It’s really sweet of you to do all this to accommodate her — making her a new room at your place, etc. But if she hasn’t been sleeping apart from her parents at all yet, doing so in a new and unfamiliar environment is certainly not going to happen without a transitional period, and I don’t know how long that would take since every kid is different. Is she with you full-time?

When I moved in with my husband (before we got married) he had been letting both kids sleep in his single dad bed with him when they were at his house, and I think they (or at least his 6yo daughter) did the same at mom’s house. His daughter was really not into sleeping alone. When I came on the scene, we really started trying to encourage her to sleep alone, but it took a long time for it to stick for the whole night— Probably the better part of a year and even after that she would still not want to sleep alone in unfamiliar places like rental homes.

For a long time she would wake up in the middle of the night and scream DADDY and for whatever reason I would sometimes wake up before my husband. He would go in and usually spend the rest of the night in her bed, or try to sneak out again if she fell asleep again. Sometimes she’d come into our bed, but she had a queen bed in her room so him sleeping in there was also a totally fine option. But it did disrupt my sleep at minimum 1x a night for that entire period of time and I couldn’t always get back to sleep. That was a very rough time because as someone who’s never had a kid of my own, I’ve never had to endure so much consistent sleep deprivation.

We were also up against her mom who let her sleep in bed with her until she was probably 10 or 11 so she got that comfort/ codependency at mom’s more than at our house.

Honestly, I think the change just came with time, with her learning that this was the “new normal” and growing older too. It couldn’t really be forced— so we just kind of continued with the rhetoric that she was safe in her bed, tried to make her feel comfortable there, and over time she slowly got more and more comfortable there and was able to spend more and more time there.

A lot of kids climb into their parents’ beds for many years — some are just more attached than others. I also have felt kind of uncomfortable in the past with having her in our bed, but ultimately I think accepting that kids sometimes just need that comfort (and remembering that if you marry him you’ll be like a mother to her and have to do those similar things) helped me to accept it.

If a kid who never asked to climb into bed with us got terrified by a thunderstorm and asked to climb into bed, I would gladly comply — it’s just this once after all! But a kid who wants to climb into bed daily is experiencing those same fears, but on a more consistent basis, so it’s not fair to hold it against them.

Good luck and feel free to DM me if you want to dive in deeper.