Back long ago when I was pregnant with Bean, Dave and I read about Montessori floor beds and loved the idea. And then I googled it (as you do) and found a quiet glaring empty hole on the internet. Of course, How We Montessori had floor beds, but at the time, she hadn’t written much on the practicality of it. Sew Liberated also had a post on creating her floor bed nursery, with inspiring photos of how cute it would look.

But I wanted feedback on how it went. There is always a difference between the darling nursery you set up, and then six months after the baby is born, the way you actually utilize it. I felt like this might be doubly so for nurseries with floor beds.

So, what’s the point of a Montessori floor bed? Why bother? Well, as Polk and Lillard discuss in Montessori From the Start, “our goal then is to build an environment for engagement for the infant, one that maintains a good balance of challenge and support, and where the adult is not overly involved.” Later, “allowing the possibility of movement into the entire room would open a whole world of interest.” The floor bed encourages an infant’s early sense of independence and ability, and is also intended to smooth the later transition to a big bed.

Bean has been in her Big Girl Room with Big Girl Bed for a few months now, so I feel confident talking about not only how the floor bed functioned, but also whether it has helped in the transition to her big bed. Bean slept in a co-sleeper next to our bed for the first three months before moving to her floor bed, but took naps on her floor bed from the start. I should start out by saying we all absolutely loved it, and I think it had an overall net positive affect on Bean’s infant years, for her and us.

I’m going to split it up in Pros and Cons.

Pros

1. Lillard and Polk say that an infant given a wide space for movement, will actually start transporting themselves very early on. This was definitely true for us, Bean started scooting in and out of her bed at a few months old, even scooting out of her room and then out the door. It was pretty cool to see, even if it had no practical consequence. Sometimes, parental experiments are just for our own curiosity.

2. Bean loved her floor bed. She generally woke up happy and she didn’t fight bedtime (I think because she knew as soon as we left, she’d be able to jump out.) She’d also happily play on it when she was awake, bringing her dolls and toys over. Even now, when she’s feeling upset, she’ll calm down by grabbing a book and heading for her floor bed in her nursery, not her big girl bed.

3. She tended to hit all her milestones in her room and floor bed, like rolling over and pulling herself up, particularly when she was bumming in there alone and we weren’t watching.

4. As an infant, she really would wake up and start playing with her toys or reading books before alerting us she was awake.

5. Floor beds make for good cuddles. Every night, we could lay down next to her and read a book before bedtime. When reading time was over, we could just slip out of bed — no uprooting her just as she was feeling most calm. (When we had to use cribs on vacation, this was the one aspect that annoyed us to no end — no bedtime cuddles?!)

6. Overnight nursing was a breeze, since I could just nurse in her bed then get up and leave. I didn’t have to move her.

7. On those terrible sick or teething nights, when she just wouldn’t sleep and was inconsolable, we could lay down next to her to comfort her, while actually half-sleeping ourselves.

8. The playing-by-herself-then-crawling-into-bed-and-going-to-sleep goal was more of a moving mark than a goal reached. It would work for a while and then we’d travel or she’d get sick or she’d hit a new developmental milestone and then it wouldn’t work for a while. When it worked, it felt miraculous.

9. The bed had a huge impact on her confidence and independence. She’d let me know she was awake by crawling down the hallway and finding me in the living room, face full of baby-pride.

10. On the topic of eventual transition to big girl bed (at around 2.5 years old), it went even smoother than we’d hoped. By the time of transition, she was going to sleep on her own in the floor bed, and the switch to a larger room with even more toys didn’t affect her ability to go to sleep at all. She’s always been able to get in and out of bed, you know? It wasn’t a novelty and she already knew how to get in bed when she was tired. We didn’t have any issues with her doing the whole asking for water, asking to go potty thing, I think because we’d already dealt with it when she was around 18 months old and came up with some techniques. In the mornings, she does tend to wake up and come to our room, but we just tell her to go back to her room until her moon/sun clock says it’s time to wake up. She seems to accept it. We can hear her playing in her room until the sun comes up.
Cons

1. I was pretty (by which I mean defcon 5 level) anxious about SIDS, and google telling me not much on the safety of a floor bed made this even worse. I puzzled through all the ways in which a floor bed could have a terrible outcome, and didn’t come up with anything. That didn’t help the anxiety.

2. I worried the cat would get to her. We got a gate, that the cat deftly got through the first time we put it up. But, the cat was terrified of the small writhing human and avoided her.

3. When Bean hit mobility around 7 months, the game was changed. A suddenly crawling infant is not an infant that wants to be confined to a bed, nor told to get back in bed. For a while, I gave up and just let her roam her room, hoping she’d fall asleep when she got tired. I’d find my energizer bunny baby sitting completely upright, toy in hand, asleep. Since she’s the type to blast right past naptime to overtired crazyland, we almost had to coach her to get in bed when she felt tired. We felt insane doing it, but it eventually worked and we had a 1 yr old who could put herself to bed. And then walking/jumping hit and then talking hit, and each time, we’d have to coach her anew. (The “I want water” stage mentioned above.) Our friends with cribs didn’t have these issues, or didn’t have them yet. We used the Baby Whisperer’s Gradual Withdrawal method, and after the course of months, we eventually had a one year old who could play with her things and then tuck herself in and go to sleep. Once those problems were solved, we haven’t had to revisit them in over a year, even when transitioning to a big girl bed. Even now as an almost-3, she still doesn’t go to sleep right away, and some nights, she’ll play by herself for over an hour before finally falling asleep, but we don’t have to be there and she’s perfectly content.

4. The room has to be completely baby proofed, so I had to pay special attention to which toys I kept in there. This also meant that a lot of things that would normally be kept in a nursery (diapers, diaper cream, medicines, clothes, electrical cords) were kept elsewhere in the apartment or on a very high shelf.

Did any of you use a floor bed? What were your experiences? Would you do it again?

More reading:
A friend’s experience with her Montessori floor bed