Help me sleep-train almost 3 year old!

amother

Tue, Dec 21 2010, 4:58 am

My daughter will be 3 yrs old in 3 months and she still wakes up in the middle of the night and comes to my bed. (She's still in a crib, we bring her.) It's getting quite ridiculous especially since I am in my 3rd trimester and I really want to get her out of this annoying habit soon (especially since she doesn't know how to climb out of her crib yet.)

Letting her cry just doesn't work for me, especially as she is an older child, it's just more heartbreaking.

We've tried incentives. Before we put her down, we remind her "if you sleep the whole night in your crib, Mommy's going to buy you a doll." And she's all excited. But in the middle of the night, she doesn't care about the incentive, she just wants to come cuddle.

Please give me some suggestions, and ideas that have worked for you.

simcha007

Sun, Dec 26 2010, 1:43 am

I had the same thing with my daughter, she would wake up in the middle of the night and need me to lie down next to her and rub her back to help her go back to sleep, some times she wouldn't be able to fall back to sleep at all.
my advice is to teach her that her place at night is her bed. you do that by going to her when she wakes up and calmly and firmly telling her it's time to go back to sleep. you can take her out and hold her for a minute if that would calm her down but then put her right back in. you then leave the room and let her cry, wait 15 minutes and do the same thing again, you keep on doing this untill she falls asleep I li ke this method because even though she's crying your still present and giving support. I know you said that you don't want crying but from my experience not sleep training my daughter led to much bigger problems, think of how she feels when she wakes up and knows that just by being awake and with you she's bothering you.
mabey you can start talking about it during the day, and you can play role playing games ,where you act out what's going to happen at night then tell her to be the mother and you'll be the baby.