Transitioning from crib to bed

“People should be waiting until as close to three as they can to transition to a bed; it’s a much smoother process when it’s closer to three.”

Dana Obleman, Infant and child sleep consultant

Switching your child from a crib to bed can be a big milestone! Most sleep experts recommend waiting until your child is around three years old. 

Jessica Rolph  is joined by Dana Obleman to discuss what factors might go into that timing. Dana is an Infant and Child Sleep Consultant and the creator of The Sleep Sense Program.

Highlights:

[1:08] What are the signs that your child is ready to make the switch from a crib to a bed? 

[1:50] What should parents do when their child is climbing out of the crib?

[3:30] How much weight should parents give to their children’s request to be in a big bed? 

[4:39] Night training in a bed: Will your child keep you up all night with requests to go to the potty? 

[6:13] What can parents do when their child is potty trained during the day but not as confident at night?

[8:02] If parents are welcoming a new sibling and want to use the crib for the baby, how should they manage this situation with their toddler? 

[9:45] Is there anything parents can do to make the crib more comfortable for an older child? 

[11:17] How can you best prepare a child for this transition?

[13:11] What kind of bed does Dana recommend parents transition to? 

[14:06] How concerned should parents be about the child rolling out?

[14:56] What kind of child-proofing needs to happen when a child has access to the bedroom at night? 

[16:14] What are some positive ways to handle night waking? 

[17:43] Dana speaks about co-sleeping.

[19:52] Does Dana have tips for parents that were co-sleeping and now making the switch?

[21:09] Dana explains why sleep is a skill.

[21:58] Jessica shares the key takeaways from her conversation with Dana Obleman.

Transcript:

When to transition to a toddler bed

Jessica: I’m so excited to get into this topic with you. So let’s start with the signs. So what are the signs that your child is ready to make that switch from a crib to a bed? 

Dana: I think people should be waiting until as close to three as they can to transition to a bed. I just find it’s a much smoother process when it’s closer to three. They’re just better equipped to think things through a little bit more. They understand consequences, they know what the expectations are a little bit easier and it’s just a lot less hassle or game-playing that goes on when we wait closer to three.

So there’s no rush. If your child’s not trying to jump out, is a good sleeper in that crib, then don’t rush it. Just hang in there. 

Child climbs out of their crib

Jessica: Yeah, so let’s talk about climbers. If the child is climbing out of the crib, what should we do? Especially, if they’re young and we don’t want to transition them to a bed yet.

Dana: I know, I know. There’s a few things. So always make sure first that the crib is on its very lowest setting because there’s usually different settings and you can drop it almost all the way down. That’ll help and then it depends on the style of your crib but sometimes you can just turn the crib around where the front of the crib is lower than the back of the crib that faces the wall, and if you turn that around and now the wall side is facing out, it just gives you like five more inches of crib and that can be really helpful to keep your little one from trying to jump out.

My other favorite tip is putting your child in a sleep sack. So if you find a slim-fitting sleep sack… Because usually, the first thing they try to do is get their leg up on the top of the bar. And if they’re in a sleep sack, it’s very difficult to get your leg up high enough to give you any kind of leverage to get over the crib bar. So those are my favorite two tricks and even if your little one figures out, some of those clever toddlers can figure out how to unzip a sleep sack and get themselves out of it then my advice would be put it on backwards and then it’s again, very difficult to unzip as we all know when we’re wearing cocktail dresses that zip from the back, it’s very hard to get ourselves out of a sleep sack if it’s on backwards.

Child is asking for a big kid bed

Jessica: Oh, those are such great tips. So how much weight should we give to their request to be in that big bed? 

Dana: Very little. Very very little. You know the whims of a preschooler, right? They change like the wind. And so they’ll sometimes say they want to sleep in a big girl bed or a big boy bed and then the evening rolls around and they say, “No, I changed my mind. I want to be back in the crib.” And so I’ve seen lots of parents who are basically flip-flopping for weeks back and forth, some night she’s in this crib, some night she’s in the bed and then you’re putting your toddler in the driver’s seat. And toddlers are not equipped to be in the driver’s seat. They’ll take it if you’re going to give it to them, but that’s not where they feel safe. They feel safe when you’re in the driver’s seat. So you make the decision and once you’ve made the decision then it’s all or nothing. I would even put the crib in the garage or get rid of it completely so that you can start the transition and start making a clear message that now you will sleep in a bed.

Potty training and how to time the bed transition

Jessica: And so let’s get into the potty question. If your child is potty-trained during the day, what does it look like at night? Oftentimes, that comes later and then how do you know that sequence of when it’s appropriate to transition your child to a bed without keeping you up all night with requests to go to the potty? 

