Even parents of grown children sometimes wake up in a cold sweat reliving the battles in getting their 4 year old to go to sleep. In this episode we tackle head on the thorny but solvable challenge of getting your young child to go to sleep. After listening to this podcast, you’ll be primed to make bedtime more effective and relaxing for everybody.

Some of the topics we cover are:

When is the ideal time to switch your child from a crib to a bed?

Common causes that create difficulty falling asleep or middle of the night wakings.

How do you handle it if the child is afraid?

How much sleep do children this age actually need at night?

What is a healthy bedtime routine that promotes sleep?

In the end, it’s all about taking back parental authority by setting appropriate, respectful, firm boundaries while avoiding some of the common mistakes that parents make that inadvertently cause sleep problems.

We’ll give you tips on how to set limits and consequences that actually work and give you a realistic time frame about how long to expect before seeing results.

Finally, we’ll look at the more controversial topics: Do rewards work? And what about the “family bed”?