Sleep! 5 year old waking up every night

[ThisBrickBiscuit]

My 5 year old son has always been an early riser he goes to bed absolutely fine every night and is asleep by 7.30pm. He wakes up almost every night at around 2am and comes into our room and into our bed and goes back to sleep until around 6am. Sometimes I don’t even hear him sneaking in.

We’ve tried different pjs , different night lights, sock on , heating on low, different blankets, special teddies etc etc

He doesn’t know what wakes him up when I ask him but we’re really struggling now as it’s affecting everyone’s sleep.

Does anyone else have any other tips we could try? We have thought about the clock that changes colour when he is allowed to get up but I don’t think he will care what colour or time it says and still come through!

a very tried Mum x

I have a 4 yo that still wakes frequently. We do now have periods where she will sleep through but also weeks where it's every night. She won't come in our bed any more so I'm stuck in a toddler bed for a few hrs a night or on the floor.

The tricky thing we find is there will be a reason she wakes for several nights but the she gets into the habit of waking and then wakes every night.

Being cold is often the reason she wakes. She refuses to stay covered especially when cold. She has a heater in her room, a heated under blanket and we put her in poppered vests under her pjs (we can still get these as she's tiny for her age).

Viral illnesses are another trigger she coughs a lot and it triggers her silent reflux. We put her humidifier on with some olbas in and make sure she's propped up on pillows when we go to bed.

She needs a lot of comfort, she has suffered a lot of pain especially when tiny due to reflux and allergies which was worse at night. This is harder she needs a cuddle but then it's a feedback loop to her needing more and more cuddles. We give her a few days and then start pulling back a bit. A cuddle to settle her and then moving further back keeping a hand on her and then taking that away then escaping back to my own bed. After a few days we start with the hand on her and try to avoid the cuddle.

Noise is a double edge sword for us. She goes through periods of needing noise to sleep so we put stuff on and she wakes if we turn it off then she will pass through the phase and the noise will then wake her but she's a creature of habit and will want it on anyway

Life was definitely easier when we let her and she was willing to sleep in our bed but since this ended we have more days where there's no wake up or just a short wake up and it's been easier to spot some patterns as it's not nightly behaviour.

For us there's no one thing that helps and there's no one cause so it's continuous problem solving!