Sleep Training When Siblings Are Sharing the Same Space

– Hello, I’m Dana. Welcome to this week’s video.

One of the questions I get asked the most is how can I teach my children to sleep well if they share a bedroom? This is difficult and I will take a few different pictures today.

The first and most common scenario is that you have an older child and a child and they are sharing the same space. And I think the big boy is sleeping well.

I hope you got the Sleep Sense app early with that baby and it’s a beautiful sleep. So I don’t worry too much about the older one.

But I agree that it is difficult when they are in the same room. It will be difficult for this big baby to continue to sleep well. Maybe you will be a little concerned with the fact that the child wakes up the older child and becomes younger, maybe a little less with your rules because of this.

So if this is the case, my advice is to take the baby out of your older child’s room for a short period of time and he can be anywhere, your room, the laundry room, the office, the little room. It doesn’t matter where because it will only be for a short time.

If you are in your bedroom, make sure that you make a space for the child in your room, whether you make a wall with furniture or you hang a sheet or you divide it in some way or you put it in your bedroom. Again, it doesn’t have to be fancy it just has to be a place of its own. Because this can be difficult if he wakes up at night and sees the people he loves sleeping next to him, which can cause problems. So make a place for me.

And then go ahead and sleep on the train. Now I still recommend that you talk to your older child about what is going to happen. Because even if the baby is in another room there is a possibility that the noise or the protest of the baby can wake up your older child. So just prepare him and say, “Listen, you can hear your baby brother tonight.” “There is nothing to worry about. “Mother is dealing with it, or Mother is teaching the child “how to sleep well.” Just explain to him that there is no reason for him to panic or worry about going back to sleep if he hears the baby at night.

And note that this is a small hill that we have to climb to get to the other side, where all the children are sleeping strangely.

So when a child sleeps well and overnight in another place I give them two or three weeks of adequate sleep before putting them back. And it should be smooth sailing when you move them back.

Again, you may want to give your older child a little preparation so that if you feel he is not worried about it, it will only last a minute or two and the child will fall asleep.

The good news is that they will get used to each other on some level, right? In the same way we all get used to sleeping in bed with partners or having other people in the room with us. So they will be a little less sensitive to the noise and noise that goes on in there.

Now another scenario would be that you have a young child and an older child. My only change to these instructions is not moving the baby. If you have an 18 month to 2-1/2 year old that you want to sleep train, my advice is to leave the younger child as is and move the other child and give them clear instructions that this is only temporary and when the child is sleeping well they will go back to their room.

I just find that young children are so black and white with their thoughts that they can just cause so much anxiety and depression that they are so moved that they can’t move on and it’s hard for them to learn to sleep well with this kind of change.

So keep your child where he is. And know that you know, like I said, it’s really hard with a lot of kids. It’s worth considering, right? Especially if you’ve already seen the proof in the pudding, your older child has been sleeping a lot for years.

We know that this is possible, we know that it is a small task to start so that everyone can sleep well. But good sleep is a gift to your child. So I encourage you to start.

Thanks for watching, sleep well.