Getting a baby to sleep at night can often be a nightmare for new parents and the temptation to simply bring the baby into bed with you can be overwhelming. While it's nice to sleep with your child and feel the closeness, this is a habit that will be very difficult to break once they get used to it.
In fact, when you try to break the habit of your child sleeping in your bed, you'll find that they will throw quite a fit when you tell them no or leave the child in the crib to cry it out.
The only thing that worked for my partner and I as we tried to break the habit of our baby sleeping in our bed was to simulate the comforting smell of our bed. Babies are a lot like tiny baby animals (okay, to be fair, that's exactly what they are) and thus things like smells are very important to them.
When we tried to break the habit of our child sleeping in our bed we simply slept with one of her crib sheets for two nights so that it started to smell like our bed. This sounds like we're stinky people - we're not. There are smells that babies are in tune to and find comforting that we ourselves cannot detect. From the very first night we did this we saw instantly that we had broken the habit of our child sleeping in our bed.
Now the problem is that I miss sleeping with the baby sometimes although unfortunately, it doesn't work for me to sleep with one of her crib sheets. Sometimes even parents get hooked on this feeling of closeness with their baby, which is totally understandable.
Still, if you do not break this habit of the baby wanting to sleep in your bed soon, it will become a habit that will be more difficult to break as they get older.
