From the Crib to the Bed – Small Steps to Big Change

Any parent who’s been there knows that moving a toddler from the crib to a bed is a big transition. Think about how attached we get to some of our own things, and then magnify that 100x to account for the emotions of a toddler as they struggle to figure out the world around them. Now throw in the fact that you’re potentially disrupting the sleep routine you’ve worked so hard to build, and you’ve got yourself a scary proposition.

We recently went through this with our own son and had a pretty successful, painless transition. For us, it reinforced the importance of accomplishing big goals through small steps, which is a lesson that can be applied to anything in life.

Why the transition from crib to bed is tough

Before taking on any kind of big change in your life, I think it’s important to understand the reasons it might be difficult. This is not to discourage you, but simply to give you a better understanding of what you’re up against so that you can plan for it. For the transition from a crib to a toddler bed specifically, there are three main reasons that it’s a potentially troublesome change:

1. Your child is used to the crib. Any parent can tell you how delicate a process sleep is, and how mind-blowingly better life gets when your child starts sleeping through the night. Familiarity and routine are big parts of creating a successful sleep habit, and changing the place where your child sleeps is a big disruption to everything that’s been built so far.

2. The crib is “hers”. Children this age are just starting to get into the “mine” phase, where they assert their independence by identifying their ownership of just about everything. Changing where your child sleeps can potentially incite this compulsion in a negative way. This is especially true if you wait until you have a second child before making the change.

3. The logistics of sleeping in a bed are different. A crib has walls that keep the child inside. Her only real options are to sleep or cry. A bed, on the other hand, opens up a world of possibility. It’s much easier to get out, so there’s a level of distraction that has to be overcome before your child learns that a bed is for sleeping.

How we made it happen

Before getting into it, I need to give 100% of the credit for this to my wife. She mapped this out from the beginning and I simply helped execute her plan.

Just to give a quick summary of our setup, our apartment has three bedrooms (that’s right, we’re renters). One is for my wife and I, one was made into a nursery and one was previously a guest room/storage closet. With a new baby on the way in December, our goal was to move our son from the nursery to the guest room well before then so that the two things were in no way related in our son’s mind. We also knew that because this was a big transition, we needed to help our son along by accomplishing things in small steps. Here’s how we did it:

Step 1: Clean out the guest room. Some stuff was thrown away. Some was donated. Some was simply moved to a different part of the apartment. But we needed to make this into our son’s room, so our stuff had to go.

Step 2: Move some of his toys into his new room. Before this, almost all of his toys had been in the nursery. We moved about half of them into his new room and spent about a week just getting him used to playing in there. The goal here was to help him feel like this new room was “his”.

Step 3: Move all of his toys out of the nursery. After that first week, we moved all of his toys out of the nursery. Most went into his new room. This gave him even more incentive to spend his time in there, and little incentive to spend time in the nursery beyond sleeping.

Step 4: Part of our overall strategy to get him ready for the baby is to have him help “take care of” his favorite stuffed animal (a stuffed tiger given to him by his grandparents, which we subsequently named Hobbes. It’s really fun to be a parent sometimes!) Part of this was having him put Hobbes down for “night-nights” in the new bed. This was to help him get used to the idea that the bed was for sleeping.

Step 5: Do naps in the new bed. We started with the shorter of his two sleeping periods, saving the big night-time sleep for last.

Step 6: All sleep happens in the bed. By the time all of the previous steps were complete, this one was met with pretty much no resistance.

The big lesson

A lot of us have big changes we want to make in our lives and there’s often the urge to try to make them happen all at once. I’ve certainly been guilty of that, and usually it’s resulted in failure. Our current situations have been formed through many experiences over a long period of time, and it’s just not realistic to expect to change them overnight. Real, lasting change only occurs over similarly extended periods of time and requires a similar amount of experience.

If you have some big change you want to make in your life, good for you! It’s an exciting opportunity. But recognize that change is a process, and that your best chance for success is to map out a plan where the big end change is accomplished through smaller changes along the way. Understand the very real obstacles in front of you and make a step-by-step plan that gets you to your end goal. Focus on truly accomplishing each individual step along the way before moving on to the next one, and before you know it you’ll be at the end. If you’ve done it well, it will barely feel like a change at all.

Photo courtesy of thomasrdotorg