Posts Tagged ‘toddler night waking’

Many parents with babies who are troubled sleepers figure the baby will outgrow the issue. Some do, but many simply don’t. If your 4 month old is waking up a lot at night, you might think it’s normal. But, when she is 12 months, 18 months or 2 years old and now a toddler, you’re wondering just when she might outgrow this night waking problem or if she will at all.

There are a number of reasons why toddlers wake up at night. This article will outline a few main reasons:

Night Waking by Sleep Association

The same way your 4, 6, or 8 month old can struggle with sleeping all night, so can toddlers, if they don’t know how to get back to sleep without your “help”. I say “help” because all of our good intentions to help our babies and toddlers to sleep sometimes isn’t help at all and it only continues the night waking longer than necessary. Of course, I don’t fault anyone. I fell into the same trap. I didn’t know how complicated sleep could be until I had my first son!

The place we fall asleep and how we fall asleep is important. If you fall asleep on your bed and wake up at 2am and you’re on the couch, you would be disoriented and wonder how you got there. If you fell asleep on a pillow and you wake up at midnight without your pillow, you might have trouble going back to sleep without looking for it. Very often we become our baby or toddler’s “pillow”. Therefore, it’s important to have good routines that set the stage for sleep, but when it comes down to that moment when your toddler falls asleep, it needs to be in the same environment he will wake up in periodically throughout the night. This is highly related to his personality and temperament. Some children can be rocked to sleep at bedtime and wake up 12 hours later while others will need to be rocked and re-rocked every hour or two. The key is to break the sleep associations, if they are a problem.

Night waking due to the “Too long in bed problem”

I read about the “too long in bed problem” in Ferber’s book and has been so right on in numerous situations I’ve come across.

The gist of this problem is your toddler is in bed more hours than he can physically sleep and it causes schedule problems. This problem can show itself in different ways. Your toddler might take too long to fall asleep at night, wake too early in the morning, be up for long periods at night or a combination of the three. Waking too early or going to bed too late can usually be fixed by simply shifting his schedule.

When your toddler is up for a long period at night, the trick is to know what the cause is. If she doesn’t have a sleep association problem as described above, she gets a good amount of sleep for her age (e.g. 2 year olds need 11-13 hours in 24 hours, including their nap) and especially if she used to sleep well and now she’s up for 1-2 hours in the middle of the night, you can pretty much guess this is the issue. A toddler with this problem will genuinely not be able to physically sleep, no matter how hard she tries. No amount of cry it out or taking away toys or anything will help.

If your toddler has this problem, usually the best course of action is to make bedtime later. This is very backwards from almost any other situation I talk about on this site where an earlier bedtime will help, but in this case, it’s true. Even if your toddler goes right to sleep at bedtime, making bedtime later can help this problem. Another key is not to let her “sleep in” the next day, which is sooo hard because look at all the sleep she lost last night! The goal is to keep her in bed for as long as she can sleep, including her nap(s), and no more.

I personally went through this twice before, the most recent earlier this year with my older son, who was 3 at the time. He had been sleeping so well and all of a sudden he started coming into our room at night. At first it was just once or twice a week and no, it was not nightmares. He would not be scared or anything. Then, it started happening every single night. He kept saying “I’m not tired” but being the sleep fighter he is, I did not really believe him. We’d take him back to his room and he’d want his music on and sometimes we’d need to turn it on again if the CD finished after 45 minutes. He started staying up 1-2 hours almost every night and we were becoming our old exhausted selves.

Sometimes it’s hard to see your own problems, which is why I help others so well because sometimes you need an outside party to take a look. In my case, I didn’t really have anyone but to reread my Ferber book. His explanation of first, “the afternoon dip” and the “too long in bed problem” was DEAD ON! It hadn’t dawned on me that my son’s bedtime was too early. I mean he wasn’t napping anymore and staying up 12 hours straight already! And, he’d seem so tired at dinner (but that was just his afternoon dip we all have). But, sure enough within 3 nights of moving his bedtime 1 to 1 1/2 hours later (from 7:15 to 8:30 to 9pm — yes he is a night owl!) he stopped waking up at night! Well, he does have a night waking occasionally if he does have that bad dream, but mostly he sleeps straight through, again.

Teething

Unfortunately, teething night wakings don’t go away for everyone until both the one-year and the two-year molars come in. My first son just had molars one day without too much upheaval, but my second son, wow! His one-year molars took MONTHS to come in. Fortunately, his rough sleep nights were only here and there with his worst being just over a week ago when he was also sick with Roseola. See my article about teething for more information.

Developmental Night Waking

When your baby was less than a year old, you had teething and learning to crawl and all sorts of fun things to keep him awake at night. Well, your toddler may have some night waking due to developmental milestones, too. The biggest one is learning to talk and the language explosion she will have around 18 months old (my son did not have his until closer to 22 months). Some toddlers could be sensitive to other developmental milestones, but if they don’t have sleep associations, the night waking is usually minimal during these.

Nightmares

Soon, I will be writing a whole series on nightmares and night terrors, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but nightmares obviously can wake up toddlers. After their imagination starts to really blossom, they become more aware of the world, develop reasoning skills, and start to put together that we are mortal (i.e. we can die), things start to scare them. Also, disruptions or stress at home can cause nightmares too. The main thing to do is try to talk to him during the day about what might be scaring him and also make him feel safe and secure in his room and bed. This nightlight really helped my son feel more comfortable. He didn’t have any nightlight until around 2 or 2 1/2 years old after he transitioned to a toddler bed when we were pregnant with #2. I did have to cover it up 85% with a washcloth because it was too bright. LOL!

All situations are unique and there could be other causes of night wakings, but these are the main reasons. Typically, once they are toddlers, they don’t need any feedings in most cases. If you need help on dealing with your toddler night waking, please contact me. I’d love to help!

How is your toddler sleeping?