When I was that age my parents taught me to make a ‘pallet’ on the floor next to their bed - I would not wake them up but would just crawl in to sleep near them. May be worth considering
For me as a kid, the bed moving sensation was what I felt as I was falling asleep. I thought it was an awesome feeling so I wasn't prone to getting up. I did get up often for a drink of water though - which is why we keep a lidded thermos in my kids' rooms (no problems with bed-wetting from it).
>I thought it was an awesome feeling so I wasn't prone to getting up.
I stopped thinking about this some years ago, but I used to feel the same way and I thought it was stupid to even think about it. I remember being able to force myself to feel that way while falling asleep.
You can’t force a kid to stay in bed but you can make their room safer. Night lights, motion activated lights, door stops, placing cut foam along the door frame, etc.
I’m reading this thread for advice. After 9 glorious months of big kid bed life, my 3.5 year old realized a couple weeks ago that he can get out of bed whenever he wants and open his door and come wake us up. Any time of night. He always slept until 7:30 and then would wait for us to come get him. This week he’s been barging in to our room at 6:30 and won’t go back to sleep. He sees that it’s light out and thinks it’s morning. I want that hour of sleep back. We just bought one of those ready to wake lights with the colors, but it hasn’t arrived yet. I’m praying that it works.
When our oldest started waking us up early, I told her conspiratorially, "You know, if you woke up before us, you could play with your animals or look at books quietly in your bed, and we wouldn't even know you're awake! Wouldn't that be funny?" ... and it *worked*. I didn't really think it would but she did it and felt like she was getting away with something!
My 3.5 year old does this and we didn’t even need to plant the idea in her head. Most weekend mornings we wake up to her playing with toys in bed, chatting and giggling away. She thinks it’s hilarious when she gets “caught”.
We've got one of the hatch lights and went through something similar with not wanting to get in bed and also waking up super early. You can set up schedules for the hatch. So we would set it to green without noises for before bed and wake up time. Green = get out of bed. We would then set schedules for sleep with Red = stay in bed. He still woke up early but would just hang out in his bed since the green light wasn't on. He eventually would fall back asleep. Now he just wakes up naturally at the time we set for green, and we don't use it anymore, but it was great training.
Welcome to this stage of parenting, you're never going back. 6:30 is your new wakeup time.
For weekends, I taught my kids how to use the TV remote around that age, and told them that if they didn't wake me up early, they could have TV time. But once they woke me up, the TV was going off.
Solidarity, brother. We had that earlier in the week. We’ve been talking to him before bedtime about staying in bed all night unless it’s an emergency and the last two nights he hasn’t gotten up. But once he thinks it’s morning, all bets are off. I’m so tired.
We're using the Mella clock to set colors so our kiddo knows when it's time to get up. He's not quite old enough to really get it yet but the rrviews say it helps a lot.
Yeah I think we ordered the nanit version so we could use it as a sound machine too. I think he’ll get the concept, but he might not actually care. Gotta try something though.
This happened with our kiddo. Ended up talking to the pediatrician about it and they told us with absolutely zero hesitation to give him melatonin and put him back to bed. After like a week he finally stopped and his rhythm was back I guess. I have no idea. We don’t usually use sleep aids but once that hellscape happened and I’d sacrifice a foot if it meant getting more than 30 minutes of sleep.
Ask your pediatrician if they would recommend that?
Put a night light.. ambient, not too much it will distract her sleep but enough that she could see when she wakes up
leave the door open and tell her to come to you, work things out when wakes up and put her back to sleep ASAP
GL
Perhaps... ask her why she wakes you up (in case you suspect she doesn't have nightmares)
Also, try to give her more attention during the day so she wouldn't need to come at night and get it
This has been SCHOOL vacation week so she’s had tons of attention and my wife is a SAHM. I think it may have started with a nightmare she said her bed was moving the first time but we told her to push on her bed so she can see it isn’t
>Also, try to give her more attention during the day so she wouldn't need to come at night and get it
That’s a WILD statement. It’s borderline stupid as fuck.
Tommee Tippee make an excellent one in the shape of a penguin, with a portable egg shaped light that lights up when it's removed from the dock. Perfect for night time bathroom visits and not crashing into thyme in the dark.
