When should I change strategies?

Remember, the best strategy for your family has to be comfortable for you but also effective for your child.
If you're seeing that the strategy you picked may not be effective for your child, you might want to consider switching.

If you're considering switching strategies, here are a few things to know.

I don't recommend going from Silent Return to Camping In
Camping in is a more parentally involved strategy so any misbehavior or lack of rule follow that you may be experiencing with Silent Return will likely not be improved by switching to Camping In which requires a parent to be more involved in the sleep process. In this case, it may be best to be more strict with Silent Return and reduce the number of exist limits. Switching from SR to Camping can also be seen as giving the child more attention which may be viewed as a reward for the unwanted behavior that you're trying to get away from. 

Switching from Camping In to Silent Return may be the best choice in these scenarios

- Your child is calm but takes forever to fall asleep. Your presence in the room may be too distracting to the child. They keep themselves awake to make sure you stay in the room. They talk, try and get your attention, they roll around, etc.

- You child refuses to follow the head on bed rule. They are constantly getting up and you're spending your time enforcing the consequence over and over but seeing no improvement. It starts to feel like a game. 

- When you try to move farther away or into the hallway, your child starts breaking the head on bed rule even after a period of doing well. This may show that having you in the room is just too distracting. 

- If you start to feel like sitting in the room is a game to your child.

- If you are worried about your ability to stick to the rules due to any number of reasons - exhaustion, child wearing you down, child too upset, too emotional, frustrated to the point of just wanting to crawl in bed with them so everyone can sleep - these are all signs that Camping In isn't working and you may want to consider switching. It's always better to leave the room rather than fold and jump into a bad habit due to one of these stressors.