Chair Method

The chair method, sometimes called camping out, keeps a parent physically in the room while your baby falls asleep, then fades that presence out over successive nights by moving a chair progressively farther from the crib. It is the slowest method covered on this site and, for most families, also the one with the least crying at any single moment, since you never leave the room during the earliest nights.

How it works, night by night

For the first few nights, put a chair right beside the crib. Run the bedtime routine, place your baby down awake, and sit down. If your baby fusses or cries, you can shush or pat briefly without picking up, keeping interaction as minimal as you can manage; too much talking, singing, or eye contact tends to re-stimulate rather than settle. Stay until your baby is asleep. Every few nights, move the chair one step farther away: toward the door, then just outside the doorway, then out of sight entirely, repeating the same low-interaction routine at each new distance. The total number of nights is really a function of two choices you control: how many chair positions you use, and how many nights you hold at each one before moving again.

What the evidence actually says

This is the one method on this site without a peer-reviewed randomized controlled trial isolating its own results. Graduated extinction, full extinction, and bedtime fading each have direct study coverage (see the full comparison for citations); chair method’s mechanics are extensively documented across sleep-consultant practice and parenting literature, but no RCT has measured a “typical nights to resolution” figure for it specifically the way the cited studies do for the other approaches. We are stating that gap plainly rather than borrowing a number from a study that measured a different method. The 7-to-14-night range on the comparison page is a commonly cited practitioner estimate, not a study finding.

Who tends to pick this method

Families with a low tolerance for their baby crying alone, or a strong preference to be physically present for the whole process, choose chair method most often. It trades a longer, less-studied timeline for staying in the room the entire time, which is exactly the tradeoff the fit quiz weighs against your own answers about crying tolerance and how much time you realistically have for a multi-week process.

Where it goes wrong

Moving the chair too quickly is the most common misstep: a distance jump that feels sudden to your baby can restart the protest crying you were fading out, undoing several nights of progress. The second is staying too involved once you’re in the chair, talking, singing, or picking your baby up when fussing escalates, which keeps you an active participant rather than a fading presence and can stall progress at one chair position far longer than planned. The third is simple expectation-setting: because this is the slowest method here, families who go in expecting a one-week result can lose confidence partway through a fade that was always going to take closer to two.

If chair method fits your family, the plan builder will lay out a printable, night-by-night chair-position schedule you can adjust to your own pace.

This page is educational, not medical advice. Do not start structured sleep training before 4 months, and talk to your pediatrician first if your baby was premature, has reflux, or any health condition. See our methodology for how this site is sourced and reviewed.