By Dr. Deepak Khanna, D.O.
There’s a specific week that catches almost every parent off guard: the week their toddler figures out how to get a leg over the crib rail. It usually happens earlier than expected, often before the child can reliably communicate, and it tends to happen at night, which means the first anyone hears about it is a thud.
I see this constantly in practice, and the parental response is almost always the same – buy a taller crib tent, add a mattress on the floor “just in case,” and hope the climbing phase passes. It rarely does. Once a toddler has figured out that the crib is climbable, that knowledge doesn’t uninstall itself.
Why this happens earlier than the milestone charts suggest
Crib-climbing isn’t really a gross motor milestone in the way rolling over or walking are – it’s closer to a problem-solving moment. A toddler doesn’t need advanced physical development to climb out, they need motivation.
The instinct to add more containment is usually the wrong instinct
The default parental response is to make the crib harder to escape – tents, higher rails, tighter positioning against a wall. In my experience, this addresses the symptom and ignores the actual shift that’s happened: the child has decided the crib no longer matches what they want, which is more autonomy over their own movement. Making the container harder to defeat sometimes works for a few more weeks. It also raises the height a toddler is climbing from if they do eventually succeed, which is the opposite of what you want from a safety standpoint!
What I’d actually recommend instead
Once a toddler is reliably climbing, I tell families to stop fighting the crib and change the setup entirely – remove the fall risk instead of trying to out-engineer it. This is the point where many of my patients’ families move to Montessori beds, essentially a mattress placed on the floor, so there’s no longer a height to fall from in the first place. It sounds like a bigger change than it is. The mattress itself often doesn’t change; it’s the frame and the fall risk that disappear.
The tradeoff is real and worth naming honestly: the room now needs proper childproofing, because a toddler with a floor bed also has the run of the room overnight. Anchored furniture, no reachable cords, nothing within crawling distance that shouldn’t be swallowed.
What the first two weeks actually look like
Almost every family reports the same adjustment period – more nighttime wandering initially, a bedtime routine that takes longer to stick, and at least a few nights where the toddler treats the new freedom like a novelty rather than a bedtime. This settles faster than parents expect, usually within one to two weeks.
The bottom line
Crib-climbing isn’t a phase to wait out with a taller barrier. It’s usually a signal that the setup has stopped matching what the child is developmentally asking for. Once that’s the case, changing the environment tends to work better than reinforcing a version of it the toddler has already outgrown.
Dr. Deepak Khanna, D.O. is a board-certified family medicine physician based in Philadelphia.