Dana: When they’re starting to show signs of being ready to go the night without a diaper… and that does come later, you’re right, that comes much later for some kids. I’ve known kids who are in the four, even the five year age range before they’re really ready to start going all night without a pull-up or something to protect them, but usually, the first sign is a dry diaper all the way through the night. That’s kind of my go-to indicator that a child is ready to take on that challenge for themselves.

Jessica: Now this is more of a potty question, but also very much a sleep question. When my children they were about two and one of them I remember was potty-trained and had just been successfully going potty in the toilet during the day and then when he got his diaper on, it was kind of confusing because he was up 11 o’clock, 11:30, 1 o’clock, 2 o’clock saying that he needed to go to the bathroom. And I remember just being desperate for sleep and being like, “Just… You can go in your diaper. Just just go in your diaper. Don’t worry about it. Just… “ And then it gets so confusing but I remember telling him “Go in your diaper at night, but definitely don’t go in your underpants during the day.” He was in the crib, how can we deal with this situation? Do you have any tips? 

Dana: I’m always all about sleep and I think sleep is more important than getting up to go to the bathroom. So if I’ve got a child I’m working with who is waking up through the night to use the bathroom then they’re not ready. They’re not ready because what they should be able to do is go to sleep at bedtime and make it all the way to the morning without needing to wake you up or wake themselves up to go to the bathroom.

So yeah, I think you were right to say, “Hey listen, it’s okay and if you feel the need to go, you’ve got your diaper on. It’s safe, it’s fine and just use that.” And see how that goes. You might find within a week or two that that diaper is dry in the morning and they’ve been able to hold it and then that’s a great sign to say, “Okay. Guess what? You’re doing such a great job. I don’t think you need this diaper anymore in the night. Let’s go ahead and try without.” And be ready, there might be an accident or two here or there but it’s a learning process just like everything else. But I think it’s so disruptive to their sleep and to yours, to be fair, but for a child to get up even once in the night to use the bathroom, I don’t like to see that. I like to see consolidated sleep all the way through.

New sibling considerations

Jessica: We parents do too. I will say that my, one of my children was in pull-ups like I think almost till eight and we saw the pediatrician and that was still within the range of normal and so, I think that it’s also a biological question when it’s nighttime around being able to hold it all night. So thank you so much for that tip. So then let’s say we are welcoming a new sibling and you’re expecting another baby and you do eventually want to use that crib for the baby. Well, how should you think about that with respect to your toddler or your older child, I would say, maybe not even a toddler? 

Dana: Yeah. So again, if your child’s not close to the age of three and another baby’s on the way, I would say get a second crib. It’ll be worth it. You don’t need to deal with a toddler who’s having… There’s already a transition period when a new baby arrives and a toddler usually regresses in either sleep or potty training or both when a new baby appears so don’t set yourself up for heartache because you’re anxious to get this crib for your new baby. You can have two cribs or you can let your newborn sleep in the bassinet in your room for the first… Some people are keeping babies in bassinets for six months and onward.

So we can keep this toddler in the crib and it’s better to wait until the dust has settled a little bit around a new arrival than to try to do it sooner, because even though you’re thinking logically “If I do it now, he’ll be used to it by the time the baby comes” and yes, he will but he will absolutely regress when the baby comes. And so now, you’ve took one step forward and three back. So just keep that little one in the crib and don’t worry about it until at least three or five months after a new baby arrives and then you can start thinking about what should we do.

Jessica: Yeah, super helpful. I do remember my children… they’re all pretty big and one was very big, my first was very big in particular and I remember seeing him in the crib and thinking his arms are kinda banging against the sides of the rails and is he really comfortable? Is there anything we can do to make the crib more comfortable or think about? Is comfort a question? 

Dana: Once they’re of a certain age and most of the recommendations is over the age of two for pillows and blankets and things like that. But yeah, absolutely. We can start adding in some comfort objects like a fuzzy blanket or a pillow and making it a little cozier. It is kind of sad when you look at those poor little babies sleeping in this empty crib without a single thing of comfort, which is where they’re safest but now that we’ve gotten to an age where we’re no longer concerned about SIDS or suffocation or any of those issues now that we’ve got a child that is an appropriate age, yeah, absolutely put those things in and I love the idea of them having a little sleep buddy, like a little teddy or something that has become special to them in the night, those are all great things to see.

Tips for moving from a crib to toddler bed

Jessica: Now that we’ve decided that it’s time to transition, what are the best tips for approaching this transition? 

