Reader’s question: To transition or not to transition a 2-year old to a “big boy bed”

Here's a challenge a lot of you seem to be going through: transitioning a child from a crib to a "big kid's bed." I think I've said this before on this blog, but I'll say it again: I was SURE I'd never move my kids out of their cribs until MAAAAAAAAAYBE when they reached adolescence and the bars on the cribs couldn't be nailed any higher. I'm serious. I LOVED those cribs, mainly because my boys loved their cribs. And they slept in them. For many, many hours. And when they did not sleep, they were still IN their beds. Contained. But in a socially-acceptable, non-locked, un-toruturey-looking sort of way. Oh how I feared the move to big boy beds. Oh how I put that transition off… And then things changed and I had to suck it up and just do it. Here's the question (the child is 2):

We bought the bed about 6 weeks ago, planning to use it for story time
to get our son used to it. Well, one night about a month ago, my son
begged to sleep in the bed, so my husband let him. To our great shock,
he went right to sleep and stayed there all night with no problems.
That went on for two weeks. Naptime wasn't as great. I would give him a
chance sleep in the bed and tell him if he got up, he had to sleep in
the crib. I usually gave him three chances, and 60-70% of the time, he
ended up in the crib. He'd scream for one minute about wanting to sleep
in his big bed, then go to sleep peacefully.

Then we went to the
beach for vacation for a week.When we got home he was getting all four
2-year-molars at once and he simultaneously discovered how fun it was
to run out of his room and laugh gleefully while Mommy or Daddy chased
him. He's been 90% in the crib ever since. Every single time, he cries
to sleep in the big bed and we try it, but it ends with him running
around. A few times last week, I managed to get him to nap in the big
bed by holding his doorknob shut for 30 second intervals, but I think
it was just the surprise of the situation that worked. Once he got used
to that, he realized it was just as fun to play in his room and make a
mess until Mommy came back.

I feel like we're at a crossroads.
If we're going to make the bed work, we've got to do it now. I'm also
at risk for preterm labor (our son was 4 weeks early after I was on
bedrest for 10 weeks) so there's also a real possibility this baby
might come sooner and I obviously don't want to try to change anything
in my son's world once this baby is here. My husband is loathe to spend
money on another crib, but our son sleeps SO well there. Is there even
a chance we can get a just-turned two year old who just wants to run
around to actually sleep in a big bed? We haven't taken the crib out of
his room yet, or tried returning him to bed as many times as it takes,
because honestly, both my husband and I feel drained after 15 minutes
and it's so much easier to give up and put him in his crib where we
know he'll sleep. I'm starting to think we should buy a second crib for
the baby and leave well enough alone until our son seems more ready for
a big bed. The only reason I hesitate is remembering the 14 or so
nights he slept there so well, but maybe I should chalk that up to a
fluke and move on.

Alrighty… there's a few things going on here and I'll take them in turn. First, let's start with his age (I'm so predictable that way). Two years old can be a GREAT age to make big changes. He's gone through the messiest part of the 18 – 22 month transition and he should be feeling a lot more emotionally resilient and relatively stable now. I'll write more about this stage soon, but the bottom line is that your child should generally be less clingy and anxious than a few months prior and more feisty and independent (generally speaking, of course). So, yeah, good age to move things around if you must. ESPECIALLY since a new baby is coming and change is going to be hard at 2.5 years old, no matter what form it takes.

Second, um, yeah, you really WERE lucky with those first two weeks and unfortunately your instinct is right, you should probably just chock it up to a fluke and move on to problem-solving the current situation as it stands (which is of course exactly what you're doing). Also… if it makes you feel any better, I'm pretty sure that your son would have eventually figured out the joys of hopping out of bed and running whacky through the house even if his molars DIDN'T come out and you HADN'T gone away for a trip. It's generally just a matter of time until the little monkeys get it and most of us have to actually implement some sort of "rule" about staying in bed before they reliably stay put.

Third, you obviously have a HUGE life-altering change that's going to be happening to your whole family, including your son, very soon. I completely agree with your decision to make any changes now, before the new baby comes. And the sooner the better so that your son doesn't "blame" the baby for kicking him out of his own bed. So, I think you have at least two ways to go with this:
1. If he sleeps beautifully in his crib still, you can easily let him go for another year there if you want to (if he's not endangering himself by climbing out). At two, they're still little roly-polies, squirming all over the bed during the night, and often feeling a lot more secure in a crib than a big bed. So, if you don't want to buy another crib for the new baby, you can get yourself a pack and play (they were called play pens in my "youth") or a similar idea through Craigslist or any second hand store. They're generally very inexpensive if you take that route and the new baby won't know the difference for at least 6 months.
2. You can bite the bullet and REALLY transition your boy to his big bed. That means take the crib right out of the equation, otherwise, your son knows that you'll place him there eventually when he's oppositional (develpmental psychologists' way of saying a "pain in the ass") and runs away. He's probably enjoying that game by now and his goal may ultimately be to land himself in the crib. You can make a big to-do about moving to a big bed permanently and then go through the regular old routine that you are loathe to do: when he gets out of his big bed, walk him back calmly, probably 100,000 times the first nigh 90,000 times the second night, and so on. Walk him back to his room when he gets out of bed with as much neutral emotion as possible. Don't get angry or playful, don't talk much to him, just say the same thing each time you escort him back to his bed, something like: it's time for bed now, please stay tucked in, see you tomorrow morning. You WILL prevail. He WILL get bored of bouncing out of his bed the ten trillionth millionth time, but it may take a few nights of staying consistent with this message.