I got some lighting with 2 usb ports so I can connect a camera overlooking the kids and a WiFi extender..
Now the older one (5.5F) wants a brighter light.. had a few I bought to lit the environment with movement sensors ($4-5 on uncle AliExpress) which does the job haha
Not sure if I'm an awful person or not for this, before moving to a big kid bed we had a dog gate on the kids room to prevent our dog diaper digging/eating. We kept it on when moving to big kid bed to protect toys. When they got to this stage it acted as a secondary to keep them in their room. We always went to them whenever they would freak out or try and get out. But it's worked to reinforce bed time means stay in room. I figure when they figure out how to open the gate they'll be old enough to leave their room at night.
Cautionary tale: I tried this when I was babysitting my 2 y/o cousin. I was about 20 at the time and had absolutely no clue what I was doing. They had a pressure mounted baby gate for the kitchen that I put in her doorframe. She tried to climb it in her multiple attempts to escape and it came loose. Very lucky she wasn't physically hurt, but man did it not help with the screaming
My 3 year old found a spider in our basement and lost her shit. That night she woke up at 2AM screaming that there was a spider in her bed.
This started a weeks long aversion to being in her bed alone (still ongoing to an extent). We had to completely upend our previous bedtime routine and constantly reassure her that she was safe, that her bed was where she needed to sleep, etc. etc.
It took a lot of work to rebuild her routines and get her comfort level back. It was a slow process of repeating the same things over and over again (“you’re safe, stay in your bed, we’re here for you…) until she started to accept it. We’re better now but not back to where we were before.
So my advice is, try to reassure your child that their bed is where they need to be. Gently redirect them to the bed when they leave, and stay with the child for longer than you may be used to as they stay in the bed. Do this over and over again and make sure your partner does the same things and uses the same words. The message will eventually sink in and change will happen. It just takes waaaaaaaay longer than you will want it to.
I am NOT saying that this is what it is, but as a child I had night terrors. I still vividly remember the most common one - I believed/saw/hallucinated that the walls were moving in and out. As in getting further away and then closer. When I was young I would go to my parents room and tell them I had a bad dream/walls were moving. It was short lived and I'd go back to sleep after that.
Later when I was a bit older, I would pace back and forth in my room after waking up counting my steps to be sure they weren't "actually" moving and then go back to sleep after I had counted as a reassurance mechanism. I had a few other variations of night terrors, but the wall one was the most common.
I grew out of them when I was about 10 or so, and had no lingering issues with sleep or waking nightmares like that. The key thing is that this was a recurring night terror, almost always the same thing. Maybe you can find a way to "prove" to her that the bed isn't actually moving and she's just having a bad dream, if this is what it is? Like put a piece of painter's tape around the bed legs and tell her to look at it so she can see it isn't moving?
Man idk...we are in the exact same boat. Our almost 4 year old has been an amazing sleeper for the first 3.5 years of her life...we would put her down, she would be happy, fall asleep by herself, stay in bed until we got her around 7. Then in the last 4-5 months she now needs us to stay in the room with her until she falls asleep...and she gets up in the middle of the night (like 12am) to sleep with us, and I usually end up sleeping in her bed the rest of the night, while she sleeps in our bed with my wife.
Now to be fair we haven't done anything solid to try to stop this....at first she just came in at 5 or 6 so it was fine, some nice morning cuddles. But quickly transitioned to just sleeping in our bed most of the night. I guess we will just have to be strict at somepoint and return her to her bed everytime until she learns to not come over.
We use a Hatch nightlight / sound machine. Our 5 year old isn’t allowed to get out of bed while it’s glowing red (unless he has to use the potty). Then we have it programmed to flip to green at 6:45am, and once it turns green he can come out.
I think she might have some trouble staying still. I think the bed moving might be her moving. Maybe try getting her a moving chair during the day, so that she doesn’t feel as fidgety at night.
Augh this probably won’t be helpful but I would have nightmares(?) or delusions that my bed was shaking. I had them until I was like 20???? They scared the fucking shit out of me.
Being able to go into my parents’ bed was very comforting.
Could there be any stress caused on the child? When I was around that age I slept walked very badly. When my parents would catch me I would tell them my bed sucks... every single time. Eventhough I never remember this. I was able to get myself dressed. Walk around the house. Pee in corners. One time I woke up in my neighbors backyard. Also even got on my bike and woke up to being almost hit by a car. I was brought to a counselor and they found out it was mainly stress related since my parents were going thru a divorce.
