Train to the playpen.
I believe this works for us because we do not need the playpen for our children to actually play in. A baby gate to keep a little one in a secure room has worked fine, but usually we just close all the doors in the house and let walkers roam a bit. So when I say “train to the playpen” I am referring to training the child to sleep in the playpen. If a child is required to spend a lot of time playing in the playpen, training him to sleep in it also may be more difficult.
For those searching for a great playpen, I’ve found that SafetyAround.com have a fantastic list of the Best Kids Playpens currently on the market. It’s always wise to read reviews of playpens before committing to a purchase – to make sure it’s going to suit yours, and your child’s needs.
There are many reasons to do this.
The most obvious is that when parents travel, they usually bring along a playpen for the baby to sleep in. If the baby has not been trained to sleep in the playpen, he may not sleep at all, turning a vacation into a nightmare. But this benefited us a great deal even at home, especially when we had only one child, because we could go to a gathering of friends and stay as late as we wished. We simply brought along the playpen and set up a makeshift nursery in a back room. Our son used a playpen in this manner until he was two-and-a-half. Our daughter still uses one.
The question is usually how to do this.
What has worked for us is to start young — about the time the baby has outgrown the bassinet and moved to a crib. A. was more difficult to train than E. I remember that with A., I simply had her take one nap a day in the playpen until she was no longer resisting {resisting, by the way, was not screaming, but just a tendency to fuss a bit and take longer to fall asleep}. Then I lowered the frequency to about twice a week. Now that she is over one, she doesn’t need the practice. She will sleep in the playpen whenever we require it of her. It also helped that we put down the same blanket {we didn’t have a sheet to fit the bottom} for her to sleep on every time, and made sure that the blanket came with us when we took the playpen out. The consistency in bedding seems to help.
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