Dana: So again, you’ve made the decision to move your child to a bed and remember to stay in the driver’s seat around that. And the next thing would be to discuss it with the child. I like to make it a fun event, like maybe take the child to the department store and they can pick out new bedding and maybe they can pick out a new sleep friend and make it a celebration of such, that this is a new exciting transition for your little one.

And then you have to be clear about what your new rules are or your expectations. I always find that there’s a really beautiful honeymoon period I like to call it where your toddler does just brilliantly like for the first two or three weeks and you’re high-fiving yourself and thinking you’re a parenting genius and everything’s awesome. And then at that about 2-3 week mark, that’s when your little one starts thinking “Hey, I can get out of this thing, I can go see what my mommy’s doing, I can start messing about in my bedroom.”

I like to do something called I’ll come back and check. So you say “Listen, if you can stay in your bed and I’ll come back in a minute, I’m just going to go to the bathroom real quick and I’m going to come back and check on you.”

And then you come back and you keep coming back and you reinforce it really hard and praise them with a good job, “Thank you for staying in your bed.”  And you just keep that up for a few nights of just this really consistent reinforcement and then as the days go on you can start stretching out your check backs. Now you’re bumping it up to a minute or two before you come back and now three or five minutes until you come back and so on.

What kind of toddler bed to transition to

Jessica: And what kind of bed do you recommend we transition to? There’s lots of options. It seems like you could take the rails off the crib or you could buy a whole cute little toddler bed or put a mattress on the floor. How do you think about this? 

Dana: I’m not super picky around that. I do think it should be some sort of bed that they’re going to be in at least for the next few years. So lots of cribs, you can take the bars right off and a toddler can be happy in that for until they’re starting school like school age and then you can move to a bigger version or some people go right to a normal-sized twin or some even go right into a double bed. The only thing I’m not a huge fan of is the mattress on the floor. I just think that’s such an invitation to get out, right? Such an invitation to just roll right off that thing and go play with toys and start messing about in your bedroom. So that would be the only one I’m not a huge fan of but otherwise, I’m not really picky around that.

Jessica: And then what do you do about a twin bed? Are there guard… Do you recommend those guard rails or how do you make sure they won’t actually fall out of the bed? 

Dana: Maybe throw some pillows down beside the bed just in case they did roll out or you make sure that there’s no side table close by that they’re going to hit their head on if they roll out. But the thing about that is they might roll out of the bed accidentally once and that’s all it takes because now the body knows that there’s boundaries to this space that we’re sleeping in and that takes over and now there’s like this spatial awareness that we know. It’s like we don’t fall out of our beds. We know where our beds end and start and it usually only takes… Maybe, I’ve heard of it happening maybe twice but very rarely will a child continue to fall out of bed once they’ve been transitioned.

Jessica: Yeah. And what kind of child-proofing needs to happen before we can safely grant our child access to the bedroom at night? 

Dana: So yeah, you just want to maybe do a little survey of the bedroom and make sure like if they were to get up, which they probably are going to at some point, what’s within reach? Are they going to pull down anything from the top of the nightstand onto their heads or if they were to explore the dresser, see “Hey, this thing looks fun to climb.” Is that going to potentially be a safety concern? 

Just making sure that there’s nothing within reach that’s going to be an issue. And I’ve had to sometimes we have to secure the door, you can buy those little like covers for the door handle that just spins so the toddler can’t get a good grip on the door and that would only be I would never say to start with that but if you had to if you found like “Ooh, this little one’s getting up in the middle of the night and wandering the house” or getting out of their room and potentially falling down some stairs or something like that then then in some cases, that might be something to consider.

How to get your toddler to stay in bed

Jessica: The boundaries are so helpful. So anything else about what parents should say or do related to night-waking, waking up in the middle of the night asking for us, waking up in the middle of night coming and getting us, getting into our beds? Talk me through this scenario.

Dana: So again setting the stage going in is always important. I think often we just assume that our children know what we want, but we haven’t really articulated that well. And so just sitting down, there’s lots of books on the market that you could read at bedtime about transitioning to a bed and what that looks like and just make sure they know that your goal here is that they stay in this bed until it’s morning and they sleep through the night.

If you’ve got a little early riser or night visitor, I love using a clock of some kind. OK-to-Wake clocks, there’s tons now on the market. I just don’t want any of them to be glowing or emitting light through the night. That can interfere with melatonin and we definitely don’t want that. So it needs to be something that stays dark until it is okay to wake up. And that can be a great visual for your child to know “Okay, when I roll over, I see that clock still dark. I know it’s not okay to get up yet. I’m going to wait until it turns.” And then you just really have to make sure that that’s the rule. If they get up before it, you’ve got to return them to their bed and say, “Look, it’s not time yet. You’ve got to wait.” And you just keep returning them to their beds until the clock changes.

