Transitioning to a Toddler Bed

We are in the process of transitioning our three year old son from a crib to a toddler bed. We were a bit nervous about whether the change would affect his great sleeping habits. Thankfully, it hasn’t so far, and he is still the model toddler as far as staying in his room and bed until it is time to get up.

We introduced our son to a Hatch clock about a week before we transitioned to a toddler bed. While he was still in his crib, I was able to teach him what the different colors meant. A Hatch clock is an ok-to-wake clock that you can program with different colored lights and different sounds to signal to your child when it is time to stay in bed and when it is okay to leave their room. For our son, we have a blue light come on in the morning and when nap/quiet time is over. I also have a yellow light come on 15 minutes before the blue light as a signal that it is almost time to get up. But for the duration of the night and nap, we have the Hatch clock programmed to have no sound or color. I explained to him that yellow means that it is almost time for Mommy to come get him and blue means that Mommy is coming. Being able to start him with it before we actually switched to the toddler bed helped familiarize him with the concept beforehand. We use the Hatch rest clock. You can find it here. We use it primarily for the ok-to-wake features, but it can also be used as a sound machine or night light.

Make sure to prepare your child for this change well in advance. About two weeks before we made the switch, we started talking about it. We told our son what was going to happen and when. We explained that soon he wouldn’t sleep in his crib anymore and he’d have his very own big boy bed that he would be able to climb into all by himself.

Make the transition exciting for your child. One thing we did was buy our son a new set of sheets. He loves cars so we got him a set that had different colored cars/construction vehicles. He loves it and is always pointing the different ones out to me. This is the set we bought him. We also bought him a toddler pillow and a pillowcase that matches his car sheets. Another way we made the transition exciting for him was to let him help assemble the toddler bed. This mostly consisted of him watching me put it together and handing me pieces and asking me a bazillion questions. But he definitely found it exciting, especially being able to see the end result.

We decided to keep the crib in the room for the first few days. His current crib was a hand-me-down and not convertible so we ended up having to buy him a bed. Because of this, we made the decision to keep the crib in his room in case he had a particularly bad night and wouldn’t stay in bed then we could just put him back in his crib. If you are converting your crib to a toddler bed, you could always put the side back on if your child is not adjusting after a week or so. And then try again later when they are a bit older. Know your child. Some children may completely resist the new bed if they can see their old crib. But for our son, it almost added some comfort to him to know that his crib was still there if he needed it. This is the toddler bed we got for him. After a few days of his toddler bed going well, we disassembled the crib and moved it out of his room. At first, he didn’t want it moved out, but we explained that the crib would be for the new baby in January and then he got pretty excited about that!

Don’t make any changes to the bedtime routine. The only thing that should be changing is the transition to a toddler bed. Naps and bedtime should remain the same along with any routines you have prior to going to sleep.

Three might sound a bit old to some to be making this transition, but we made the decision that unless he was trying to climb out that we would wait until three. A lot of people assumed we would transition him out of his crib before his younger sister was born, but because the age gap was only 18 months we made the decision to buy a second crib instead of making the switch too early. We are very glad we made the decision to wait. I don’t think he would have been ready at 18 months, and I don’t think it would have gone as well as it did. Takingcarababies recommends waiting until at least 2 1/2 before making the toddler bed transition. She says that before that most children do not have the maturity or emotional capability to understand that they need to stay in bed. We honestly probably would’ve waited even longer if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m pregnant, and it was getting a bit difficult for me to lift him in and out of his crib.