Here’s a really common scenario …

Your lovely toddler is between 18 months to 2 years and has been sleeping well ... but then, seemingly out of the blue, starts to battle going into the cot and doesn't want to go to bed.

You hope it’s a one-off but then it happens again the next night, and the next night. They seem well and aren’t in discomfort with teething during the day but they suddenly don’t want to fall asleep without you and get very upset when you leave the room.

Often the more you need to intervene and comfort at bedtime, the more nightly wake-ups creep in and settling becomes increasingly challenging. If you pick them up, it’s an endless battle to get them back into the cot again. They may end up coming into your bed during the night or you find putting a mattress on the floor in the room to lie with them makes it more bearable.

Perhaps if you make the transition to a bed, it will all settle down?

Sound familiar?

Though it can seem like the best resolution when cot battles and nightly wake-ups are all too exhausting, the issue is more likely to spiral, rather than resolve. This is because it probably isn’t the cot that’s the problem.

Inevitably, you'll still have a child that’s increasingly attached to your proximity and comfort to fall asleep and will battle bedtime in their new bed too. But now - they're also freely hopping out and coming out of their room into yours during the night.

My advice is to hold off jumping into a big transition that your child may not be ready for, because most children at this age don’t have the maturity and reasoning to cope without physical boundaries. They can feel too overwhelmed by suddenly having so much control over their sleep environment and the increasing reward for delay tactics and getting out of bed with more cuddles, being tucked in, extra drinks, coming into your bed etc, as you try anything to coax them back to sleep again, is a hard cycle to break.

The best course of action is to take a step back and review all the factors affecting your child’s sleep. You need to try to understand why they're behaving in the way that they are. This will help steer you towards the right strategies to re-establish boundaries around sleep times if you're keen to make the cot work for a bit longer. Then you can make the transition to a bed when they’re ready and when you’ve been able to prepare them for change.

I usually recommend waiting until toddlers are nearer 2.5-3 years, as these extra months make so much difference as to how well children cope with (and respect!) ‘invisible’ boundaries. This is often the age too where the nap phases out as children begin to consolidate all of their sleep at night time.

Toddlers notoriously struggle with big changes – whether it’s adjusting to new childcare or a new baby sibling, parents returning to work, weaning from breastfeeding, a long period of illness, travel, sleeping away from home or holiday periods. Think back to when the issues began to see if it fits with a time of change for your child.

Readiness to sleep for this age group is pretty much always a factor, along with inconsistent routines and daytime limit-testing, overstimulation in the lead up to bedtime and losing the cues for sleep.