Co-sleeping with toddlers

Jessica: Yeah. And where do you come down on co-sleeping? I’m asking, I shared, my husband was out of town and so my youngest slept with me for two nights and it was darling. However, it’s not our typical at this stage of parenting. Tell me more about co-sleeping and how does that work? What if they’re crawling in in the morning and it’s just, it’s so cozy and sweet? 

Dana: Yeah. I have no issue if it’s morning we did it with all three of our kids as well when it was morning and the clock said magic seven and they were allowed to get up. We would all pile into our big king-sized bed and have a little cuddle time in the morning before we got up and started our day. I love that and I think if you have time to do that you should.

But as far as having them come into your bed at some point in the night, I don’t love it because it’s fragmenting their sleep. And I’m such a protector of children’s sleep because that’s the only time in our life when sleep is perfect. Sleep is beautiful and perfect and the cycles are perfection, and so I don’t want to see kids waking up at 4:00 in the morning and come into your bed because I know that’s going to impact them through the day because that’s not consolidated sleep. That’s fragmented sleep. So I would say we got to figure out a way to get rid of that and keep them in their bed until it’s appropriate time to get up. And that’s, I’m just a stickler about that.

And I worry too that if you’re allowing it at four o’clock then four o’clock becomes 2:30 and 2:30 becomes midnight and midnight becomes 10:00 and so it just has this way of snowballing and the child might prefer it and now it’s even at bedtime that there’s a big fight now because they want to sleep in your bed right from the get-go. And so it really just becomes problematic in the sense that it’s ruining their sleep and yours because I don’t know, it’s not very easy to sleep with a toddler because they’re very active sleepers. So it’s ruining your sleep and it is ultimately ruining theirs if they’re having a full night wake up to come find you.

Jessica: And what about transitioning from your family bed to their own independent bed in their room? Do you have any tips if you’re just decided you’ve been co-sleeping, I’m done with it now, how do I transition them to their own toddler bed? 

Dana: Yeah. So I have a toddler plan in the Sleep Sense program that’s really awesome for that just because it’s more of a wean out process where we get the child in their own bed and we have the parent be present and we’re supporting and encouraging them to develop some independent sleep skills and gain confidence at the same time, because it is asking a lot to say, “Hey, I know you were really comfy and cozy and comfortable sleeping in the family bed but now we want you to be all by yourself in your own bed.” And that’s a pretty big learning curve to start feeling comfortable and confident in your own abilities.

So being there and being present and then we do this gradual thing where we move the parent a little further away as the nights progress and so that the child is saying “Oh, hey, I can actually do this myself” and it’s not that scary and everything’s fine. And we just get the parent out of the room in a really gradual process.

Jessica: Yeah, that makes sense. I think gradual is where it’s at probably if you were truly weaning from that closeness and that close connection. So any other advice you’d like to share with our community? 

Dana: I’ve always believed that sleep is a skill and independent sleep skills are the answer to long, happy, full nights of sleep for a lifetime, really. I think if children can gain the confidence and understand the connection between sleep and health and happiness and they learn that from an early age, it will grow and continue on with them. And you shouldn’t have to go through these periods where you think your child hates sleep and fight sleep because who does? Sleep is beautiful and lovely and it’s a biological necessity. So creating space and giving your child the skills and confidence they need to become a beautiful sleeper is a gift that keeps on giving.

Jessica: Great. Well, it’s been wonderful having you with us today, Dana. Thank you so much.

Dana: Thank you.

Takeaways:

Takeaway #1:

Don’t rush the transition. Dana recommends waiting until as close to 3 as possible, when children are more equipped to understand consequences. 

Takeaway #2:

Is your child climbing out of the crib? Consider a sleep sack. A sleep sack makes it harder to climb the guardrail and putting the sack on backwards is sure to confound even the most clever of toddlers. 

Takeaway #3:

Maybe you’re expecting another baby, but your older child doesn’t seem ready to move to a bed. Consider keeping the baby in a bassinet for up to six months or invest in another crib. Toddlers usually regress in sleep or potty training or both when a sibling shows up. Dana recommends waiting 3-5 months after the arrival of a new baby to move beds. 

Takeaway #4:

OK-to-Wake clocks are a great tool to reinforce sleep schedules. Ensure that the clock remains fully dark until it’s time to wake, so as not to interfere with melatonin production. 

You can find more sleep tips on the Lovevery blog. And tune into past episodes of My New Life; we kicked off our Perspectives season with two experts on sleep in the spring of 2021.