Tough Love at Bedtime

Co-Sleeping (Photo credit: Cascadian Farm)

There are several different parenting approaches to the sleeping arrangements for babies. For my family it has been an experiment of sorts. Since I missed some of this time period due to deployments I was forced to go along with whatever my wife did which happened to be co-sleeping. For obvious reasons, this was not in sync with my sleep plan that I had in mind, so I was faced with the predicament of getting a child out of my bed.

At first I thought this would be an easy task. How hard would it be to get a tiny boy to sleep in his own room? I tried every approach I thought possible. Sit next to him on his bed, let him fall asleep on my bed and move him, rock him to sleep, etc... Problem was no matter what I did he would get back up screaming in the middle of the night.

Then came the moment of clarity. Let him cry. It sounds so easy but in the moment it's impossible. You hate to hear your child scream and you just want to go back to sleep. I decided to wait until we had a few days off and let him cry himself to sleep. It was tough to but in the end it worked like a charm and now I'm back to my normal evening of rest and activities....

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