Managing a cat who insists on sleeping in the baby's room starts with accepting why the room wins: it is warm, quiet, softly furnished, smells strongly of the people the cat loves, and contains an excellent small heated mattress in the cot. The cat is not being defiant; it has done a sensible survey of the house and chosen the best bedroom. Your task is therefore twofold and non-negotiable in its first half: the baby's room must become reliably unavailable during sleep, and the cat must be offered a sleeping place good enough that the trade feels like an upgrade rather than an exile.
Make the boundary physical, not theatrical
Cats do not learn much from being carried out of a room at midnight by an exhausted parent, except that the game repeats nightly. The boundary has to live in the hardware: the door kept closed during naps and nights, a latch the cat cannot lever, or a properly fitted screen door that preserves airflow and sound while ending access entirely. A cat should never sleep unsupervised in the same room as a sleeping baby, and should never be in the cot, pram, or Moses basket at all, so remove the opportunity rather than relying on the cat's restraint. Check the room for the cat before the baby goes down, the way you check anything else in the bedtime routine, and make that check a named step so it survives tiredness.
Build the rival bedroom properly
The replacement spot fails when it is a token blanket in a corridor. Study what the baby's room offered and reproduce it: warmth from a safe, low heat source or a sun-catching position, height if the cat likes to sleep raised, a soft surface that holds familiar scent, and proximity to the adults' evening life, since most cats choose the nursery partly because that is where their people keep going. A perch or bed in the parents' bedroom or beside the evening sofa usually beats any spare-room arrangement. Launch the new spot deliberately: feed a prized treat there at bedtime for a run of nights, play the last game of the day beside it, and let it collect the cat's own scent undisturbed rather than washing it back to neutral.
Handle the protest period without caving in cycles
Expect a campaign: calling at the closed door, scratching at its base, and attempting entry whenever the door opens for night feeds. Answer it with boring consistency. Do not open the door to scold, which still rewards the performance with attention and a glimpse inside; instead, redirect to the rival bed, offer the bedtime treat there, and leave the door shut. Keep the cat's overall routine generous during this period, with normal play and affection, so the closed door is one rule inside an otherwise unchanged life rather than the start of general exclusion since the baby arrived. Most cats redirect within a couple of weeks once the door truly never opens and the new bed keeps paying its nightly dividend. Persistent night yowling that disrupts the baby is a reason to move the cat's sleeping base further from the nursery door, not to relent.
One rule, followed by every adult at 3 a.m.
This arrangement collapses through kindness: a grandparent who lets the cat slip in, a night-feed parent too tired to check, a helper who did not know the rule exists. The sleeping arrangements only hold when every adult in the house follows the same door habit and the same pre-bed check, which is why writing the rules where the whole household can see them matters more than repeating them. KinsLe's Family Sharing keeps your cat's sleeping spots, closed-room rules, and bedtime routine in one shared profile, so even the person doing the night feed for the first time keeps your cat's boundaries exactly as you set them.