How to ease out of your older child's bedroom at bedtimes
From an evolutionary perspective, social sleeping is normal for humans. Still in many contemporary cultures, parents bedshare with their children right throughout childhood. There is no right or wrong way to do childhood bedtimes. There's just your family's way.
You can find out more about protecting your family's sleep throughout childhood here.
As your child gets older (I'm thinking here preschool or school age, depending on the needs of your own little one) you might decide to start experimenting with physical closeness and stories - and then find an excuse to be out of the room for ten minutes.
"I'm just going to finish packing the dishwasher sweetheart. It will take me ten minutes, and then I'll be back."
You do need to come back then at the ten minute mark, so that your child continues to trust what you say. You might come back in, plant a kiss on his little forehead, stroke his cheek, tell him he is a gorgeous child - and announce that you're now going to the bathroom and will be back in ten minutes.
Eventually your child really will be ready to say goodnight after you've read a story and had a cuddle, and will let you leave.
This is a process called 'scaffolding' which parents constantly experiment with across diverse cultures. Parents don't need to be taught how to scaffold their child's development. It's a gradual encouragement of independent behaviours, to the extent that the child is ready for them and can manage. It is important though that we, as well-meaning health professionals, don't interfere and recommend one-size-fits-all rules, which may not work in your unique family!
Children develop at different rates. Children have different personalities and needs. One child might be very happy for you to kiss her goodnight and leave the room at four years of age; another child is not ready for this until six or seven years of age.
With older children, there may also come a time when you announce that you are going to do things differently now. This is how it is, you decide, regardless of complaints! But you wouldn't decide to teach your child something new like this until you were reasonably confident she'll be able to adjust without impacting upon her sense of security and her trust in you. You'd simply make sure that her sleep pressure is very high, and that there is plenty of time for physical closeness and focussed attention upon your child, delighting in her, before you leave the room.
If you find your child has a pattern of coming into the living area after you've said goodnight, either his sleep pressure is not high enough, which you can change by working with the sleep regulators, or sleep has become associated with being dialled up, which you can change by going back to the ritual of snuggling him until he's asleep, for a time.
You know your child and her unique personality and what she's ready for. If you make a mistake, and find she's really not ready, that's alright, you can go back to what you were doing and try introducing the change again when she's a little older.
It's best to not allow screen devices (TVs, video games, computers, tablets, mobile phones) in our children's bedrooms, nor (as they get older) to allow interaction with screen media in the hour before bedtime (and also of course not during the night). In addition to the disruptive effects of blue light on sleep, the emotional rollercoaster of digital social connection or violent and scary movies dial children and adolescents up, interfering with healthy sleep.
