What are you actually supposed to do when your child wakes at 3:45am???

[Usners]

He wakes up at 3:45 and will not go back to sleep. He’s 19 months. Been happening for around 3 months, not every night but at least 3 or 4 times a week. He will wake to breastfeed at 1am then back up at 3:45 for the day. I hate my life.

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that he may need to nap longer during the day. I would suggest a longer nap of 2 hours after lunch. For many little ones it is the case that sleep begets sleep. Hang in there!

We tried the treat it as a night wake thing extensively. It didn't work for us because for my kids, it simply didn't feel like a night wake up, it felt like morning, I don't think it works for very hardwired larks.

We did sleep training for night wakings and it worked really well but for the mornings, it did not. Mine went through a phase of 3:45/4 but more normally it was 5ish.

What did work for us was a combination of gro clock and Tonie box, essentially training them to entertain themselves in their bedrooms. We had the gro clock initially set for something really achievable like 5 and then gradually pushed it to 6:45. When they woke up, we would point to the clock, and leave them to listen to their tonie box until the sun on the clock was up.

It never made them sleep later but it did help us sleep later!

My eldest done this OP. No matter if you stay in the bedroom or in the Livingroom, try keep it dark. So no TV/loud interactive toys. Keep it quiet time until around 6:00am. It’s tough but the light mornings will ping him awake. Hopefully it corrects itself soon.

Unfortunately I'm not sure the same things work for different children and for some children nothing seems to work at all! Ideas from me:

We had some success with the picking up and putting down again multiple times without engaging until he went back to sleep (not the same as leaving to cry).

My friend had some sort of app where you log naps and wake ups and it tells you what time to put them to bed. It worked for her. I think one day it said put to bed at 5.45pm or something ridiculous and it worked on that particular night!

Pay some sort of professional!

He wouldn't have slept in our bed anyway but cosleeping would be absolutely last resort for me.

We had a terrible sleeper but I would say that about your son's age he just suddenly got it and has never been up before 6.30 / 7 in all the years since. He was going to bed earlier than 7 at that point.

We did rotate early mornings between us so I'm hoping you're not doing all this yourself.

You have my sympathies. I promise it won't be forever. ETA At 19 months I guess you're probably not that far off him having a proper verbal understanding about not getting up.

Well, what i did when mine was like this at the same age was fork out for a sleep consultant! They advised some tweaks to the day schedule and controlled crying. However we didn't end up with any crying as I found that if I didn't really engage and left the room, DS stayed in bed happily enough on his own and eventually went back to sleep! So my question to op is, is your ds actually crying? It's not your job to 'get' him to go back to sleep. He needs to do that himself. If he's awake but not massively crying, leave him to it.

We got a gro clock for our DC around a similar age. We read the book religiously every night, I can still recite the bloody thing!! It was a brilliant visual, they'd wake up and we hear them say 'no sun' and go back to sleep.

We started off with setting it around 5.30-6am and gradually moved it to 7am.

It worked wonders for years, I think because they could just look at it quickly from bed they didn't get up and wake themselves up fully so tended to just go back to sleep.

My brother had this problem with his first child. Tried absolutely everything for a month's and months, and eventually just accepted it. They bought some good blackout curtains for their own room and started going to bed themselves at 8pm.

They learnt to love 4am, and just lived like that for the next 18 months. Eventually they all went on holiday involving a timezone change and that reset their son's body clock, and suddenly he started sleeping civilised hours.

Blackout blinds, a later bedtime, and making any engagement boring to send the message that nothing’s happening so he should go back to sleep.

I wonder if he needs the nap? He might need to now because he’s waking so early, of course, but does he actually need itif he was sleeping properly? It can become a bit of a vicious circle. My first dropped all naps at 18 months.

I found what helps is to imagine if you all emigrated (stay with me here 😀) If you went to live somewhere that was 6 hours behind the U.K., would your child be getting up at 9.45pm local time? No, because his body would retrain to the new time by following the new time zone’s bed and wake times. You’re going to have to try to replicate that rather than reinforce the old waking too early schedule. It will take time but hopefully you’ll see some improvement.

I just fed back to sleep until at least 7 when tiny - I am a v much path of least resistance parent which made life happy and cosy for us all with no ill effects for DC that I can perceive now they are older.

Mine were still early risers now older - around 6am. However they now get their own breakfasts and I don’t have to watch CBeebies!

This is excellent advice. I’d couple it with making sure you are very calm and boring in your actions too. Eg no eye contact, no smiling mummy face just lots of soothing noises and reaffirming it’s still sleepy time.

@SatoshiNakamoto I disagree that it is good advice. It's just adding another bad habit to the night. Rocking him to sleep and op will be sitting there constantly doing that and baby will learn that.
Op the only way to deal with this is sleep training. A friend visited the other day and my dd needed a nap. She started getting ready to leave and I told her not to as I will only be 5 minutes. I put my baby in her sleeping bag, sound machine on and left her in her cot and closed the door. We watched her on the video monitor and she put herself off to sleep after a few minutes of chatting. She was blown away, as she is rocking faffing and dancing around through the night. She went back and sleep trained her son.

