw a pic of the family put us all in BED!
Veteran parent here with kids now in their 30s and just starting grandparent stage: Main goal: everyone sleeping! We put a futon mattress, sleeping bag and pillow under our bed. If a kid had a nightmare and wanted to sleep closer to us, we pulled out it out. We called it the "cuddle bed," meaning, come up, get a hug from mom or dad and then sleep right next to the bed, but not in it, because that interfered with our sleep. We'd go through weeks where we had a kid on the cuddle bed almost every night; weeks when it didn't get used. Also, what works for one kid doesn't work on the next, alas. Standard for success: everyone sleeping as much as possible.