How to Stop Your Toddler From Climbing Out of their Crib

Stop Toddler Crib Climbing

This post contains affiliate links. See affiliate disclosure here.

Chances are that if you are reading this, then you also had the horrible experience of waking up to the sound of your child falling out of their crib to the ground. The initial thud noise was probably followed by a loud wailing from your now traumatized child. At least, that’s how it went for us. This delightful experience immediately sent me searching for options of how to stop my toddler from climbing out of the crib again. There were a lot of suggestions out there, but most of them lead to converting his crib to a toddler bed, which is a step we are not ready for. As it stands, my son currently naps for 2-3 hours at a time and sleeps at night for 12-14 hours. There was just no way I was going to change-up his current sleeping situation unless I had no other option.

We decided to use a combination of three different ideas so that we could increase our chances of success.

1. Move the crib against the wall! We moved his crib so that one of the long sides was against the wall. A lot of people already have their cribs like this, but in doing so, you reduce the number of sides that your naughty toddler has available to climb out of. Our crib is the same height on both of the long sides., so it didn’t matter which side ended up against the wall. If your crib has a higher side, put the lower side against the wall so that you have even more of a barrier for your toddler to have to climb over.
2. Sleep Sacks! A sleep sack limits how much your child can can extend their leg upward. My son has been unzipping his sleep sack lately, so we started zipping his sleep sack so that the zipper was at his back. This was to eliminate the chances that he would unzip it and have a full range of motion. Our favorite sleep sack is the Zipadee Zip!!

Lower the crib mattress! We built a platform so that we could move his crib mattress down an additional 3 inches. This was definitely the “big gun” in our three-part plan. Instructions for how we built this are listed here.

It has been 2 weeks since the fall that started my frantic online searching for solutions. Since putting all three of these changes into place, we have not had any more climbing out of the crib. My son has been awake and ready for me for 15+ minutes before I get him, which gives me a lot of confidence that the lack of falling is actually because of these changes and not just because of his lack of trying.

Have you done something different to keep your toddler from climbing out of the crib? I would love to hear what worked for you in the comments below!