A new mom was trying to figure out how her son’s crib kept moving from one side of the room to the other every night—then she checked the babycam.
Sloane Lyle from Tupelo, Mississippi, told Newsweek “about four months ago” she noticed the crib was in a different position when she came into her son’s room every morning. Confused and ever so slightly concerned, Lyle checked the camera in her son’s room to try and get an explanation.
New parents can expect plenty of disruptions to their sleep in the first few years of their child’s life. A 2019 study, published in the journal Sleep, and based on sleep data collected from 2,500 moms and 2,200 dads over a seven-year period found new parents experienced sleep disruption for the first six years of their child’s life.
While it’s one thing to be kept up by a child’s cries, Lyle was facing the prospect of being kept up as her imagination ran wild with thoughts of what could be causing her son’s crib to move.
In the end, however, the reality was something she had never dreamed of. Watching back the babycam footage, which Lyle subsequently shared to TikTok under the handle @slyle01, she discovered her son had been moving the crib. It turned out, every night, he had been sitting up and gently headbutting the end of the crib, shunting it across the room as he went. “Every nap and at night like clock work for about two to four minutes he will do it and then he’s dead asleep,” Lyle said.
Seeing her son doing it on the video that first time was a shock to Lyle. “The first time he did it my husband and I were horrified and thought something was wrong and after calling our pediatrician frantically,” Lyle said. “She reassured us that this is a very common and normal thing for toddlers, babies and children to do when going to sleep.”
Now it’s something Lyle has become used to seeing when she checks-in on her son via the babycam. “He does it right before he goes to sleep,” Lyle said. “It’s a very common thing for toddlers and even children to do to self-soothe themselves as a pacifier would soothe an infant for example. It’s more common for boys to do this as well.”
Lyle was further reassured when she shared the clip to TikTok. Several other parents quickly took to the comments section to post about similar experiences they had had with their kids.
“Mine does this too. I’m glad I came across you,” one viewer wrote. “My son is 4 and still does this… and sings a tune while doing it,” another commented. A third added: “I thought mine was weird but the comments have helped me realize that he’s apparently normal..ish.”
Lyle said she originally posted the clip because it was funny and she “wanted to know if any other parents have children that do this as well.”
“I think it gained so much traction because it is a very niche topic and a lot of parents can relate but it’s also not talked about either,” she said. “I’m sure many parents of children like my own were relieved to know that their child wasn’t the only one that did this as a form of self soothing.”