I know option 2 really, really sucks because you need your sleep and you're very pregnant and tired and NOT in the mood to play tag an hour after bedtime and it's just SO MUCH EASIER to give up and plop him in the crib and be done with it! The main thing I wanted to emphasize with these last 2 options is that at this point, it seems like giving him choices about where to sleep might be confusing him in the end and he may be developing new habits that will need to be broken when the baby comes (NOT a time when you want to deal with this). Although I understand your initial rationale for wanting to ease your son into the choice of where to sleep, I think right now, presenting the option of the crib vs big boy bed may prolong the inevitable transition and make it harder on everyone involved.

Any other parents with siblings who have dealt with this transition? Suggestions, words of commiseration, success stories or cautionary tales?

4 thoughts on “Reader’s question: To transition or not to transition a 2-year old to a “big boy bed”

  1. Oh, wow, that was me 3/4 months ago, except I’m not pregnant.
    We moved DD into her BGB at 23 months. We still had a backup cot (crib) in our study for her in case she woke up screaming in the middle of the night or to ‘contain’ her if she wandered around too much. Also it was good for our 4y.o when he woke up vomiting in the wee hours, which sometimes happened. DD graduated to her BGB without any trouble but spent at least some part of every night in her cot. She loved it. Whenever she’d wake and fuss, off she went. She was happy to go back too, somehow she felt more secure in there ( she tends to sleep up against the side of her ‘beds’, so the feeling of the netting -ours in a porta-cot- seems to reassure her).
    Around 2 weeks into the move into her BGB, she started wandering around at night. She’d try to get into our bed and we’d march her back to hers and she’d be back in a flash. This went on till her 2nd birthday when we finally remembered we actully had a railing for the bed, which we installed the very next day. Suffice to say it worked miracles. The child wasn’t going to hurdle the bar in the middle of the nigth, no sireebob. She also felt more secure having the railing to sleep up against. Now at 29 months she has finally learnt to get over it in the dark, but seems to have less interest to come into our romm in the middle of the night. Fortunatley.
    But back to the cot. The only thing that stopped her ending up in her cot was actully dismantling it completely. We made a real ‘event’ of it. Showed her what we were doing and told her how now that she was big she could sleep in her own bed all night. That was about a month and a half ago. She seems to have forgotten of her cot’s very existence.

  2. Go with a pack-n-play. I had a new baby a month after my daughter turned 2, and almost 5 months later she’s still in the crib and he’s still in the pack-n-play and will be until she’s closer to 3. She sleeps fantastically in the crib and there’s nothing you could do to me to make that change right now. I’m sleep deprived as it is dealing with the baby, I certainly don’t want to add her to the equation!!! My baby is perfectly comfortable in the pack-n-play, and he’ll get her crib when we finally take her out of it. A LONG time from now. Why add more trouble for yourself than is necessary at this stage?

  3. I wanted to second the second point. My son slept like a dream the first two weeks we got the big-boy-bed. We thought to ourselves, this was easy. Why do people get so worked up about this? And then he discovered he can escape. Oh the glee! It took us about 10 days of consistently putting him back to bed without talking to him, etc. We started keeping a tally. The peak was about 124 gleeful escape attempts in 2 hours, before he finally zonked out. He didn’t have the crib, so he had no choice. After two nights where he passed out from exhaustion on the floor, he finally got the hang of staying in bed. It totally sucks.
    One thing I wanted to say – what are the odds your new baby will sleep in the crib right off the bat? Could you keep the baby in a car seat or something else until 3 months, when the older one is a little older and perhaps more willing to make the switch?

  4. Original poster here…
    Thank you all so much! You’ve given my husband and I a lot to think about.
    I think we are leaning toward keeping our son in his crib, if only because why fix what’s not broken. And I admit when I read ahead to the 2.5 year old stuff, I figure it might be nice not to have our little rule-breaker running free at night.
    My husband is really happy to see you all mentioning the pack and play. We have one of those, I’ve just been fighting putting the new baby in it long term. I don’t know why. I just thought she needed a crib (we had our son in the pnp in our room at first but he was a NOISY sleeper and we all got more sleep when we moved him to his own room/crib. There’s no reason we couldn’t put the pnp in the new baby’s room, I just didn’t realize they could sleep there every night past a few months old…)

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