when and how to enforce/create a bedtime?

[abharrington]

dd is 5 mo old and sleeping well at night, 8 -12 hours, sometimes with us and sometimes in her crib. lately, i think due to lots of travel and no real "at home" schedule just yet, she is sleeping in in the am (till 8 or 9) and wanting to stay up with us at night (9 or 10 pm). i dont' think she should have to lay in her bed (much less lay in her bed unhappy) if she is not tired or ready to go to bed, so some nights i will try to put her down when i notice her sleepy cues but if she fusses or wants up, i go get her. (we do NOT let her CIO). so tonight DH says he thinks we should decided when it is time for bed and then care for her in her room only (changing, rocking, nursing, holding, etc) so she does not learn that by fussing she can stay up later with us in the family room. he says he thinks she may be old enough to know what she is doing, basically manipulating us to get what she wants. i think she is way too young for that, but i do want to have good habits and nighttime routines in place as early as possible, so as to avoid creating a mess later on.

so...my question is how old is/was your dc when you set a bedtime and expect them to go to sleep at this time? also, how does co-sleeping work when dc goes to bed well before dh and i do?

Thanks so much in advance...i love GCM...all you mamas have the best advice!!

[Ali]

You are right, she is much to young to be able to manipulate! It is normal for a baby to want to be near her parents. That's a very real survival instinct. At about that age I think it can be a good time to start creating a sort of routine to the day that includes naps at about the same time and a fairly regular bedtime, if you are someone who likes a more scheduled day. Others are fine just letting things go how they go and lots of kids do great just sleeping where they may whenever. My best friend didn't create any sort of routine or "bedtime" until her's was over 2 years old. I'm a bit of a scheduler, so I liked being able to have a plan for the day, and my son took to it easily at about 5-6 months.

If you want your child to fall asleep earlier, you may have to wake them earlier for a few days to shift their natural pattern - kind of the same way you would if you moved to a different time zone. When it was bedtime and after a while I knew my son's natural sleepy time, I could lay him down drowsy or asleep after nursing. If he did fuss, I went back into him, but didn't bring him out to play in the bright light and bustle of the rest of the house, etc, because that got him fully awake again. I'd hold and rock him, lay next to him and pat him, or see if he wanted to nurse again, and then lay him back down and try again. Some nights I was back in a million times, others he would be out like a light.

He was a fairly easy guy to get into a routine, since he really sort of set it himself and I kind of molded it around his natural rhythm. I got some good tips from The No Cry Sleep Solution book by Elizabeth Pantley. She has a website that has a few of the tips from the book.

As far as co-sleeping, a bedrail is great for tucking little ones in before mom and dad come to bed, and a baby monitor if you can't hear the baby in the rest of the house. Or start them out in a pack n play in your room and bring them into bed when you go to bed. HTH!

[tienke]

Hi,
My 2nd and 3rd baby both did not sleep very early in the evening (about nine o'clock). Today I visited another mom who had exactly the same experience and we said to one another: it seems to be that from one day upon another they just start to sleep earlier. I hope this will be so with your baby... but I agree she is to young to manipulate. My babies never went to sleep when I put them in a bed (theirs or mine), they only slept when I nursed them to sleep or rocked them in the sling. now I nurse my baby to sleep in my own bed and later I go to bed myself

[Firebird Rising]

We had NO semblence of a bedtime structure until DS was about 15 months. He's 16 months now so it just happened. There are just SO many changes a little one goes through and so many things that happen as the adjust, I think expecting a bedtime is just setting yourself up for too much. I think that if you want to, you can provide the structure even at this early age, but you really can't expect it to take hold for quite a while. We found it easier to just have DS adjust to our schedule b/c that way we didn't have to do anything special.

Jen D.