Originally Posted by Michelle:
what bedtime technique do you recommend?
If they won't stay in bed and are actually laughing at you every time you put them back.
What would you do?
With my DD we put a child safty handle on the inside of her door so that she couldn't open the door from the inside. She was young enough at the time that she didn't try to take the handle off as I assume some older more determined kids would. It took a week or so for her to figure out that it wasn't worth the effort and finally just gave up. This was for nap time though, both of my girls were very easy to put to bed at night. Good routine and consistency, we had friends over one night when 8:00 came around. My youngest was busy playing, she was probably about 18 months at the time, I picked her up and said " say night night" and off we went and I was back two minutes later. My friend was amazed and even said " how did you do that" these friends would put their kids to bed, read them a million stories, lay with them until they were sleeping etc. etc. I didn't have time for all of that, we needed our Mommy Daddy time too, our girls just new that bed time was bedtime. I guess we had it easy.