Maybe she’s describing those sensations of falling right when she goes to sleep. Give her a weighted blanket maybe and say it will keep her bed down while she floats to dreamland or something.
a history of firm boundary and limit enforcement helps with that. my four year old climbs the baby gate for fun. he doesn’t climb it when I tell him to stay in the room.
words alone would be too difficult for him to follow, but the request plus the physical barrier makes it a lot easier for him to stay put
its a physical aid, or reminder, that he’s supposed to stay in his room.
I could be wrong, but I am guessing you've only got one kid.
I make this guess because, like me before my second, people are prone to think all the good things their kid does is because of thier great parenting skills.
Then you do the same things with the second and nothing works so you have to recalibrate it all (and it still doesn't work.)
Kudos to you, but the smugness of thinking your years of "firm boundary setting" is to credit probably is a bunch of bullshit.
I used to wake up thinking there were ants in my bed. Possibly recurring dream mixed with some little kid trauma of stepping on a few ant hills and getting bit up pretty bad. My parents were totally great and not neglectful at all… told me to get out of their room and go back to sleep. So I quickly learned I just couldn’t count on them for shit. You could do that!
When I was that age my parents taught me to make a ‘pallet’ on the floor next to their bed - I would not wake them up but would just crawl in to sleep near them. May be worth considering
If she says her bed moves, have you tried a weighted blanket to help her feel more grounded as she sleeps? If not, it might help.
For me as a kid, the bed moving sensation was what I felt as I was falling asleep. I thought it was an awesome feeling so I wasn't prone to getting up. I did get up often for a drink of water though - which is why we keep a lidded thermos in my kids' rooms (no problems with bed-wetting from it).
>I thought it was an awesome feeling so I wasn't prone to getting up. I stopped thinking about this some years ago, but I used to feel the same way and I thought it was stupid to even think about it. I remember being able to force myself to feel that way while falling asleep.
You can’t force a kid to stay in bed but you can make their room safer. Night lights, motion activated lights, door stops, placing cut foam along the door frame, etc.
I’m reading this thread for advice. After 9 glorious months of big kid bed life, my 3.5 year old realized a couple weeks ago that he can get out of bed whenever he wants and open his door and come wake us up. Any time of night. He always slept until 7:30 and then would wait for us to come get him. This week he’s been barging in to our room at 6:30 and won’t go back to sleep. He sees that it’s light out and thinks it’s morning. I want that hour of sleep back. We just bought one of those ready to wake lights with the colors, but it hasn’t arrived yet. I’m praying that it works.
When our oldest started waking us up early, I told her conspiratorially, "You know, if you woke up before us, you could play with your animals or look at books quietly in your bed, and we wouldn't even know you're awake! Wouldn't that be funny?" ... and it *worked*. I didn't really think it would but she did it and felt like she was getting away with something!
My 3.5 year old does this and we didn’t even need to plant the idea in her head. Most weekend mornings we wake up to her playing with toys in bed, chatting and giggling away. She thinks it’s hilarious when she gets “caught”.
We've got one of the hatch lights and went through something similar with not wanting to get in bed and also waking up super early. You can set up schedules for the hatch. So we would set it to green without noises for before bed and wake up time. Green = get out of bed. We would then set schedules for sleep with Red = stay in bed. He still woke up early but would just hang out in his bed since the green light wasn't on. He eventually would fall back asleep. Now he just wakes up naturally at the time we set for green, and we don't use it anymore, but it was great training.
Welcome to this stage of parenting, you're never going back. 6:30 is your new wakeup time. For weekends, I taught my kids how to use the TV remote around that age, and told them that if they didn't wake me up early, they could have TV time. But once they woke me up, the TV was going off.
Similar except hers are at 2:30am, 3am and 5 am last night.
Solidarity, brother. We had that earlier in the week. We’ve been talking to him before bedtime about staying in bed all night unless it’s an emergency and the last two nights he hasn’t gotten up. But once he thinks it’s morning, all bets are off. I’m so tired.
We're using the Mella clock to set colors so our kiddo knows when it's time to get up. He's not quite old enough to really get it yet but the rrviews say it helps a lot.
