A different bed every few nights: baby sleep and behaviour when you’re moving between homes all summer

Your baby finally settled at your mum’s — and then you packed up and went to his mum’s, and then the friend in London, and then the Airbnb away from everyone to ‘relax’. This is the bit of the expat summer nobody writes about: not one strange bed, but a whole summer of them.

Most of the advice you’ll find about baby sleep on holiday assumes a tidy little scenario: you go to Grandma’s for a long weekend, the sleep gets a bit wonky, you come home and reset. Lovely. The problem is that this bears almost no resemblance to an actual expat summer, which is not a weekend at one grandparent’s house but a six-week multi-trip across several relatives, friends and hotels. You do a fortnight at your mum’s. Then there’s the unspoken obligation to give equal time to his side, so you head to the in-laws. Then there’s the friend in London you promised you’d visit, so that’s three nights on a sofa bed with barely enough room next to you for the travel cot. Then a few days at the coast in an Airbnb because you’re already in the country so you might as well. By the time you fly back to Dubai your baby has slept in five different beds, in five different rooms, with five different sets of tracing - paper thin curtains and five different ambient noise situations, and somewhere around bed number three they decided that enough was enough and started waking up every hour.

I’ve lived this, for many summers. The summer where you are technically on holiday but haven’t unpacked your actual suitcase once in seven weeks, just gone through it in one of many unfamiliar box rooms, is something that only an expat mum knows.

Why moving is harder than just being away

A baby doesn’t just struggle with sleep because the bed is unfamiliar, they struggle because they’re constantly adjusting to a new environment, and every move resets them and they have to restart all over again. Babies anchor sleep to environmental cues — the feel of the room, the light, the sounds, the smell, the whole sensory package that their brain processed as ‘this is where I sleep safely’. At home in Dubai (hopefully!) that routine is engrained into them and is solid. At Grandma’s, it takes a few nights to build a new, not so solid version of it. And then — just as it’s starting to take root in their little minds — you move, and they have to start the whole thing again from scratch, except now they’re also more tired & dysregulated than when they started.

Each move causes more issues than the last, because your baby is heading into the trip with less resilience each time. By the third or fourth house you’re often not dealing with just a baby who’s struggling to settle in a new place — you’re dealing with a baby who is exhausted, wired, clingy, and behaviourally all over the place. This is important because it changes what you do. You stop treating each house as a new sleep problem to solve and start treating the whole trip as one long stretch where your job is trying to manage baby’s tiredness levels and start walking on eggshells around a tired grumpy baby.

The one thing that can travel: their bedtime routine

The best tool you have across a summer of moving is your bedtime routine, because it’s the one thing that you can keep the same when everything else is changing. The room changes, the bed changes, the time zone could be changing, the people are different, the noise is different — but if the bedtime routine stays the same, your baby can take that from from house to house. Same order, same songs, same words. The bath (or the pretend bath, if there isn’t one), the same book, the same sleep sack, the same phrases in the same order. That routine becomes the thing their brain attaches to when nothing else is familiar. It says: I don’t know where we are, but I know what this is, and what this is means sleep. Babies can’t tell the time, but they know what’s coming next by what has just happened.

Which is also why you should ideally protect the bedtime routine even when it’s socially awkward. There will be a lot of evenings where everyone’s still at the table, the cousins want one more go, your mum’s saying oh just let them stay up, they’re fine, and and your baby’s routine is the thing that gets changed because you don’t want to be the difficult one. I understand it, I’ve been there. But the routine is doing so much more work than you realise on a moving trip than at any other time, and the night you skip it at house number four is usually the night that breaks the camel’s back (Dubai Mums, no pun intended!). You’re allowed to slip away and do bedtime, you’re not being precious, or difficult. You’re being Mum, and Mums do whatever they can to avoid a 3am screaming baby waking everyone up in the house.

Pack a portable sleep kit and use it identically everywhere

Build a small kit of the sensory cues your baby associates with sleep and use them, exactly the same, in every single house you visit. A travel blackout blind (the suction-cup kind, or honestly just bin bags and tape — nobody’s judging, the British summer sun streaming in at 9pm is the worst). A white noise machine or a phone app playing the same sound every night, which is brilliant because it hides the different noises in every house. Your the in-laws’ creaky landing, the London friend’s street, the Airbnb’s mystery weird hum that you can’t find out where it’s coming from. The same sleep sack and the same comforter/lovey. Their own cot sheet, unwashed and carried from home, because it smells of home and can help settle them more than anything else will.

This all works because you can’t make the rooms the same, but you can make the space around your baby’s head look, smell and feel the same and if everything seems to be the same, your baby can sleep almost anywhere.

The behaviour, not just the sleep

A baby or toddler who is moving between homes, dysregulated, off-routine and surrounded by overexcited relatives is not going to be their easygoing, regulated self. They will be clingier and more prone to meltdowns. More likely to refuse food they would normally eat, to hit an exhaustive meltdown wall at 5pm and to crash over something tiny. And it’s so easy, in someone else’s house and in front of people whose opinion you’re anxious about, to see this as your child being difficult, or worse, that you’re a bad parent. You’re not, and they’re not, this is a tiny little nervous system that is having to adjust and carry on with very little rest, and the ‘bad’ behaviour is the outward sign of that. It’s not naughtiness, it’s just a tank running very low.

The single most useful thing you can do to help them regulate their behaviour is, really boringly, protect their sleep and their downtime. A rested child is a regulated child, and most of the summer behaviour problems are just tiredness and dysregulation. Another tip: Every house, every day, find a bit of low-stimulation time where it’s just you and the baby and no one else. They need a break from being held by every relative and so do you.

When to hold the boundary, and when to relax it

Decide your non-negotiables — for most families it’s the bedtime routine and night sleep— and don’t drop those boundaries, no matter what. And then let almost everything else go to pot. Naps in the car, naps in the buggy, naps on a cousin’s bed (safely), a late night because it was a family party and those memories are more important than a perfect bedtime once in a while. Your baby’s sleep will recover from it once you’re home and stable again, especially if the bulk of your usual routine stayed the same throughout the trip.

If you’re in the thick of it right now, frazzled, on someone’s sofa, googling this at midnight while your baby finally sleeps in a travel cot wedged between a wardrobe and a radiator, don’t worry, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re doing one of the hardest versions of the expat summer there is, and it’s called parenting. Protect as much of the consistency as you can, hold the boundaries you need to, let the rest go, and know that the moment you’re back in your own Villa in Dubai, the reset is much easier than you think.