When to start putting baby to bed at night?

[Chattycat78]

Just wanting opinions on this. We have an 11 week old but he's more like a 7 week old as he was premature. In the evenings he's still down with us and comes up to bed with dh after the dream feed. This may or may not be "right" - it's just what we felt we should do given his size and age.

However it would be nice to have our evenings back! When s a good time to start putting him "to bed" in the evening?

Ps we've done this before - we have a toddler too and I seem to think it was a real struggle getting him to bed in the evenings. Maybe because we tried to introduce this too early and there were many evenings of crying and multiple up and down the stairs visits.....

Not before six months , baby should sleep in the same room as you until then, even in the evening or for naps.

I have a 14 month old and we started to put him to bed at 4 months. The catalyst for us was that he was getting disturbed by us having dinner/ watching tv in the lounge with us.

We found at about 3.5 months she was unsettled with us in the evening, rather than dozing in her basket, so started doing bed time then. I would put her to sleep in her own room, then bring her through into ours when we went to bed

I started putting DD down in her basket in our bedroom with the monitor on at around 4 months. Then I'd just turn the monitor off when we went to bed. She moved into her room in the cot at 6 months. The reason I did that was that she was becoming more unsettled with the natural noise me & DH were making in the evening (TV/chatting/tidying up etc). We live in a flat so our bedroom is very close to the living rather than on a different floor. I'm not sure how I would have felt if we lived in a house.

Around 12 weeks for DS1 as he grew out of the moses basket so it seems like the natural way forward.

For DS2, it was much sooner (4 weeks?) as he got into a routine much more easily due to fitting around DS1's bedtime, etc.

From just afte 5m we started putting him upstairs to bed at 8 in our room - we'd follow by 11 so he was only alone 3 hours a night. As others have said, suddenly the to and the lights were too distracting for him. Before that we took him up with us later on after a final feed like you describe.

SIDS advice is to keep them with you downstairs until 6 months. See the Lullaby Trust website and then decide what you're comfortable with.

I think for us it was around 9 weeks. He was unsettled in evenings down with us and not sleeping well. Once we started a bedtime routine with him and putting him upstairs (in our room with a video monitor) he slept much better (although the rest of the night is a different story). It was definitely the right time for us. With the video monitor I was able to see and hear him breathing which made me feel less anxious, and I would also check on him myself frequently.

We did it pretty early on with DS, maybe around 8 weeks (although to be truthful the first few weeks I wasn't far behind him!). I know for a fact we were in a routine of putting him up at 7.30 ish, and us going up at 10 ish and doing a feed before we went to sleep, because we had some work done on our house and lived at my parent's for a few weeks while they were on holiday at that point.

Sorry, when I said 'at that point' that was by 16 weeks