Toddler Sleep Hacks and Favorite Sleep Products

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I was originally thinking about labeling this “Toddler Sleep Tips, from One Tired Mother to Another,” but then I thought – wait a minute, I’m actually not tired. I mean, I am physically exhausted from caring for two children under the age of 5, and my body feels like it might break every time I am on solo for an entire weekend – but I’m not tired from lack of sleep. I am someone who has always done best with a solid 8 hours of sleep every night, and whether it’s because I need my sleep or because I believe sleep is extremely important for little people, I have been very focused on it from the start.

I charged through the first few months after my having my daughter on little sleep fueled by new mom adrenaline and coffee, and then I sleep-trained her at 4 months at my pediatrician’s recommendation. I remained consistent on sleep over time – reverting back to sleep-training foundations to nip any regressions in the bud; getting right back on track after vacations; maintaining sleep routines during teething or colds; insisting upon solo sleeping; not lying down with my child until she fell asleep (I am far too impatient for that and need my evenings) – and if a situation arose, I came up with a hack to address it.

Here are some of my toddler sleep hacks, which anyone is welcome to adopt and call your own:

Bedtime Battles

Once your child starts resisting the idea of getting ready for bed, it can be such a wrangle to get them there. My 2-year-old son is currently in this stage – he wants “2 more minutes” or “I’m busy, I still coloring!” or “I want to go to the play room!” at the very moment it’s time for bed. (Side note: as much as I love these young ages and don’t want to rush through them, since I know I’ll miss the cuteness and cuddliness when they get older, I really hate all the wrangling and look forward to when I’m past that stage. By 4-5, it started getting a lot easier with my daughter…so only 2-3 years to go until my son outgrows it!)

I let my kids do some play time after dinner, and then I give a 5-minute warning and set a time (either my phone or Alexa, but I would also like to try a visual timer) and make it clear that when the timer goes off, it’s time to start getting ready for bed. Sometimes the kids are great and start running upstairs right away. Other times, I have to do a little more work to get them there. Here are some things I’ve tried, with varying success – sometimes one works, sometimes another, and sometimes I have to try multiple together:

  • Make it a contest of who can get upstairs and get pajamas on fastest. That can be a fine line between friendly competition to speed things along and pitting your children against one another, so another angle is beating the clock together, e.g., “Let’s see if we can all get PJs on in less than 5 minutes!”

  • Incentivizing with a special toy that they only get to play with upstairs – currently their Tonieboxes.

  • Suggesting a fun activity that can only be done upstairs. For my son, this involves washing plastic animals in the sink (don’t ask me why, but he just loves this – favorites are these sets of dinosaurs, jungle animals, and farm animals – and I’m often able to brush his teeth at the same time).

  • Channeling the “Goodnight, Daniel Tiger” book and trying to make going to get ready for bed more fun – “Let’s fly to our bedroom!” “Let’s ride the Mommy train to bed!” (The hoops we jump through as a parent, honestly.)

  • Appealing to their love of reading by saying that if we get ready quickly, we’ll have time for 3 books (son) or 2 chapters (daughter), but that if we waste too much time, we won’t have time for as much reading. (Truthfully, I don’t love this one, since I don’t like making threats and don’t want to sacrifice important reading time, but I don’t really have any other leverage at this point. If anyone has a better idea, please feel free to add in the comments because I’d love to hear it!)

  • Appealing to their sense of autonomy and independence by giving them a friendly challenge – e.g., “Do you think you can get your pajamas on all by yourself tonight?”

  • Giving them a faux choice to enable more feelings of autonomy – e.g., “Do you want to walk to your bedroom, or do you want me to carry you?”

Sticking to the Bedtime Routine

With younger kids, it’s definitely helpful to have a bedtime routine that you keep fairly consistent night after night, so they know what’s coming. Sometimes it feels like that bedtime routine can drag out forever (and they will drag it out as long as they can), so I try to keep things moving right along. We do it in this order:

  • Close blinds and turn on bedtime mood lighting

  • Change into pajamas (if you’re still in diapers, that happens at the same time)

  • Brush teeth + floss

  • Warm washcloth over face, hands and feet (if it’s not a bath night; if it is, bath kicks off the whole routine)

  • Read books – I limit my son to 3 short books and my daughter to 2 chapters, and I make the limits clear ahead of time and stay consistent to help avoid a meltdown when we’re done. As much as I love reading with them, they would be content to do it for an hour and I need to prioritize their sleep; but we read at other times of the day too and especially on weekends, so they’re getting a lot of it over the course of a week.