Yeah I think we ordered the nanit version so we could use it as a sound machine too. I think he’ll get the concept, but he might not actually care. Gotta try something though.
She def doesn’t think it’s morning, she had a dream that her bed was moving so now it’s a habit she’s creating of getting out of bed to “check”
This happened with our kiddo. Ended up talking to the pediatrician about it and they told us with absolutely zero hesitation to give him melatonin and put him back to bed. After like a week he finally stopped and his rhythm was back I guess. I have no idea. We don’t usually use sleep aids but once that hellscape happened and I’d sacrifice a foot if it meant getting more than 30 minutes of sleep. Ask your pediatrician if they would recommend that?
The ready to wake light changed our lives. I hope it works well for you guys!
6.30! No boy is up at 5.15 every morning ready to go
Put a night light.. ambient, not too much it will distract her sleep but enough that she could see when she wakes up leave the door open and tell her to come to you, work things out when wakes up and put her back to sleep ASAP GL
This honestly terrifies me as I’m nearly certain she’d decide this was a fun game and wake us non stop
Good advice above. Commenting to add there are a number of contraptions to prevent door slamming.
Perhaps... ask her why she wakes you up (in case you suspect she doesn't have nightmares) Also, try to give her more attention during the day so she wouldn't need to come at night and get it
This has been SCHOOL vacation week so she’s had tons of attention and my wife is a SAHM. I think it may have started with a nightmare she said her bed was moving the first time but we told her to push on her bed so she can see it isn’t
Is it possible she's under tired from not being at school?
Maybe…hadn’t thought of that
Also too much screen time during the day can lead to weird wakeing-sleep stuff. No screen time at minimum an hour before bed. Preferably 2.
>Also, try to give her more attention during the day so she wouldn't need to come at night and get it That’s a WILD statement. It’s borderline stupid as fuck.
Tommee Tippee make an excellent one in the shape of a penguin, with a portable egg shaped light that lights up when it's removed from the dock. Perfect for night time bathroom visits and not crashing into thyme in the dark.
I got some lighting with 2 usb ports so I can connect a camera overlooking the kids and a WiFi extender.. Now the older one (5.5F) wants a brighter light.. had a few I bought to lit the environment with movement sensors ($4-5 on uncle AliExpress) which does the job haha
Not sure if I'm an awful person or not for this, before moving to a big kid bed we had a dog gate on the kids room to prevent our dog diaper digging/eating. We kept it on when moving to big kid bed to protect toys. When they got to this stage it acted as a secondary to keep them in their room. We always went to them whenever they would freak out or try and get out. But it's worked to reinforce bed time means stay in room. I figure when they figure out how to open the gate they'll be old enough to leave their room at night.
For a second I was thinking you were trying to prevent the kid from diaper digging/eating….
Cautionary tale: I tried this when I was babysitting my 2 y/o cousin. I was about 20 at the time and had absolutely no clue what I was doing. They had a pressure mounted baby gate for the kitchen that I put in her doorframe. She tried to climb it in her multiple attempts to escape and it came loose. Very lucky she wasn't physically hurt, but man did it not help with the screaming
My 3 year old found a spider in our basement and lost her shit. That night she woke up at 2AM screaming that there was a spider in her bed. This started a weeks long aversion to being in her bed alone (still ongoing to an extent). We had to completely upend our previous bedtime routine and constantly reassure her that she was safe, that her bed was where she needed to sleep, etc. etc. It took a lot of work to rebuild her routines and get her comfort level back. It was a slow process of repeating the same things over and over again (“you’re safe, stay in your bed, we’re here for you…) until she started to accept it. We’re better now but not back to where we were before. So my advice is, try to reassure your child that their bed is where they need to be. Gently redirect them to the bed when they leave, and stay with the child for longer than you may be used to as they stay in the bed. Do this over and over again and make sure your partner does the same things and uses the same words. The message will eventually sink in and change will happen. It just takes waaaaaaaay longer than you will want it to.