Well, I know what I did was try to resettle, inevitably fail, take them downstairs for early breakfast and to play quietly while I doze on the sofa.

There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that got my dc to sleep more. I tried everything except leaving them to cry, which I wasn't willing to do.

One of the hardest things when I was living through what we now term as the "not sleeping years" was that other parents with dc who were different would be absolutely determined that "if you just do X they will sleep" (they didn't) and also that people make out like having dc that don't sleep is some sort of moral parenting failure. The pp who said they "would never have a dc who woke before 7" is an example. Ridiculous, you don't get to choose.

My advice is to survive however you can. Be ruthlessly fair with the other parent about sleep. Remember it won't last forever.

I have a teen and a preteen now who are so easy going. I'm really proud of not having resorted to parenting that's against my values, like leaving them to cry, even when life was really hard.

They slept eventually!

I know this sounds hideous but if they regularly wake at the same time, go in an hour or so earlier when they are sleeping heavily and disturb or even wake them up briefly and they’ll go back to sleep. This then resets their sleep cycle and they’ll go through longer. It did work for me. Worth a try!

Put him back in bed and go back at intervals if he’s being fussy. Do not give in to getting up. I think a parent’s presence in the room at all times is too stimulating for them.

Mine was like this. I do have to laugh at the suggestions of rocking back to sleep. It really doesn't work when they're fully awake and raring to go!

Tbh I can't really remember what I did now OP as it was 9 years ago but I guess I just got through it, got up with him and then went back to bed again at about 5/6 when he was tired and just rode it out. Mercifully I wasn't working at that time though so I could just sleep whenever (the reality is that I probably didn't though)

It does pass I promise.

I would say it's most likely a phase (might be a long one) dont worry about it, ride it out and do what you can to get through it e.g. sleep at other times to catch up if you can. My DD now aged 3 has had various disrupted sleep phases and what we mainly do is just wait for it to pass! I used to get up with her in the night, go downstairs and play for 2 hours to tire her out again, then she would often go back to sleep for a couple of hours.

I’m not at all an advocate of CIO or controlled crying but what @AperolWhore is suggesting is not either of those.

Crying whilst with a parent /carer is different from crying alone - the same stress response isn’t seen in this instance.

I would start with moving away from night feeds - that made a big difference for me with my sleep refuser.

The “shh it’s nighttime” worked for my third and fourth children (not always without a struggle) but my second child just WOULD NOT SLEEP and I think unless you’ve had one of those it’s very hard to understand that nothing works! 4am was morning for me for many many years. I kept it dark, no tv, no talking, no playing, only water before 6am… but he was still over 8 before he slept until 5 and at secondary school before he slept until 6.

Does he def still need the nap in the day? My first was an awful sleeper and we cut the nap around this age as a) It was a struggle to get her to nap anyway and b) It was a struggle to get her to sleep at night.

First was terrible sleeper from birth, hardly napped either. Ended up letting him stay up till I wanted to go to bed (about midnight) and he would sleep for 4 hrs then he usually woke and came in my bed where, if I was lucky, he would go back to sleep for another 3 hrs which at least got it near a sensible getting up time🥴 went on like that until he could read, then he would happily go to bed with books and comics until he fell asleep but was always late.........fortunately he was a very early reader😉 he's 40 now and i still wake up after 4 hours every night🤣

I'm probably a terrible parent ( and have not RTFT). But when mine started this ( and this was back when you boiled the bottle and the water). I'd make one before I went to bed. When he woke ( between 3 and 5 am) I'd get up give it to him and go back to bed ( he was about 18 months) and then hear him throw it away. We'd both go back to sleep for hours. Just a thought but probably not approved of now. He's 30 and an economic advisor to the govt so don't think it did him any harm. But everyone makes their own decisions.
Also I never heated his bottles except this one just to take the chill off. . The rest he had at room temp with the formula added in when we were out and he got hungry.

Disagree with the advice to drop the night feed. He’s probably not far off dropping it for himself and in the meantime it’s a tool for you to get him settled quickly and easily.

I have a similar aged DD. She’s recently started sleeping through the night but I’ve always fed her to sleep including night wakings. We co-sleep. I don’t want to sound like a smug twat but I only felt sleep deprived in the newborn days. We all sleep well and can have a lie in any day.

This was my experience too.

agree with others about being as boring as you can when you in to him.

Your child is sleeping for over 8 hours. Maybe he doesn’t need more sleep than that. Some kids don’t. Thats enough time for you to have a full 8 hours sleep yourself.

If you go to bed at the same time as him you’ll get a full sleep. If it’s easier for you, adjust his sleeping hours to be 10pm-6am.

If you’re asking how to make a child sleep 12 hours a night, it’s impossible to force them. Some kids do - yours doesn’t. You just have to accept that you’re not lucky enough to have one of those kids who sleeps and gives you evenings to yourself. Lots of parents don’t get free evenings, you just have to suck it up.

I did exactly what @AperolWhore has written.

We never removed her from the bedroom.
Were boring AF, the only chat was "shhhh" "its night time." "Go to sleep"

Our dd didnt scream her.head off 3-7. She was often calm or just jamming her hand in our mouths or making calm noises.

When she got calm we would leave the room. If she cried we'd go back in.