  • Final potty (if potty trained)

  • Get into bed/crib

  • Turn on sound machine (sometimes with my son I do this before we start reading to limit outside distractions) and turn lights down very low or off entirely

  • Song (both my kids like me to rub their legs or back while I’m singing)

  • Last big hug and kiss

  • Lights out and leave room

My son goes in & out with bedtime but often has trouble handling the part where I actually leave the room, so I say my goodnight before I start the song, and then after I finish the song I keep singing as I leave the room, which seems to help him.

“Just One More…” 

Toddlers are always coming up with “just one more” thing they need at the very moment the lights are going out – a sip of water, to use the potty, another hug, the answer to a hundred questions.

  • When it comes to water, I have Dixie cups by the bathroom sink and let her have “last sip” before bed. I make it very clear that it’s the last sip and there are no more after that.

  • For the potty, I actually cannot take credit for this one, but if it becomes an issue with my son I am definitely trying it: make a physical potty pass that they can use when they’re in bed if they need it. There is only one potty pass, and once it’s used, you take it until morning. (If you’re feeling inspired, laminate it to make it extra official.)

  • Even though infinite bedtime hugs are sweet, it can get old when you know they’re using it to stall. I do “one last biggggggg hug and kiss to last all night” and we make it extra long. I am still a sucker for a request for an extra hug, but at some point I have to make it clear it’s the last one until morning.

  • When it comes to questions, I love the curiosity and want to encourage it, but not at the cost of sleep. I’ll tell my daughter she can ask me one question and we’ll save the rest for morning. If she feels they are very pressing, I write them down so we don’t forget.

Afraid of the Dark

This can be a legit thing after the age of 2. I remember not liking my room too dark when I was a kid, and I always wanted the door cracked open a little – I think seeing the light peek through from outside and knowing my parents were there was comforting.

My daughter likes her door cracked and started wanting to sleep with a nightlight. I have a few for this, and currently at age 5, she is using all of them – it hasn’t seemed to hinder her falling asleep, so I’m just going with it for now. She has the Hatch with the light turned up 100% (it’s still not too bright; more on the Hatch later), a small owl nightlight, a light-up jellyfish we got at the aquarium that plays an awfully loud tune (she is only allowed two runs with the jellyfish right at bedtime), and recently a rotating star projector when we moved into a new home and I was trying to get her comfortable with sleeping alone in her new room (this thing is actually awesome and has totally worked).

Afraid to Be Alone / Wants Company

By now my daughter is generally very good at falling asleep by herself, but occasionally she’ll say she wants company or will ask me to lay down with her. I remind her how important sleep is for growing and learning, and that we sleep best alone, but that I’m always right nearby and her brother is just in the next room. I won’t ever lay with her until she falls asleep except in rare occasions if she’s having a very hard time. There are some other things I try first:

  • If she’s just a little whiny about wanting company and saying goodnight, I tell her that I’ll come check on her as soon as she falls asleep. That usually is all she needs.

  • If she’s having a hard time, I tell her that I’ll come back to check on. her in 5 minutes. She likes knowing that I’ll be back, and usually that’s enough, but if she needs more, I tell her the next time that I’ll be back in 10 minutes to check on her, but that she needs to try to fall asleep first. This is kind of like a sleep training technique adapted for an older child.

  • If she’s very upset at my leaving the room, I tell her that I’ll lay with her for 1 minute but then I have to go to let her fall asleep. I then do the check-ins if I need to. It’s rare that we actually have to do this, though.

Bad Dreams

Around age 3-4, my daughter started saying sometimes that she had bad dreams. I hung a dreamcatcher up on her wall, right over her bed, and explained how it would catch those bad dreams and not let them go anywhere. That, combined with her nightlight + lullabies + magical unicorns seemed to do the trick.

If your child suffers from night terrors, that is different from regular nightmares and I’d recommend speaking with your pediatrician or a sleep consultant about the best way to handle them.

Too Hot, Too Cold, Too Dry

As someone who runs cold almost all the time, but am a hot sleeper, I do understand how uncomfortable it can feel when you’re either too hot or too cold. It’s hard to find the perfect temperature for everyone in the household, so I try to have options available. My daughter seems to run extra hot and often likes to fall asleep without any blankets covering her (what?!), but then sometimes she wakes up chilly in the middle of the night since I run the A/C set to 68 degrees. For a while, she would call for me to put a blanket on her, so I realized I had to nip that one in the bud early. I showed her how to put her blanket back on herself, and we practiced during the daytime. I also keep an extra blanket on the foot of her bed, so if she’s wrestling with a comforter that is rumpled because she kicked it off at the beginning of the night, she can easily cover herself with the loose blanket.

