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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 has ever been put to sleep by us. Our eldest son is 8, our eldest daughter is 5, our second son is 3, and our second daughter is 0. To repeat, we do not put any of them to sleep at all.

The benefits of not putting your kids to sleep (especially not co-sleeping) are huge. For example:

After 9pm is adult time

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

No need to be nervous when placing the child in bed

There’s a common expression that “kids have a switch on their backs.” You know the one — you rock them to sleep in your arms, and the moment you set them down in bed they wake up screaming. But if you never put them to sleep in the first place, you’re placing an awake child straight into bed, so there’s no need to be careful at all. You just plop them down, pull up the blanket, wave and say “night night, see you,” and walk out of the room. And I’m not just talking about an 8-year-old here. This applies from age zero.

No falling asleep by accident

With our first child, we actually started out co-sleeping to get her to sleep. That put us in the classic trap of having to treat the hours from 8:30pm to past 10pm as effectively nonexistent. If you fall asleep during that window, you tend to end up going to bed properly much later than you meant to, which is rough on your health. If you never co-sleep in the first place, none of that happens.

They put themselves back to sleep even after crying at night

Kids cry at night. Our 3-year-old has mostly grown out of it, but our 0-year-old obviously still needs nighttime feeds, and up through age 1 and 2 they cry at night with some regularity. Sometimes something is actually wrong (a nosebleed, say), so if there’s any commotion we do go check the kids’ room. But once we confirm nothing is seriously wrong, we just say “night night” (and pull the blanket back up if needed) and leave. The child goes back to sleep on their own after that.

They sleep deeply

Our kids barely stir once we go into their room after they’re asleep. We can re-cover them with a blanket, take things out of the dresser. I imagine turning on the light would wake them, but short of that, nothing does. This is true even for our 0-year-old. It makes daily life enormously easier.

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

Sometimes a child gets overexcited after a fun day or an outing and has trouble falling asleep, but once they’ve built the habit of putting themselves to sleep, that isn’t something you need to worry about. Once they’re placed in bed, sure, they might not fall asleep right away, but each of them has their own style — tangling themselves up in the blanket, putting a pillow under their legs, pulling a favorite stuffed animal close — and they drift off on their own in their own way. Meanwhile the parents get to catch up on whatever needs doing from the day.

I just quickly jotted down what came to mind, but I’m sure there are plenty of other benefits beyond these.

You may also have heard a friend or acquaintance say something like, “Oh, we don’t put our kids to sleep either.” But honestly, I think most people find it quite hard to actually put into practice.

So below, I’d like to share the specific method for establishing a “no putting to sleep” routine.

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

In the newborn period, most families have a bassinet next to the parents’ (or mother’s) bed. That part doesn’t change. But we don’t put the baby to sleep. This part itself isn’t especially hard once you try it, because a newborn baby will usually drink their milk, get laid down in bed, and fall asleep on their own anyway. The key is to keep doing this, adapting the form as they grow.

Split rooms early

The next hurdle comes with nighttime crying or waking up by chance at night. Around 3 to 4 months, babies start rolling over. At that point, they might happen to wake at night and notice you sleeping in the bed right next to them. That can set off a “(Daddy!)” or “(Mommy!)” moment of excitement, which can turn into crying or fussing. If it’s just rolling over, you can handle it with something like a cushion (bumper) attached to the side of the crib. But once they reach the age of crawling or pulling themselves up to stand, you may suddenly find yourself making eye contact with the baby in the middle of the night. Once that happens, it’s over — you should split the rooms early. In our experience, nighttime feedings drop off sharply around 6 to 8 months (down to once, or at most three times a night), so we split the rooms once they reach that age. If you don’t have enough rooms, even just putting up a partition should help.

The steely 15 minutes

Do you really think a child will just fall asleep the moment you plop them into bed? They won’t. They’ll cry. You’ll wonder what on earth you’re doing. You grit your teeth and hold firm. It helps to have a benchmark. How long you can hold out probably depends on the person (and the layout of your home), but for us it’s roughly 15 minutes. For 15 minutes, you wait no matter how much they cry or scream. Only once they’ve cried past 15 minutes do you go into the room and pick them up. Once they’ve calmed down, you put them back in bed and leave the room again. They cry again. You wait 15 minutes again. How far do you take this? In practice, the first few times we’d do 2 to 3 rounds of this and then give up, feed them milk, and let them fall asleep that way. The trick is not to push too hard. If you push too hard, neither the baby nor the parents can keep it up. If listening to your child cry is too hard, 5 or even 10 minutes is fine. If you can manage it, I’d recommend 10 to 15 minutes. Do this for a few days, and they naturally start falling asleep on their own. I remember our second child struggling a bit, but our third and fourth only needed a handful of rounds — you could count them on one hand — before they were sleeping on their own smoothly.

