15 Mth Son will not sleep through

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My wife and I have a 15mth boy who refuses to sleep through the night and wakes at about 11pm, 3am and is then up at 5:30am. He goes to bed at 5pm with a bottle at will only go back to sleep at the above times if he has a bottle of milk, if we give him water or dilute the milk he just screams the house down, which wakes his sisters up.

We have tried the cry it out method and he will just cry and cry the one night we gave up after 2 hours and gave him his milk just so we could get some sleep. We have tried watering down his milk in a hope we could ween him off his night time drinks all to no avail.

Because of his sleep patterns and also having a 3 year old and a 6 year old (who gets up at 6am without fail) we get little or no sleep, we keep getting told he will grow out of it but my wife is so tired she is becoming more and more ill.

Has anyone got any ideas on how we can get our little boy to sleep through the night.

have you tried any sort of white noise cd to calm him down ?? its works a treat with my baby..would be worht a try a cd called SLeepy head

I feel for you. My 2nd child didnt sleep through til she was 3 years old (used to wake 6-10 times a night), we didn't used to give her milk and we tried everything. I got very very ill. Eventually she just did it on her own but by which time my health was so bad

How much does he sleep during the day?

5 pm is a little early to be going to bed. Can you try putting him down a little later each evening?

Crying it out can work (did with my 1st and 3rd) and/or controlled crying but it can mean nights of hardly any sleep. IIRC my 1st cried for 4 hours the first night we did CC.

Hi - you poor things - it's horrid! I used the controlled crying method and if you're willing to see it through it does work. I only ever used the 10 min/2 min rule as couldn't remember the 'extended time' bit. Basically put to bed after the normal bedtime routine, leave for 10 mins, visit for 2 mins MAX and go back every 10 mins to wipe eyes, wipe brow, repeat go to sleep quietly and calmly and leave again for another 10 mins for as long as they are crying. The visit should not be more than 2 mins and under no circumstances do you pick them up. You're just teaching them that it's not worth waking up/staying awake for the attention they're getting - i.e.none! They may sound seriously angry, miffed, screaming blue murder - it's working then. It may take a good few hours the first night, several the second, much less on the third and then generally improves drastically after that. You may have to keep doing this every few months too as my ds tried it again every 2 months until he was 2 yrs. Sorry if this sounds harsh but I can only speak from experience of HAVING to do this with my ds who was a complete nightmare and would only sleep again with milk/me/bf. I hadn't done him any favours by teaching to go to sleep on me and I then had to get him out of the habit. I do know that there are less 'hard' methods but I haven't used them. I'm sure another MNtter will know though. Good luck!

You poor thing!
How much does your lil boy eat in the day? Also, any chance to give him a later bedtime, 5pm seems very early. And offer , just before he goes to bed a lil supper,Toast or something carbohydrates, maybe even cereal, to fill him up a bit.

lol 3sEnough...what is it about 3. Children, eh...that they make us think that enoughs enough, lol!

Sorry - meant to say that you have to do the same during the day if he sleeps then too. I also think that 5pm is too early - mine are all 7pm which means that you have a chance of a 7am wake up! I know of friends who's kids go at 6.30pm but that is about the earliest.

my 21 month is also doing this and I'm due in 5 days with our third so I am also at a loss as to what to do
I will not do Controlled Crying so I figure I'm just going to have to deal with it for the mo

I feel for you and your wife, it is very hard
good luck with with whatever you choose to do

Yup 3andnomore - I take my hat off to people with more than 3 - couldn't do it!!x

I would also say try a slightly later bedtime, my 21 month old goes at 7pm and wakes for the morning at 7am. she is up usually 2 to 3 times a night but she doesn't think that it is morning till 7am which helps cause at least when she does settle then she doesn't try and get up for the morning till 7.

He is an extremly light sleeper so dont sleep much during the day with the three year old around making sure he stays awake with the odd prod now and again .

Thats why he goes to bed at 5pm cause he can hardly stay awake after that.

my youngest is 16m and not sleeping through either - wakes at least once for milk, but i can live with that for now as my nearly 3 year old has become a sleeping star - after years of getting up at 5 something, she now has become a 7.30am wonderful child! hurrah... (we did nothing btw, it just happened)

anyway, i would first sort out his daytime sleep as it sounds like he is overtired to me and not getting into a deep sleep at night. take him for a walk/drive whatever you need to, but get him to have at least an hour in the middle of the day.

then i would try moving his bedtime forward by 15 minutes each day. Feed him as much as possible so you know he can't be hungry. Then hopefully the night time waking will start to decrease. Once he is only waking a couple of times a night, you can try watering down milk/cc etc. but i don't think he's ready for that yet. Good luck.

is there anything else waking him up?
does he need a night light?
does he have a grobag sleeping bag?

all these things are essential to keeping my LO asleep.

