When your toddler won't settle back into the cot at night

Why won't your toddler settle back into the cot at night?

Cots often don't work for families, especially as your little one moves through the second year of life. It's not that your toddler is resisting sleep, or intentionally resisting the cot, though you might hear this.

Here are reasons why toddlers might start waking whenever they are put into a cot.

• You might have been told that you should be putting your little one into the cot drowsy but awake, so that he doesn't develop a 'bad habit' of going to sleep at the breast, with the bottle, or being held in your arms. (This is part of the sleep training approach.) Unfortunately, trying to put your toddler down in the cot drowsy but awake can be very unhelpful. Many (or maybe even most) families find their little one simply wakes and dials up if they try this. Over time, this might turn into sleep battles with your toddler, which are awful.

• If your toddler's body clock settings are disrupted, and not well aligned with your own, your little one might be waking excessively. Her sleep pressure isn't high enough for big blocks of night-time sleep, at least for part of the night. Excessive night waking can be behind the difficulty you're having putting your toddler down into a cot even after she's gone back to sleep.

• The older and bigger your little one grows, the more likely she is to flail around at times even when she is asleep, as you carefully try to lower her down in the cot. Then she bumps against the railings and wake herself up!

A low, wide mattress on the floor in your little one's own room provides a useful transitional arrangement

Many of the families I've worked with over the years have found a mattress on the floor in the toddler's own room works well as a transitional arrangement towards independent sleeping, once it's no longer working to settle their little one down into a cot at night.

For a floor bed to work, the mattress needs to be

• Large enough to comfortably accommodate both the small child and a loving parent. This is because at first, as you do this transition, you might find you are sleeping quite a lot of the night on this mattress with your little one. That's a normal part of making the change!

• Safe, without objects and bedding that could obstruct airways. After 12 months of age, children are much more robust in protecting their own airways in the night, but sensible safety precautions are required.

• Low, so that your little one won't be hurt if he clambers off or falls off the mattress on to the floor.

For a floor bed to be safe, the room also needs

• To be completely child-proofed, so that a toddler climbing around in the night without you present is completely safe, including securing

  • Furniture that could be pulled over

  • Powerpoints

  • Dangling cords from blinds

• A child-proof gate at the door.

Not every family is lucky enough to have a spare room for their little one. The floor bed might be in a room shared with a sibling. It might be in the lounge room, if you can make the lounge room safe.

If you have to, you can make a floor bed work in your own bedroom too - although your toddler is likely to try to crawl up into your bed each time he wakes in the night! If necessary, you can relax into this and do your best to make a floor bed work in your parental bedroom, too, knowing that caring for a small child is about workability, not perfection.

Why does this work so well as a transitional arrangement for many families?

It's much easier for you to roll yourself out of a comfortable floor bed and return to the parental bed, than it is to put a tall, heavy, wriggly toddler into a cot.

If you fall asleep as you are breastfeeding or cuddling your little one to sleep on the transitional floor bed, that's not a problem! However, more and more often you'll be able to roll yourself away without waking the little child, and return back to your own bed.

Your child learns that his room is specially for him, and is the place he sleeps during night (when you're home). If he also learns that you always come when he calls out in the night (even though you might respond in a sleepy, lazy, night-time kind of way), and if he builds up lots of snuggled-up, enjoyable experiences with you in his own special bed during the night, he will usually like being there!