Tips for handling the crying

As above, we only stay involved up to the point where the crying stops. We never pat them on the back once they’re in bed, and we never rock them to sleep in our arms before laying them down. Ideally, you set them down in bed right around the point where full-blown wailing turns into hiccupping sobs. It’s easy to imagine the child looking up at you with eyes that say “(wait, that’s it!?),” but in practice that’s not what happens. It’s actually the parent’s own feelings — “I want to hold them,” “I want to soothe them” — that are far more clingy than necessary; once the child has calmed down a bit, what they actually want is to go to sleep. Set them down promptly, give their head a good stroke, say goodnight, and leave the room.

Don’t make “milk = sleep.” Make it “time = sleep”

We’re careful not to build the habit of a cycle where drinking milk leads to falling asleep. The reason is that eventually they’ll stop drinking milk. In our case, every one of our kids weaned somewhere between just past 1 year old and around 1 year 3 months. In fact, that age range is exactly when the difficulty of “no putting to sleep” ramps up. If you’ve let the child internalize “drink milk, then sleep” as a fixed habit by that point, you’ll end up caught in a tug-of-war between wanting to wean them and wanting them to fall asleep on their own, and it gets really tough. So before that stage arrives, we make a point of never creating a “milk = sleep” cycle in the first place. The method is simple:

If they resist being put down, stop right away and play for a while longer

Sometimes a child already resists as you’re carrying them to bed, or starts fussing the moment you lay them down. In those cases, stop for the time being and play with them until they’re in a good mood again. It does take a bit of effort to make the bed feel like a place the child finds calming, a place they like.

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

Sometimes kids wake up in the middle of the night and roll around in bed, or even play. Our second daughter is currently 7 months old, and now that she’s starting to babble a little, we sometimes hear “dah” or “appah” from the next room. We ignore it, of course. Leave them be and they’ll fall back asleep eventually. Sometimes they stay 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 back asleep on their own, and it’s all good.

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

In our house, even when our second daughter is crying a fair amount, we just carry on watching TV in the living room as usual. After a while it goes quiet, and we think “(finally asleep, I guess)” and peek into the room — only to catch a strange smell and find there’s poop in the diaper… that happens every once in a while too. When it does, we apologize, wake her up, change the diaper, and slather her bottom generously with petroleum jelly. Then we plop her back into bed, and more often than not she drifts off with a big smile on her face.

None of this is complicated in principle — if anything, it’s all extremely simple stuff. What it comes down to is just doing it. I wrote this post with new parents in mind, but really, all it takes is resolve and courage to actually carry it out. Below, I’ll lay out this “no putting to sleep” scheme in simplified form, along with some rough benchmarks.

**- Don’t rock 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 one time, wandering the coffee aisle at a Cost Plus World Market in Redwood City, an elderly woman spoke to me, and we had a conversation I still remember well.

Grandma: “Excuse me, could you read this part on the coffee bag for me — the expiration date? The print is so small, I can’t quite make it out.” Me: “Of course, no problem.” Grandma: “Could you check from here to here on this shelf and tell me which one has the longest date?” Me: “Ah — of course, sure thing.” (I spend a while reading off the expiration dates from one end of the shelf to the other) Me: “So, this one has the longest date. Just the one, right?” Grandma: “Yes, 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 lasts longer. If you don’t have a grinder, you should get one.” Me: “No, I do have one. But you see, we have small children, and if I use it while they’re sleeping, well, it wakes them up. So I basically haven’t used the grinder at all lately.” Grandma: “That’s no good. 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 takes the bag I was holding, puts it back on the shelf, and hands me the bag she’d just picked out for me) Grandma: “I had three children myself, and I never once worried about anything like 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.”

The specific methods for “no putting to sleep” were ultimately built through our own trial and error, after also getting advice from local friends and more experienced moms. But there’s no question that what pushed me forward was that grandmother’s words.

Let’s properly enjoy life. After 9pm too.

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