Hellobee Boards

Stand outside the door and with every cry or noise shush him and remind him you are right there. Don’t go back in. We’ve done it with my son and my daughter is just turned 3 and I this phase. She wants us to sleep with her but we sit outside the door and she falls asleep quickly. Eventually we won’t have to do it.

Ugh. I think it's something about 3.5! My daughter went through this for about a month at that age, and it was awful. Is your son still napping? We found bedtime was harder if my daughter had napped so we mainly switched to have a "rest" time in the afternoon instead. It was like she had a harder time just settling down to sleep at night if she'd slept earlier. Looking back, I realized she also took off with imaginative play around that time, and I kind of wonder if her mind just wandered a ton at night.

Anyway....I'm not sure anything we did was a magic fix or if time just sorted it out, but we ended up doing a series of timed check-ins (like after 5 min, another 10 minutes, another 15 minutes, so on) to reassure her that we were available until she fell asleep. I think it took about a month and we were back to "normal" well enough.

I don’t have personal experience with this, but what about a projector nightlight? Maybe one that he picks out that projects something onto the ceiling or wall? Sorry you are dealing with this, hopefully it’s a phase. My 4yo has recently started talking about bad dreams and sometimes asking if we can sleep with him, but it hasn’t escalated yet. There must be something with the age.

I have more of a cautionary tale rather than advice. We had the same issue so we would lay in bed with our son until he fell asleep and then creep out. For awhile that worked great and about 20 minutes of our time was all he needed and he would stay in bed until morning. However, a few months in, the situation evolved to him waking several times a night and whenever he would realize we were no longer there he would come visit our room until someone laid back down with him - sometimes 2-3 times a night. This went on from just after his 4th birthday until right before he turned 6 when we gave him some tough love and "sleeptrained" him to fall asleep on his own. Be careful not to start a bad habit as it was a really tough one to break for us.

When LO turned 3 he started to be much more dependent on a nightlight. Now at 3.5 he also uses a flashlight to read books in bed and there's another stack over by his nightlight. He LOVES it.

@wrkbrk: we haven't invested in the full pop up tent but are considering it for her 4th birthday. O has a tent from IKEA that goes over the pillow area that she claims "keeps out the scary shadows." Also a salt lamp night light and minimizing all scary input like movies, TV, even some books and any games that involve pretending to be something scary. I'll find a link for the IKEA tent. Much cheaper than the fancy full bed one I keep seeing on Facebook.

@wrkbrk: We are lucky in that O will sort of self-regulate the media input. She really can't handle anything even remotely scary. She won't even look at ninja turtle toys! But the chasing games pretending to be bears or wolves (both animals we have in the woods we live in-though wolves of course are very rare) are harder to avoid.