My 2nd (who was the bad sleeper) didnt sleep in the day either. My mum used to say that sleep breeds sleep. ie, she was overtired and that made it so she couldnt sleep well at night

Does he sleep in his cot, alone upstairs, darkened room during the day? Could you make it that the 3 year old (I am assuming the 6 year old is at school) has some 'quiet time with mummy/daddy' during this time (TV maybe?) so that he has a chance to sleep without being disturbed?

Failing that, take him out for a drive so that he gets an hour after lunch for example. I think amidaiwish has some good tips there. Worth giving it a go.

another thought i had was that he is going to sleep with his bottle, so whenever he wakes up he needs his bottle to get back to sleep.
can you try and give him his milk in his pjs before bed, then put him to bed without it? try replacing it with a favourite teddy or a muslin for him to hold/suck or something?

when he is up at 5.30am, is there any way you can give him his milk in his cot, act like it is another middle of the night bottle? (we did this with DD2 as i couldn't face another 2 years of 5am starts, it works - she often goes back to sleep for an hour or two which makes the night wakenings more bearable.)

What you say about your DS being a light sleeper sounds v. similar to what we've gone through. Not sure at all if this is helpful, but for us, once we accepted the fact that he had a sensible reason for waking (usually he is too hot or too cold), things got easier. Mainly I think because accepting that then made us less stressed dealing with him which then meant that he was less stressed too. Now he's far calmer when he wakes, so hence goes back to sleep virtually instantly. Okay so we're still going in a couple of times a night, but we're back in my bed in less than a minute, so although it's annoying it's more than copeable with.

With us, DS I'm sure was stressed about sleeping because he could sense that we were stressed with him. So why not let him have a sip of milk if that helps him get straight back to sleep? I know that's contentious for some, but it sounds like taking him on has just made him more entrenched (that's definitely what happened with us), so why not go with it for a while 'til the pattern changes? One thing we did (and yes I know people will scream at the screen here ), but we put a camping mattress down in his room and one of us slept there - that way we were there instantly when he woke, calmed him far more quickly, (ie almost before he was awake). Given a few days he was sleeping far, far deeper. He was waking far less and wasn't so upset when he did. After that we packed up the camp bed and left him solo again. Also, once our DS was calmer at night he soon stopped needing a drink .

Hope some of the above helps. I know it's not a nice thought, but some children just aren't good sleepers and never will be. Having said that, our DS has now slept through a handful of times, so he is getting there. Am sending your wife a huge hug though. I nearly got very ill too. HOrrible..

how are you getting on?

My ds2 was also a terrible sleeper so you have my sympathy. He finally started sleeping through at about 19/20 months old, but even now, he has good times and bad times. We were desperate enought to seek the advice of a sleep clinic in London. We live nowhere near London so all correspondance was done by telephone. I was basically told that i had to choices, cry it out or gradual retreat (both of these have been demonstrated by such people as super nanny, etc). We were told to make sure that he got some sleep in the daytime as this promotes decently quality sleep at night. I thought it may be twaddle, but it really works. I tackled the daytime sleep first. At first we had to go out in the pushchair everywhere to get him to nod off and eventually we transitioned to his bedroom, darkened and quiet (as quiet as it could be with another child in the house!). The other thing we were told was to try and ditch any "sleep props", so dummies, bottles, breast if breastfed. The child is relying on these things to fall asleep so when they wake up, they need it to get back to sleep again, effectively never learning how to get to sleep on their own.

By trying these things, we went from a nap of 15 minutes maybe twice a day, to 3 naps of 1+ hours during the day and from waking 10+ times a night, to waking just 2 or 3 times a night (he had/has other health problems, so some waking was to be expected). Following this routine worked within a few weeks.

Your ds sounds like he has got into a habit and it has stuck, hence waking at the same times. It is a case that he probably need a bit of "re-training"

Wishing you lots and lots of luck. I remember how dark those days were

Hi, sorry darlings, I sympathise, lack of sleep is the worst kind of parental torture! A quick suggestion in line with others, we use 'white noise' which is a cd with the sound of the sea which we put on so he can't hear us talking or moving about. It also helps drown out the damn birds chirping at 5am. Do you think maybe he is exhausted himself because of the interrupted sleep? I would try the later sleep times, 7 or 8pm and tire him out totally before bedtime, play catch/hide and seek or chase him around so he is really tired. I also agree you need to feed him up well at dinnertime to make sure he isn't waking up because he is hungry, have you tried going without food for 12+ hours? Maybe thats why he wants milk.

We had real problems when my ds wouldn't stay in bed so we were quite ruthless by returning him to bed 'a la supernanny' with a twist when it began to take hours - we told him if he got out of bed again he would get a smack, and so he did get out and got a swift firm smack on the nappy. You know what - he never got out of bed again and now if he every gets cocky and tries it on all I have to do is suggest the smack and he scuttles off to bed (don't report me to social services!)