Advise please - 15 month old son has just tried to climb out of cot

[Jemli]

I have just seen by little boy try to climb out of his cot, giving me virtual heart failure. I currently have a John Lewis cot which is H99cm. However he is very tall for his age and the cot side now only comes half way up his chest. Can anyone please recommend a cot/cotbed with deeper sides or any other advise for this problem. I have noticed he does the same thing in his play pen, hooking his armpits over the side and "walking" his feet up the side. He is never left unattended, but one would only have to take one's eyes off him for a second... so am trying to avert an accident. Many thanks in advance for any ideas

My son actually managed to climb out of his cot once, though we think it was partly accident. We had a cot bumper which we reckon he must have stood on, and then leant over the top, as our cot is quite deep. He also climbs everything in sight downstairs, from armchairs to stairgates (though he doesn't get far with the latter), so we make sure there is padding beneath his cot now, though without the bumper he isn't tall enough to lean as your son can.

Will the cot lower anymore? The cot wall on mine comes probably about as high on my son as it does on yours (he's nineteen months though), so I doubt that's possible, at least with the settings from the manufacturer, but I guess you could see if it's something you could alter yourselves.

Other than that, my only suggestion would be to think about getting him a proper bed. Put padding (a spare mattress or sofa cushions) by his cot for now, but when he starts actually climbing out, it's probably time to move on to the next stage. He won't climb over a stair gate at his bedroom door,and you can get clip on attachments to stop him rolling out of a 'big' bed.

I'd take the view that if he's old enough to climb out he's old enough to go in a bed.

I would second getting him his own bed or just start by taking the side off the cot for a while.

Safety gate on the door is a good idea for a while as well.

I think you are just going to have to bite the bullet and move him to a bed. As a previous posters suggested a bed and a stairgate on his bedroom door would be the safest option now. Once he has started climbing he is unsafe to be in a cot IME.

Thanks everyone... bed it is then - but this opens a can of worms as all our window cills are 1.5 feet of the ground (easy pickings for cot escapees!!). Are there "stairgate" type products for windows...??

Depending upon how wode they are, you could try fitting a stairgate to the windows themselves. You can get travel ones which don't require screwing in, and they do go down to a narrow width (I know because all our doorways are very narrow!)

How new is your house/the window? If it's double glazed, then he won't be able to go through it, and simply locking them should be a preventative at least until you can find something to block them with. I find with my little boy that it's the challenge in climbing and exploring which encourages him (as well as pushing the boundaries of what we allow), so as long as you don't make a big deal of telling him to stay away, the curiosity will wear off after a while. That combined with a barrier should be enough to keep him safe.

We moved both our dc's out of the cot around 12-13 months for fear of climbing (didn't wait to find out.

We bought the Babyden playpen which you can arrange as a room barrier, attached to the walls. It made a pen big enough to fit the cot mattress on the floor and room to sit in with the child which made for cosy bedtimes and good learning about getting into bed and staying on the mattress - they barely fell out of bed when they graduated at 2+. With ds we also managed to fit the barrier around a full-size single mattress, it depends on the shape of the room.

This arrangement allowed us to not worry about the windows or shelves & drawers in the room (dd has emptied her drawers since being on a bed in a room with a gate!)

HTH

We used a sleeping bag with a zip, and put it on backwards later when he started to unzip himself at 2 years.
We also moved from baby type cot to a low spacious solid cotbed type, which was very difficult to climb out of and converted to a proper [small narrow] bed anyway. He was a fantastic climber but he couldn't climb out of it till he was almost three.
We did lots of climbing in playground to satisfy his monkey mania.
We were very very wary of drawers, as he took to pulling them out and climbing up them like steps nearly causing the whole furniture to topple on him.
We moved everything that could be used as a climbing stool out of reach.
We played lots of games which involved climbing from one bit of safe furniture to another without touching floor so that again he had a chance to climb safely.
We got rid of all hanging flexes, lamps etc.
Kitchen chairs caused trouble too, Trip Trap were the safest as they didn't topple when he climbed on them. A mother I knew used folding chairs as they were safer when not in use.
Just some thoughts on mountaineering children!

DS1 used to kind of throw himself head first out of his cot by the time he was 18 months (climbing out wasn't an option because we had him in those grobag thingys). Once we saw how he was getting out of his cot, we stopped using the grobags (which had deterred him getting out for some months) and took the side off the cot. No problems after that, apart from a phase of running down the landing into our room in the middle of the night!

I second the baby sleeping bag solution - although it has to be said that, while it worked perfectly for our dd, our ds managed to learn how to unzip it, so swanriver's advice seems sensible. What is it about boys???!!?? The sleeping bags were great for temperature control too, and we also used them for daytime naps. We got ours from Kiddycare and they were great (some years ago as dd is 14 in a couple of weeks!), but no doubt there are plenty of other sources of supply nowadays.

Sleeping bags would be fine for children who are used to them, but I don't know that it would work for a child who hasn't had them before if you introduce them at a later stage. I'm cringing thinking of my DS's hypothetical reaction if we tried to restrain him like that, but then he's been a complete fidget since before he was born. We swaddled him until he was a few weeks old when he slept at night, but after a while he just squirmed until we unwrapped him, and he seemed much happier under blankets.