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We Raise Four Kids Without Ever Putting Them to Sleep

original Teams & Careers

We have four children, and not one of them gets put to sleep by us. The eldest son is 8, the eldest daughter is 5, the second son is 3, and the second daughter is 0. To repeat: we don’t put any of them to sleep at all.

The benefits of not putting children to sleep — especially not lying down with them — are huge. For example:

After 9pm is adult time

All the kids are in bed without fail between 8:30pm and 9pm, so after that we can just watch TV in the living room, read books, eat sweets that are too good to waste on kids. We spend time together as a couple.

No need to be nervous about putting the child down

There’s a common expression that “kids have a switch on their backs.” That’s the thing where you rock a child to sleep in your arms, then the moment you set them down in bed they wake up screaming. But if you don’t put children to sleep in the first place, you’re always placing an already-awake child into bed, so there’s no need to be careful about it at all — you just plop them down, pull up the blanket, wave and say “night night,” and walk out of the room. And this isn’t just true now that our eldest is 8. It’s been true since he was 0.

No accidentally falling asleep yourself

With our first child, we actually started out lying down with him to put him to sleep. That led to the classic trap where the hours from 8:30pm to past 10pm are basically write-offs: fall asleep during that window and you end up going to bed properly much later than you meant to, which wrecks your own health management. Never lie down with them in the first place, and none of that happens.

They put themselves back to sleep even after crying at night

Children cry at night. Our 3-year-old is starting to grow out of it, but the 0-year-old obviously still needs nighttime feedings, and up through age 1 and 2 they cry at night fairly often. Sometimes something is actually wrong (a bloody nose, say), so if we hear a commotion we do go peek into the kids’ room. But once we’ve confirmed there’s no real problem, we say “night night” (and maybe pull the blanket back up) and leave. The child goes back to sleep on their own.

They sleep deeply

Our kids don’t wake up easily even when we go into their room after they’re asleep. We can readjust their blankets, pull things out of the dresser. Turning on the light would probably wake them, but that’s about the threshold. This is true even for the 0-year-old. It makes daily life enormously easier.

The kids have learned how to fall asleep even when wound up

Sometimes kids get worked up from something fun during the day or an outing, and then have trouble falling asleep — but once they’ve built the habit of falling asleep on their own, none of that matters. When you put them in bed, sure, they might not drop off right away, but each in their own style — tangled up with the blanket, a pillow under their feet, hugging a favorite stuffed animal — they fall asleep on their own. Meanwhile the parents get on with cleaning up after the day.

I’ve just quickly jotted down what came to mind, but I imagine there are plenty more benefits beyond these.

You may have heard from a friend or acquaintance, “oh, we don’t put our kids to sleep either” — but honestly, I think most people find it very hard to actually put into practice.

So below I want to share the concrete method for establishing this “NO putting-to-sleep” approach.

Don’t put them to sleep from the moment they’re born

In the earliest period, most families keep a bassinet by the parents’ (or mother’s) bed. That doesn’t change here either. But we don’t put the baby to sleep. This part isn’t actually that hard once you try it, because a newborn, once fed milk and laid down, will usually just fall asleep on their own. The key is to keep this going, adjusting its form as the child grows.

Separate rooms early

The next hurdle is how to handle night crying, or the child happening to wake up at night. Around 3 to 4 months, babies start rolling over. At that point, they might wake up at night and suddenly notice you sleeping in the bed right next to them. That can set off a “(Dad!)” or “(Mom!)” excitement spiral, which can trigger crying or fussing. If it’s just rolling over, a cushion (bumper) on the side of the crib handles it. But once the child reaches the age of crawling or pulling themselves up to stand, you can end up making eye contact with the baby in the middle of the night. Once that happens, there’s no way around it — you need to separate the rooms early. In our experience, nighttime feedings drop off sharply around 6 to 8 months (down to once, or at most three times), so we separate rooms once we reach that age. If you don’t have enough rooms, even just a partition should help.

The 15 minutes of steeling your heart

If you just plop the child into bed, will they really fall asleep that easily? They won’t. They’ll cry. You’ll wonder what on earth to do. You grit your teeth and hold firm. It helps to have a benchmark. How long you can endure probably depends on the person (and the house), but for us it’s roughly 15 minutes. For 15 minutes, however much they cry or scream, you wait. Only once they’ve cried for more than 15 minutes do you go into the room and pick them up. Once they’ve stopped crying, you put them back in bed and leave the room again. They cry again. You wait another 15 minutes. How far do you take this? In practice, after doing this for 2 to 3 rounds, we sometimes gave up at first and just fed them milk to get them to sleep. The trick is not to push yourself too hard. Push too hard, and neither the baby nor the parent can keep it up. If hearing your child cry is too painful, 5 or even 10 minutes is fine. I’d recommend 10 to 15 minutes if you can manage it. Do this for a few days, and they naturally start falling asleep on their own. I remember our second child struggling a bit, but the third and fourth needed only a handful of tries before they were falling asleep alone smoothly.

