to think this is not normal (toddler sleep)

[onemiddlefinger]

My DS (nearly 2) wakes up at 5 am and i'm exhausted.
He goes to bed at 8.30 and when at home has a nap during the day as well, sometimes up to 3 h as he is making up for the 5am wakings i'm sure.
But during the week at the nursery his daytime naps are usually 1h-1,5h and it makes no difference to morning wake up time.
Surely at his age he should sleep at least 10 hours? Today it was less than 9 as he fell asleep at9pm!
What am i doing wrong??? Please someone tell me there is a way to get hime to sleep longer in the mornings.

I don't understand. Surely nursery give him lunch and tea if you don't get back in the house til 7pm. He's a toddler - needs to eat at 5pm ish and a snack later on eg cheese and biscuits (or not even that). Bed by 7pm. I really hope you don't mean you make your tea and keep the little dude up til you've eaten

So depends on child.
DD 2yr bed 8:30-9pm sleeps till 8am
Naps 1-2hr usually up to 3 when ill or nothing.
So late bed and naps dont guarantee early waking.

Do you use a blackout blind? Though i guess waking at 5 is earlier than sunrise.

We do tea about 3 hr before bed and dont do a bath reading routine as she needs to wind down and this makes her more active.
I would try making sure the nap is early in the day as up from 5 i assume they would be tired by 9am?
As mine up at 8 is napping around 12 or 1

Pica - what rubbish. Children of all ages around the world survive well not having dinner at 5pm.

My 3 year old goes to nursery 11-6pm half the week. They don't give dinner. They give lunch at 1pm, and a snack of say fruit toast and fruit at 4.30pm. 4 year old has snack at after school club. Therefore we get home around 6.30pm, make dinner, eat 7/7.30, play/talk/read with them, bath around 8.30pm, as bed around 9pm. They can sleep until 8am and be at school on time.
9pm-8am is 11hrs - fine for 4 year old imo
9pm-8am, plus 90 min nap is 12.5 hrs sleep a day - fine for 3 year old IMO.

This thread has reassured me. DS sleeps from 9pm to about 7.15am, and pushing bedtime earlier does nothing to change that - he's just trapped in his cot for two more hours, awake.

He's always in a great mood in the mornings and is generally a happy sunny little boy. No moods or overtiredness. He naps for 1hour at nursery, two or none on weekends depending on how exciting or physical the day is. The only days he sleeps anywhere near 7pm is the days he doesn't nap. He doesn't get dinner at nursery, he gets a light tea at 3.30 and milk and crackers at 5. I pick him up at 6 and we go to the park to blow off some more steam for 20 minutes or so. He will often have some dinner with us at 7 as well.

I think he just is one of those children who doesn't need that much sleep. His dad is the same...me on the other hand, I'd sleep for 14 hours just for fun.

Thanks again for all your replies!
He gets tea at the nursery but it's at 3.30 so i always thought he would still need dinner too at night.
Although he doesn't usually eat a lot so i could try a quicker light dinner and then would be able to do bedtime earlier.
I will try this even though last time i did it just meant that he woke up even earlier, but that was months ago, so maybe things have changed.
I will find it very hard to limit his nap on weekends as i quite enjoy having a few hours to myself but ultimately i would enjoy sleeping in the morning more i suppose...
Also at the nursery he rarely sleeps more that 1h but it doesn't make much difference to mornings.
We had a holiday a few weeks ago and he definitely slept better, probably due to lots of time in the pool, beach etc. But it's not that easy to keep up the physical activity now.

And until a few months ago he also didn't sleep though the night, so we had not 1 full night of sleep for the first 1,5years and then a short period when he slept around 10h at night and now 9h or less....

Think nursery is exhausting but noisy. So they only sleep a bit and can get overtired. Then they sleep longer other naptimes to make up.
What do you do when he wakes up at 5. Can you not gradually leave longer or go in and say still sleep time.?
If you get up then you are rewarding the early wake up with play time.

Whatever you did to stop him waking in the night I would do at 5 too, especially now its dark until about 7 I would treat it as a night waking see if you can reset he's body clock.

We used blackout blinds during summer but now it's dark anyway so don't need them.
I tried keeping him in bed but the he says he wants to go potty (just started intoducing potty, not full training yet) and i can't really say no to that, so we get up and after potty he starts to play, not really I tried to keep lights to minimum and really not make it fun. Actually at 5ami have no energy to make it fun anyway.

He sounds overstimulated and overtired to me. I'd give him a light, quick meal when he gets in, rather a full-on dinner at 7.15pm as that will contribute to him finding it hard to fall asleep, and then quickly proceed to bath/story/bed with the light out by 7.30pm.

Another thing I'd try is to refuse to get up with him at 5am, just put him back to bed, tell him its not time to get up yet, and just keep repeating that each morning until he gets the message. As you've been getting up early for a while it might not be easy to begin with, but at least its dark now until 7am, so that might help. I've never got up with my kids before 7am, apart from when they were babies and needed to be fed, and even then I fed them and we went back to bed until 7am. Its a golden rule in this house that mummy doesn't get up before 7 and so they they've learned to stay in bed. You just have to set the rules that you want to live by IMO and be kind, but firm in their application.

