How to Get Your Toddler to Sleep

Series Summary

Early childhood is a special time for both kids and parents. It is widely held that during the first few years of a person’s life, some of the most important physical and emotional aspects of development are set in place. Young children are dependent upon their mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles or grandparents to meet their needs during this time. To grow into healthy, happy adults, kids require many things, including safe surroundings, a good diet, peer interaction and a variety of experiences. In this free video series, find out some general parenting advice for infants and toddlers. Veronica Baragas has over 10 years of experience as a child care provider. She offers some tips to help structure an infant's or toddler's time, including nap time and bedtime. Find out about potty training, thumb sucking and swaddling a baby. Curious about how to travel with an infant or toddler? Baragas discusses some tips for flying on an airplane with babies and toddlers. Also, find out how to heat a baby's bottle. Baragas even gives tips for asking for maternity or paternity leave. So, take a moment, and get some general parenting advice for little ones today.

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Veronica Barogas and I'm with my wigglesandgiggles.com. I'm going to show you how to get your toddler to sleep. There's some key things you can think about throughout your day. Early risers is pretty good. You can keep your baby active all day and if you monitor your nap schedules, it'll help with bed time routines. One of the biggest things is starting a bedtime routine. Maybe people do different things. You can start with dinner and once dinner's over, you can do bath time, a couple of books. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a snack. Whatever it is that your family does, make sure it's consistent and you keep to a routine. Once your babies start getting use to it, they'll expect those things. And once you get in to that routine, it'll make it much smoother. So if you monitor their nap times and you notice that they're having trouble going down at night, maybe minimize your afternoon nap or if you want to do a mid day nap or just kind of cater to whatever it is that your baby's schedule is. So also set boundaries. A lot of the times when you're really close to bedtime and you're reading a couple of books, be careful. They'll want to read more than two or three at a time. Make sure you talk to them and let them know that we're going to read two books tonight or we're going to have one movie or we're going to do one song. So whatever it is, make sure beforehand that you don't get taken advantage of because it will happen often. So just keep consistent with your routine and monitor your kid's actions to see how they feel at the end of the day. And once you kind of get things together, it should be a lot smoother. Also, you can use some white noise. A lot of the times it helps. If you don't have some light music that they could sleep to, maybe put a fan in the background not too far. So white noise really, really helps with putting the babies down to sleep. Sometimes they may need you to hold their hand or just let them know that you're not too far away. And if they get nightmares or they have trouble sleeping, you may have to stay in the room for a little bit. Just as long as you keep them comfort and safe and they know that, then they should be no problem putting them to sleep. So that's what I would do to get your toddler to sleep."