Sleeping in the Bed We Made

We've been dealing with a recent pattern of disagreeable behavior on Grafton's part. At 4am. Every morning. Sometimes earlier. He calls out to us from his crib, "Mommy, I want to sleep in your bed" (yes, we've given into letting him do this for too long, and he's grown used to it). We tell him it's too early and that he needs to go back to sleep. He starts to whimper. Then he tells us "I need my blankets up" (yes, we've always gone into pull up his blankets). We tell him he can pull them up himself, now that he's a big boy. And he can. But this never works. His whimpers turn into a full cry, and gradually grow louder. "I need music" (we've often let him listen to music when he's trying to fall asleep in the evening).  We tell him it's too early in the morning for music, and that he needs to try to sleep some more. The crying turns to all-out screaming. Next, "my blankets are on the floor!" (yes, he knows that in the past, this forced us to get out of bed to help him stay warm on a cold winter night).  We tell him that he shouldn't have thrown his blankets out of his crib. After 10 minutes or so of crying out for Mommy, he switches strategies, and starts calling out for "Daddy", making the same requests. By now the screaming is persistent and mostly unbearable to any adult who happens to have functioning auditory nerves. We ignore him. 10 minutes more of screaming. We hold fast to our strategy of letting him "learn on his own" that he cannot get us out of bed whenever he wants. Another 10 minutes goes by. Then another. It's intolerable. No one is sleeping and we're all miserable. Pillows over the head barely attenuate the 115 decibels emanating from the neighboring room. But the lesson must be learned, and we continue to ignore his tantrum. We ruminate in our exhausted state how incredible it is that a 2.5 year old can scream for 45 minutes (and longer!) without tiring. And without learning that it will not obtain the desired effect. That's probably because after about 30 minutes or so, he almost always wins. One of us drags our tired bones out of bed to calm him down, allowing him make peace with the fact that it's still sleepy time for all of us. So of course, he's learned that he merely needs to go on screaming for as long as it takes, confident that his "victory" is inevitable. But finally, last night, we stuck to our guns, and remained silent through an endless hour of toddler tantrum. And it worked--he finally gave up. He went back to sleep on his own, and we all slept in until 8am. Let's hope he's starting to learn that tantrums don't always work, because it's hard a lesson to teach.