He's very young for a gro-clock. Neither of mine got the idea of those until they were at least three.

You may find it takes a little while for the shorter nap to start affecting him as he settles into a new routine.

Mine is similar and we stopped him napping altogether at 2 as it meant he slept from 7.30pm till 6.30pm instead of 9-6. It's hard having shorter or no nap but that's your own decision to make I suppose.

3.30 tea? Isn't that a little bit too early? More like afternoon snack time.

I know you're giving him more, but that seems bizarre to me. What time does he have lunch?

We haven't had a full night sleep for 7 years. We have been sleeping in shifts for all that time with DH going to bed earlier and me going later and sleeping in an hour in the morning. I cant think of a single thing we did that has worked as the oldest two just started to sleep when they were 4 and 3, but the younger two took over the night horrors so no break.
We are fucked.
Sorry, no help at all but you are not alone x

Ours call it "high tea" nanny and it is sandwiches, fruit and yoghurt etc etc at about 4 - much later for nurseries / preschools and it is home time - it is a big snack I guess but just that the nurseries refer to it as tea.

My maths is ropey, but isn't he generally getting 12 hours sleep in a 24 hour period? My nearly-two-year-old will generally sleep 12-13 hours in a day. He's started dropping his naps, and of he hasn't napped he will usually sleep all that time in one go (well, he might wake up but we don't have to go in often). If he does have a nap he will sleep a lot less at night.

I know the advice is generally to get toddlers into bed at 7/7.30 ish, but everyone is different. Ours certainly sleeps much much much better at night now we started putting him to bed later (he's rarely in bed before 8.30). We put him front if the telly before bedtime too!

Could you drop the nap? Two of my three had dropped daytime naps by this age - but went to bed at 6.30 - I'd stopped working by the time no. 3 came along but the first two went to nursery where they had tea in the afternoon - sandwiches, beans on toast, that kind of thing. They were never hungry when they got home so after nursery was just bath, stories and bed - milky drink at bedtime.

Could he bath while dinner is being prepared and eat in pj's?

Reduce day time naps to half an hour?

Juneau I really like the idea that mummy doesn't wake up before 7am!
I have tried a couple of time to not get up with him, but he then gets quite upset and went 1,5 intermittently crying, whining and trying to get me to get out of bed... I understand that it will take quite a few mornings like that until he finally gets the message. Lately he is also asking for the potty which I feel like I can't ignore, but I think he is realising that this gets us out of bed.
I also think that he is overtired (this is why all the crying and whining in the morning also).

I don't think he ready to drop the nap, but I do agree that 3h is too long and will affect his nighttime sleep.

Last night he was asleep by 8, still woke up at 5, but at least he had a bit more sleep.
I will try the earlier bedtime (bed 7.30, hopefully asleep by 8) for a week to see if there is a difference. Last time we only tried a couple of days.
Will also do the lighter dinners for now as he usually is not that hungry at dinner anyway.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I don't know if any of this will work, but at least I'm trying something.

He'll soon get the hang of the new routine OP, if you stick to it. My DC quickly learned that tea is at 5.30, bath at 6.30 and lights out at 7.30. And, of course, that mummy doesn't get up until 7! But if you keep it boringly the same at all times (bar holidays maybe), they don't really think to argue about it. Not until they're older anyway. DS1, who is almost 7, has now succeeded in pushing his bedtime back to 8, but I still pack him off to bed earlier than that if he looks tired. Small DC need lots of sleep, but adults also need their sleep, so don't feel bad about pushing this new schedule until he gets the hang of it - its for everyone's benefit.

some children are just naturally early risers. my ds is 8, he wakes up at 5am most days, always has, and he goes to bed at 7.30... however, he also has ADHD and doesn't sleep through, he's usually awake on and off through the night.

We have a gro-clock and it did help him learn that he needs to be quiet in the morning, but while he is quiet, i still hear him waking/moving around to get a book or a toy or go to the toilet and it does disturb me, even if i no longer have to attend to him myself!

I'm only saying this because sometimes it DOESNT get better, and if all else fails, you have to go to bed earlier or learn to survive on less sleep. I average about 5-6hrs, i go to bed at 10.30-11pm most nights as ds often has me up and down from 4.30am onwards.

Im trying early bed again but every time I do it he wakes up an hour after hes put down and gets up earlier. Any time from 4am.

Today he woke at 5.45 after going to bed at 8.30. Had a nap from 10.15- 11 and was in bed asleep at 7.30.

Hes already woken up once, I have a feeling I will be back in a week to say yet again some just dont go to sleep at 7, sleep the night and wake up at a reasonable hour.

you have to do it in teeny amounts, 10 minutes, its not a bad idea with the clocks changing soon any way!

I introduced a GroClock to my not-particularly-verbal DS when he was 21 months old on the advice of a sleep consultant - I was sure he wasn't going to get it but, with just a couple of weeks of persistence, he most definitely did. He's now 2.4yo and we're woken by 'sun awake, mummy!' down the baby monitor every morning. He still doesn't sleep much past 6:15, but it's a bloody improvement on the 5am or earlier that he was doing before!