Getting Twins to Sleep When All Else Fails

Michael wrote in to say that his twin sons have just hit the nine-month mark and they’re having a really tough time sleeping at night. Poor Michael and his wife have tried, it seems, a million different ways to help the twins fall asleep. Let them cry it out, feed them closer to bedtime, try to sneak out of the room. They thought maybe it was the diapers. Maybe it was trying to get them on the same schedule. They also tried the bedtime routine.

They’ve been trying all different things and they’re pulling their hair out trying to get their twins to fall asleep and get a good night’s rest. I know this is a huge challenge with twins because just through the natural course, it’s going to be a challenge to help them sleep through the night. And so, you want to get them to sleep.

Putting Twins in Different Rooms

Michael has tried a lot of different things and you, too maybe with your twins have tried a lot of different things. Here’s a few extra things that you may want to consider. One is that you may want to think about separating your twins. If one of the twins is waking up the other twin, perhaps if they’re in different rooms that can help alleviate the problem.

I know we had to do that for a season with our daughters. They would be in different rooms. They would fall asleep on their own, separately, and then once they were asleep we transferred them back into their cribs.

A Dream Feeding

Another thing that worked well for us is a dream feed that we would give our girls when they were infants. They would get their regular feeding before they would go to bed. Now, before my wife and I would go to bed we’d get the twins out of their beds and feed them one last time before we went to sleep. Most of the time our girls were half asleep during this feeding but they were still able to drink some milk. This seemed to hold them over until the morning, to help them sleep through the night.

You might want to try some of these different methods and see what works best for your twins.

This question was originally addressed on the Dad’s Guide to Twins Podcast episode 16: Twin Gender Surprise, Bottle Confusion, and Sleep Tips.

Picture by surlygirl