What's next if you've been sharing the bed or sharing your room with your toddler but want to change this now?

There is no need to rush our little people out of the parental bed. You can do this in a way that suits your own unique family.

For some families, this may be in the latter half of the first year of life or towards one year of age. For other families, it might be when their child is four or five years of age or older. Some cultures and some families share the parental bed with their children into primary school years or more. There is no right or wrong, just what works for your family.

Many of the families I've worked with over the years have found a mattress on the floor in the baby or toddler's own room works well as a transitional arrangement towards independent sleeping, once parents have decided they want to move away from bedsharing, or from having the toddler in the parental bedroom.

For this to work, the mattress needs to be

• Large enough to comfortably accommodate both a small child and a loving parent. This is because as you do this transition, you might sleep quite a lot of the night on this mattress with your little one.

• Safe, cleared of objects and bedding that could obstruct airways. After six to 12 months of age, children are much more robust in protecting their own airways in the night.

• Very low, so that your little one won't be hurt if he clambers (or falls!) off the mattress on to the floor. A futon can work well for this.

For this to be safe, the room needs

• To be completely child-proofed, so that a toddler climbing around in the night without you present is completely safe

• A child-proof gate at the door.

It's much easier for you to roll yourself out of this floor bed and return to the parental bed, than it is to ease a lovely, heavy, half-asleep, half-wriggling toddler into a cot! Cots often stop working for many families somewhere through the second half of the first year of life, and don't work terribly well for many or most toddlers, in my experience.

If you fall asleep on the floor bed as you are breastfeeding or cuddling your little one to sleep, that's not a problem. But more and more, you'll be able to roll yourself out without waking your small child, and return to the parental bed.

In this scenario, we're wanting your toddler to learn that her room is specially for her, and that it's a place in which she feels happy and safe, with things she likes playing with easily available. It's the only place she sleeps at night (when you're home). You can find out about protecting your little one's sleep throughout childhood here.

A note for families who enjoy bedsharing with older children

If you enjoy sharing your bed at nights with your child or children, you don't have to teach your little one to sleep alone until you want to! Sleeping socially, including with our children, has been the biological and cultural norm for human beings until the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Even today, bedsharing with children remains usual practice in many cultures and also for many families in the West, as a normal part of loving, psychologically healthy family life.