16 month old still needs carrying to sleep. How do we transition to a floor bed?

[LouisaJ88]

Hello all,

I think I've shot myself in the foot a bit here. With our daughter we transitioned to a floor bed when she was still on bottles and that worked really well to get her to sleep. However, with our son, he's off the bottles, he's now 16 months old and still needs carrying to sleep. We have to jiggle and shush him or pace with him. He's getting too big and it's doing my back in. Also he's waking a lot in the night. I think he was teething but now he has lost his ability to self soothe because we comforted him so much when he was teething.

I want to transition him to a floor bed where we can just get in with him if he cries in the night like our eldest. I'm just daunted and don't know where to start. Any suggestions? Sleep is not going well in our house!

thanks,

Louisa

Maybe he’d prefer to stay in his cot for a while longer.

if he is already having some sleep issues currently it might be the best time to make this change anyway? It’s not like you’re having perfect sleep now and introducing the floor bed is going to mess that up. Plus, if you are needing to change the routine up and stop carrying him to sleep anyway, this could be the catalyst for making that change too, as difficult as it might be.

in my experience, though, you can’t simply go from carrying him to sleep to nothing and expecting him to settle in a different bed in one go… so maybe you’ll need to go from carrying to cuddling in the floor bed to cuddling until he is sleepy but not asleep etc…

Good luck with it all!

Maybe but shushing him like this is breaking my back. My girl loved her bed at 13 months. If anything I wish I did it earlier!