Is it unreasonable to expect an 8 year old to sleep through the night without getting up and waking everyone else up?
For a bit of background my DP and I have a young baby who lives with us all the time, and his DC who come and stay regularly often up to 3 nights a week. The youngest is 8 years old now and has never really slept through the night without getting up. He’s been staying with us since he was 2 along with his siblings and although he has perhaps got very slightly better he still gets up frequently through the night often waking up his siblings, and everyone else in the household. Most mornings he wakes by 5am at the latest and deliberately wakes his siblings often by yelling and then bickering which normally results in the entire household being awake. The baby actually sleeps better than the 8 year old at the moment! It’s been explained to him for years that if he wakes up he should try and go back to sleep, and if he can’t he has books to read rather than waking everyone else up but he won’t, the second he’s up he makes sure someone else is up. They get up at 7 anyway for school and he goes to bed about 8-8.30 pm when he’s with us. He permanently looks tired and is often falling asleep by 5pm but despite trying a variety of bedtimes he always gets up through the night.
He does the same at home but at home he’s allowed to play with a play station when he wakes up rather than waking everyone else up. We don’t have PlayStations or TVs in bedrooms here and don’t plan to change that anytime soon.
Is it unreasonable to expect an 8 year old to have some awareness of the fact other people are asleep and to be considerate? If it was getting up for the toilet or because there was an issue I could understand, but it’s literally every night he will get up and pick a fight with one of his siblings or just start stomping around the house and slamming doors. In general his behaviour is quite challenging anyway but at the moment the sleep is having the biggest impact on everyone else. His elder brothers behaviour is also quite challenging and when he wakes him up we literally get woken by the sound of full on scrapping and punching each other in the head. Unfortunately attempts have been made to address this but because they’re allowed to do it at home it’s very difficult to prevent it when they’re with us. Whenever they are reminded that people are sleeping or that they’re going to disturb the baby they don’t appear to care at all even when this happens at 5am repeatedly. The youngest can’t even walk up and down the stairs without stomping his feet and banging on the walls as he goes, regardless of time of day, or if he’s been told the baby is sleeping the other side of the wall he’s banging on. I should also stress that he has behaved like this for years, it’s not just since there’s been a baby here.
Is this normal? I’ve noticed that step mums often get heavily criticised on here but I am genuinely interested if this is normal behaviour, I’m not a wicked stepmother who thinks they should be seen and not heard! Would also be grateful of any advice.