My toddler's sleep regressed. Here's how we went from 8 wake ups a night to sound sleep.
A review of Batelle Sleep School (and a discount for you!). Part 1/2.
See the end of this post for $250 off Batelle’s child sleep program via an affiliate link — 10 hours of sleep within two weeks or your money back.
We recently moved across the country, and like any big transition, I expected my 3-year-old to have some regressions. What I didn’t expect was bedtimes with non-stop bedroom escape attempts, tantrums, and fruitless negotiations with a scared and confused toddler.
My son went from sleeping all night in his bed at our old home to refusing to sleep in his room because, in his words, monsters were trying to bite his toes.
We tried everything. We tried “monster spray” that banned monsters from his room. We tried letting him sleep in a play tent. We tried making a “go away monsters” chant.
Then he started to refuse to sleep in his room at all. He would cry and run to our room throughout the night. A few nights, he woke me and my husband up eight times between the two of us. We’d swap wake ups, and by the morning, we were both zombies.
The energy in the household shifted. My husband and I started fighting more often — always stupid things, purely out of sleep deprivation and fear that we’d messed our kid up — around the time our son started sleeping outside the open bedroom door. (We have a strict “no kids in the bed” rule that we want to preserve.) He chattered to us all night.
Beyond exhausted, we sought out Batelle Sleep School.
Batelle is a hands-on sleep program for newborns up to 6 years old that guarantees a 5-minute bedtime with 10 hours to 13 hours of uninterrupted sleep within two weeks or your money back — really, they mean it. They’ll refund you if your kiddo isn’t sleeping within two weeks.
The program ships you a box of tech and tools that help with the process — which, by the way, never includes “cry it out” — that aims to teach your child how to trust that they are safe to fall asleep on their own.
After three weeks in the program (I’ll explain why it was three for us), my son was sleeping 12 hours and putting himself back to bed in the middle of the night. HOLY GUACAMOLE! It was absolutely the saving grace we needed in a desperate moment.
I’ll go over the tech Batelle uses in my next post but first, let’s chat about the method they used for my 3-year-old. The method will vary slightly based on the age of your child and other factors, like whether you’re breastfeeding.
Batelle has you start bedtime expectations before bedtime. You’ll play games during the day where you practice dry runs of bedtime, you’ll examine with them how close your child’s room is to your room, and you’ll play with the tech used at bedtime, like a Ring camera and a smart night light.
When it comes time to tuck your little one in, you’ll turn on an audio player with a song you’ve recorded for them, their nightlight, and two visual monitors. The first night, you sit next to their bed until they fall asleep. The next night, you move a few feet away and sit there until they fall asleep. A few nights in, you should be at the door, and within a week, you should be outside the door.
If your child cries for you, you always go to them to comfort them and then return to your spot. This process of responding and returning to your spot helps give your child reassurance that you’ll always respond to their cries but gives them space to find their confidence that they can fall asleep without your direct touch.
The program offers on-demand texting with a sleep specialist all night and the ability for a specialist to watch your child over the Ring monitor and provide tailored feedback and encouragement if requested. When we needed them at bedtime, they were there. When we really needed them at 4 a.m., they were there. They also offer group calls about three times a day to get questions answered and a place to vent about sleep woes.
Full disclosure: We didn’t get there within two weeks. At exactly two weeks, we were at about 7 hours of sleep and a long, drawn-out bedtime. My son would call for us to come from the living room, we would do the soothing steps, go back to the living room and about five minutes later we’d repeat. For about two hours.
Instead of asking for a refund, we asked for more time. I know we weren’t the only ones because I’d heard of another family in the group calls who was in excess of two weeks, but the vast majority of those parents with major sleep challenges were within the first week of the program.
After two weeks and three days, our son was sleeping 10-11 hours and bedtime was down to 30 minutes. We asked for more help and we were assigned a sleep specialist to call us weekly. By the time we were contacted for our second call, our son was sleeping 12 hours and bedtime was within 5 minutes with an occasional 20 minute delay.
Finally, he’s sleeping. We’re sleeping. The monsters are gone.
We felt like we had won a major battle for our child’s independence and for our sanity. We could have asked for our money back within two weeks, but we preferred the extra (free) services. Batelle now has us in the alumni network, which gives us access to reach back out for any needed support until our child is 6 years old.
I wholeheartedly recommend Batelle to anyone who is struggling to get their child to sleep soundly.
Batelle Sleep School’s guarantee is your child will be in bed within five minutes for 10 hour to 13 hours of sleep or your money back. Use the link batelle.com/parentinghack for $250 off their program. Your patronage helps to support this blog.
This post contains an affiliate link from Batelle Sleep School. I only choose to work with companies that allow full editorial control to remain in my hands and products I would write about regardless. We paid for our participation in Batelle ourselves and graduated before Batelle approached me for this agreement.