I also have a humidifier available for each of my kids, which I use some nights in the winter if it’s very dry in addition to when they are congested. It also solved the problem of my daughter occasionally waking up with a bloody nose, which seemed to be caused by weather that was too dry. I have a small indoor thermometer in each of my kids’ rooms so I can make sure the temperature and humidity is within a good range to keep them sleeping comfortably.

Afraid to Go Potty in the Night

Once you have night-trained your child, they may very well have to pee at some point in the night. There was no way I wanted to have to accompany my child to the bathroom, because it would have been hard to get her back to sleep and harder to get myself back to sleep. Instead, I equipped her with whatever tools she needed to go it alone – nightlights plugged into outlets along the way to the bathroom and in the bathroom, a lantern to bring to the bathroom with her, a unicorn with special powers to ward off the witches that were apparently lurking around the corner, and monster spray (water bottle with a few drops of lavender essential oil) in case she heard any furry feet following her. We practiced during the day how she would go potty during the night, so that she knew exactly what to do if she woke up in the dark and had to pee.

Exiting Room Too Early

I am a mom who sets my alarm every morning for 30 minutes before my kids are supposed to wake up, just so that I can have a little time to wake up myself. When my daughter would wait until she heard me and then run out of her room, I would be like noooo. Mommy needs just one cup of coffee before I am ready to face the day! I came up with a few solutions for this:

  • This is really what the Hatch clock is made for. If you just need a nightlight, you can buy a cheap one, but the Hatch is more of an “ok to wake” clock. You can pick your own colors to signify different things – time to wind down, time for lights out, ok to get up and play quietly in your room, and ok to come out of your room. There are soothing sounds you can play with it too, or even use it as a noise machine, although I like to have a separate noise machine because my daughter prefers the lullaby tunes. The best part about the Hatch is that you can control it from your phone to reinforce the good sleep habits you’re trying to cultivate. When we were first starting out with a toddler bed, I would set the Hatch to change to yellow (ok to leave room) at 6:30am; but if I could see that my daughter had been up and was getting impatient, I would move the time up on my phone, so that she technically stayed in her room until the light changed. Once she got more comfortable with that, I stopped having to make any adjustments.

  • Like many things at a toddler age, things that may work well at first stop working when the novelty wears off. So too went the way of the Hatch. At some point when she was around 3, she knew very well what the colors meant but blatantly disregarded them. That’s when I introduced a sticker chart with VERY special unicorn stickers that she only got when she stayed in her room until her light changed. I printed out a weekly chart and taped it to the wall and kept these unicorn stickers out of reach, only bringing them out when she earned one. The stickers were the reward so I didn’t have to introduce any other incentives. They didn’t work every day, but they worked enough – and over time, it stuck.

  • Once my daughter got a little older, she would sometimes get out of bed to play in her room WAY too early. At that point, I got her a digital clock so that I could say to her, you are only allowed to get out of bed when you see a 6 here. If it’s a 5 or a 4, it’s too early and you have to lay in bed with your eyes closed and try to get back to sleep. But if she saw a 6, she could get out of bed and play quietly in her room until her Hatch light changed to yellow. She may sometimes still wake up before 6am, and I have finally accepted that there is not much I can do about that, but at least she doesn’t get up and turn the light on until the somewhat more normal hour of 6am.

  • There was a time when, despite the Hatch and the digital clock and the special stickers, my daughter would still open her door early and wait by the baby gate outside her and her brother’s bedroom (there for safety, which which doubled as containment). Since my bedroom door was directly across the hall, she would see me come out and there was no escaping downstairs for that one pre-wakeup cup of coffee I need to start my day right. After this went on for a while and I became increasingly apprehensive when I would open the door that I’d be “caught,” I had a brilliant idea. I put a tension rod with a curtain up in the hallway, right outside the gate, so she couldn’t see me exit my room. This worked almost immediately – it was like because the chance of happening to see me and getting to come downstairs early was no longer there, so she lost interest.

I was never comfortable with the idea of locking my kids in their rooms to prevent them from leaving, so it took a little more work and creativity, but I found ways that helped all of us. Like everything with young kids, it can take some time to make changes and get them to stick, but I’ve found that with consistency, usually it becomes a habit within a couple weeks.

Here are some of my favorite sleep-related products that I mentioned above…

Favorite Sleep-Related Products

Now that you have my best sleep hacks and favorite sleep products, may the sleep be with you! And especially with your child, so they hit those recommended ranges at every age. Feel free to add any of your own sleep hacks to the comments below!