Right? Perhaps not. At this point some parents say, “How naive
you are. When I leave she’s right behind me!” or “If I go down to the
kitchen, she’s sure to show up in less than three minutes.” So what if
your daughter won’t stay in bed after nine?
Getting Out of Bed
Some kids just can’t seem to stay in bed after you tuck them in. While
you try to go about your business, they are always coming up with
some new reason for getting out of bed. Why? Usually it’s because
the children are (1) scared, (2) bored, or (3) both.
When my son was eighteen months old, he climbed out of his crib
for the first time. My wife and I were sitting in the living room of our
two-flat, relaxing and thinking the day was over, when in walked this
cute little kid, grinning from ear to ear, proud as punch that he had
single-handedly escaped from his crib for the first time in his life. As
young parents, we interpreted this event as the end of the known
world. We had visions of our little guy getting up at three in the
morning, calling his friends on the phone, roasting marshmallows on
the gas stove, or worse.
In desperation—and forgetting temporarily that I was supposed to
be a clinical child psychologist—I found some scrap lumber and
bailing twine and built up the sides of his crib about a foot higher all
the way around. The contraption worked for two nights.
On the third night our boy figured out a way to scale even these
new heights and once again escape. So we had to come up with a new
plan. Trying to reason with an eighteen-month-old would have been
useless. Not only that, but now our son considered getting out of his
crib an exciting challenge. So my wife and I decided that our only
choice was to train him to remain in bed—or at least in his bedroom.
We put a chair in the door to his room, and after all the bedtime