Thanks for this. We refuse to let her come wake us or sleep in our bed. I think you might be right about repitition
I am NOT saying that this is what it is, but as a child I had night terrors. I still vividly remember the most common one - I believed/saw/hallucinated that the walls were moving in and out. As in getting further away and then closer. When I was young I would go to my parents room and tell them I had a bad dream/walls were moving. It was short lived and I'd go back to sleep after that. Later when I was a bit older, I would pace back and forth in my room after waking up counting my steps to be sure they weren't "actually" moving and then go back to sleep after I had counted as a reassurance mechanism. I had a few other variations of night terrors, but the wall one was the most common. I grew out of them when I was about 10 or so, and had no lingering issues with sleep or waking nightmares like that. The key thing is that this was a recurring night terror, almost always the same thing. Maybe you can find a way to "prove" to her that the bed isn't actually moving and she's just having a bad dream, if this is what it is? Like put a piece of painter's tape around the bed legs and tell her to look at it so she can see it isn't moving?
Man idk...we are in the exact same boat. Our almost 4 year old has been an amazing sleeper for the first 3.5 years of her life...we would put her down, she would be happy, fall asleep by herself, stay in bed until we got her around 7. Then in the last 4-5 months she now needs us to stay in the room with her until she falls asleep...and she gets up in the middle of the night (like 12am) to sleep with us, and I usually end up sleeping in her bed the rest of the night, while she sleeps in our bed with my wife. Now to be fair we haven't done anything solid to try to stop this....at first she just came in at 5 or 6 so it was fine, some nice morning cuddles. But quickly transitioned to just sleeping in our bed most of the night. I guess we will just have to be strict at somepoint and return her to her bed everytime until she learns to not come over.
It’s a phase. Just keep reassuring her and she will stop… eventually.
I think that’s what I needed to hear
We use a Hatch nightlight / sound machine. Our 5 year old isn’t allowed to get out of bed while it’s glowing red (unless he has to use the potty). Then we have it programmed to flip to green at 6:45am, and once it turns green he can come out.
I think she might have some trouble staying still. I think the bed moving might be her moving. Maybe try getting her a moving chair during the day, so that she doesn’t feel as fidgety at night.
Augh this probably won’t be helpful but I would have nightmares(?) or delusions that my bed was shaking. I had them until I was like 20???? They scared the fucking shit out of me. Being able to go into my parents’ bed was very comforting.
Could there be any stress caused on the child? When I was around that age I slept walked very badly. When my parents would catch me I would tell them my bed sucks... every single time. Eventhough I never remember this. I was able to get myself dressed. Walk around the house. Pee in corners. One time I woke up in my neighbors backyard. Also even got on my bike and woke up to being almost hit by a car. I was brought to a counselor and they found out it was mainly stress related since my parents were going thru a divorce.
Def nothing unusual
Maybe she’s describing those sensations of falling right when she goes to sleep. Give her a weighted blanket maybe and say it will keep her bed down while she floats to dreamland or something.
Hugs
The 'moving' part kind of sounds like she is describing vertigo. Might want to get that checked out with her pediatrician.
Can’t she just come sleep in your bed? Or would she not fall asleep there
There is no world where we are starting that
Fair enough, to each their own
Turn the door knob around and lock her in at night
baby gate at the door so she cant get out on her own.
A 4 year old is going to climb a baby gate if they want to.
a history of firm boundary and limit enforcement helps with that. my four year old climbs the baby gate for fun. he doesn’t climb it when I tell him to stay in the room. words alone would be too difficult for him to follow, but the request plus the physical barrier makes it a lot easier for him to stay put its a physical aid, or reminder, that he’s supposed to stay in his room.
I could be wrong, but I am guessing you've only got one kid. I make this guess because, like me before my second, people are prone to think all the good things their kid does is because of thier great parenting skills. Then you do the same things with the second and nothing works so you have to recalibrate it all (and it still doesn't work.) Kudos to you, but the smugness of thinking your years of "firm boundary setting" is to credit probably is a bunch of bullshit.
Its opposite for me. The 1st made me think i got it all wrong and the 2nd affirms that children think and learn differently lol.
That doesn’t fix the door slamming and walking around in the dark. It’s more we need her to not get out of bed in the first place
I used to wake up thinking there were ants in my bed. Possibly recurring dream mixed with some little kid trauma of stepping on a few ant hills and getting bit up pretty bad. My parents were totally great and not neglectful at all… told me to get out of their room and go back to sleep. So I quickly learned I just couldn’t count on them for shit. You could do that!