The trick to handling the crying

As above, even if they cry, we only stay with them until the crying stops. We never pat their back once they’re in bed, or let them fall asleep in our arms before laying them down. Ideally, the moment full-blown wailing turns into hiccupy sobs, you put them straight into bed. You might imagine the child looking up at you with eyes that say “(wait, that’s it!?)” — but surprisingly, that’s not what happens. It’s actually the parent’s own feelings of “I want to hold them,” “I want to soothe them” that are the more lingering attachment; the child, once calmed down, would rather just go to sleep. Put them down promptly, give their head a good stroke, say goodnight, and leave the room.

Don’t make “milk = sleep.” Make sleep happen on a schedule

Try to avoid building the habit of a cycle where drinking milk leads to falling asleep. Eventually they’ll stop drinking milk, and that’s the problem. In our case, all our children weaned somewhere between just after 1 year old and around 1 year 3 months. That age is exactly when the difficulty of “NO putting-to-sleep” ramps up. If the child has internalized “drink milk, then sleep” as a habit by that point, you’ll be stuck in a tug-of-war between wanting to wean them and wanting them to sleep alone, and it gets rough. So beforehand, make a point of not creating that “milk = sleep” cycle at all. The method is simple:

If they resist at bedtime, stop right away and let them play a while longer

Sometimes they resist the moment you pick them up to carry them to bed, or start fussing the moment you lay them down. In those cases, stop for the time being and let them play until they’re in a good mood again. It does take a bit of effort to make the bed a place the child finds calming, a place they like.

Ignore them even if they’re awake in the middle of the night

Children sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and lie around in bed, or even play. Our second daughter is currently 7 months old, and she’s started babbling a bit, so sometimes we hear “dah” or “appah” from the next room. We ignore it, of course. Leave them be and eventually they fall asleep. Sometimes they’re awake for as long as an hour, but that’s fine too. Just think of it as part of the process of building the habit of waking up on their own and falling asleep on their own, and that’s good enough.

Sometimes there’s poop, but you leave even that alone for a bit

In our house, even if the second daughter is crying somewhat, we just keep watching TV in the living room as usual. After a while it goes quiet, and we think “(finally asleep, maybe)” and peek into the room — and there’s a strange smell, and sure enough there’s poop in the diaper. This happens once in a while. In those cases, we apologize, wake them up, change the diaper, and slather plenty of petroleum jelly on their bottom. Then we plop them back into bed, and they often drift off smiling.

None of what’s written here is fundamentally complicated — if anything, I think it’s all very simple stuff. What matters is practice. This post was written with new moms and dads in mind, but ultimately it just comes down to steeling yourself and carrying it out with courage. Including some rough benchmarks, let me summarize this “NO putting-to-sleep” scheme below.

**- Don’t put them to sleep in your arms, don’t pat their back

By the way, I was told this kind of approach is fairly common in America. I remember a conversation I once had while wandering the coffee aisle of a Cost Plus World Market in Redwood City, when a grandmother struck up a conversation with me.

Grandma: “Excuse me, could you read this for me — the expiration date on this coffee bag? The print’s so small, I can’t quite make it out.” Me: “Sure thing, no problem.” Grandma: “Could you check all the ones on this shelf, from here to here, and tell me which has the longest expiration date?” Me: “Ah — sure, of course.” (I check and read out the expiration dates from one end of the shelf to the other) Me: “Okay, so this one has the longest date. Just the one, right?” Grandma: “Yes, just one is plenty. Thank you.” (looking at what I was holding) “Oh, you’re buying Ground? I’d really recommend Whole Bean instead. Better taste, better aroma, and above all it keeps longer. If you don’t have a grinder, you should get one.” Me: “No, I have one. But you see, we have small children, and if I use it while they’re asleep, well, they wake up. So I basically never use the grinder these days.” Grandma: “That won’t do. You should enjoy your life properly.” Me: “Huh?” Grandma: “Which do you prefer, Ground or Whole Bean?” Me: “Well, Whole Bean, obviously.” Grandma: “Then drink that.” (She took the bag I was holding, put it back on the shelf, and pressed the bag she’d just picked out for me into my hands) Grandma: “I had three children, and I never worried about any of that. Raise them that way, and that’s how they turn out. My kids never woke up even when I used the grinder — heck, they didn’t even wake up when I ran the vacuum cleaner.”

As for the concrete method of “NO putting-to-sleep,” we later learned pieces of it from local friends and more experienced moms, and arranged it through our own trial and error into the form described here. But there’s no doubt that what set me on this path in the first place was that grandmother’s words.

Let’s properly enjoy our lives. After 9pm too.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2020/10/391/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.