2yo sleep. What are we doing wrong?

[Washimal]

Posting in desperation as I'm at the end of my rope. DS has just turned 2. For the past 3-4 months he's been waking up for the day at around 4am and nothing will get him back to sleep. He also wakes up 1-2 times a night more nights than not. He often wakes 6yo DD up which I feel bad about as she really likes her sleep and is already tired now she's back at school after such a long break.
DS is very active and full on from the moment he wakes up so it's not like we can even stick cbeebies on and doze on the sofa...he's ready to play and into everything as soon as he wakes up!
DH and I both work FT in very demanding jobs and the daily 4am starts are really starting to get to us. Although I've always loved my job I'm feeling very overwhelmed by it all at the moment, which I'm sure is due to sleep deprivation. Tiredness is impacting on our relationship too as we're both snappy and irritable.

DS goes to bed at 7pm and is usually asleep by 7.30pm. We have tried putting him down later, it made no difference to his wake up time. He has a solid bedtime routine and always has from a tiny baby. He naps for 1.30-2 hours in the day. He really likes his nap and will often start asking to go to bed as soon as he's had lunch. We have tried shortening the nap and even skipping it altogether. Again, this made no difference to his wake up time. We have tried giving him a substantial snack before bed in case he was waking due to hunger. He enjoyed it, but it made no difference to his wake up time.

What are we doing wrong?? Has anyone had a child who went through a phase of waking this early and if so when did it stop?

Any advice on how to address the early waking or even just how to cope with the tiredness would be gratefully received.

He currently naps 12.30 until 2ish. Sometimes he sleeps until 2.30 but I don't let him go any longer than that.

Sorry, no real advice as we are still struggling with similar wakes with DS who is 3.5!

We have a sleep consultant on board now and things are getting better, though quite slowly! Is this an option for you?

We started using audible audio books - Julia Donaldson books we do one when he goes to bed (after we have read him 3 stories) and if he wakes during the night we put one back on and go out again. He doesn't cry at all going down to bed now but might if we leave after putting the audio book on during the night but only for a few mins because he actually likes listening to the story. We have finally got him to mostly go without waking during the night. Past 2 days he's woken at 5 - he won't go back to sleep but at least he listens to the book in his bed

AshGirl I suppose a sleep consultant would be an option but what do they actually do? If we were going to fork out for one I'd want to know that we weren't just going to get the same advice I've gotten here or things we've already tried.

A sleep consultant will check the following:
Diet - is he eating enough, is he waking hungry or thirsty?
Nappy situation
Nursery environment - warm enough, dark enough, no central heating or airplane sounds waking him up
Routine - a nap of 40-45 mins is what they would go to first, in the car or on the move is fine
Early bedtime as anything after 7pm can result in early morning waking.

And then yes, as other posters have said, it is being absolutely rigid that there is no getting up before a certain time. At all, for anything. You might have to make that time 6am for a while and then slowly work towards 7.

This was my DS. He is now almost 3. He will now sleep til 6 but it has been a long road.

We dropped the nap around the age of your DS. We did cut it intentionally, he didn't really drop it naturally. For about a month he struggled in the afternoon but it did "collect" all the sleep up if you see what I mean and the nap time was added to the night sleep.

There is a good FB group called ', desperately seeking sleep' I can recommend. The lady running it has done lots of research into sleep and her video is really good. It isn't sleep training, it's about adjusting routines to manage sleep hours really.

Good luck. I've been there and it's so hard!

That's quite a late nap, OP. Mine goes down at 11 and wakes from 11:30 - 12:30, generally speaking, for an 8 p.m. bedtime. I'll also point out that actually, for the best sleep bedrooms shouldn't be warmer than 18 degrees. I also would not bother with a sleep consultant. They're expensive and will generally just dress up and exaggerate the benefits of sleep training until you end up doing it. And it can take two weeks to build up enough sleep pressure from a later bedtime to make an impact on wake time.

I wouldn't bother with

My two year old (25 months) dropped her nap on her own about 3 months ago, but a good friend who has a daughter exactly the same age is still getting 2 hour naps so it’s definitely different for each child! Has this been the case forever? Or has the 4am wake up just started happening? If so it might be a sleep regression? When my girls are going through regressions I just roll with it, follow the exact same routine but if they wake up then I just get up with them and we go downstairs, I don’t turn the lights in and play nighttime baby sensory in the background so it’s not a really bright and loud atmosphere, and I let them play, they’re usually asleep again in half an hour! And then I put them back to bed and follow our normal day routine! If this is a constant thing, what’s his bedtime routine? Before our 2yo started sleeping through I realised she was always being rocked to sleep so didn’t actually know how to get to sleep with it and then she would wake in the night during a period of light sleep and not be able to settle back down, and then would just wake up instead! It took a good month or two to break the habit as I don’t do CIO so I very very slowly changed the pattern until she was going straight into her own bed to sleep, I honestly didn’t think it was working at first but she’s slept through ever since unless she’s actually ill or something! J really hope you find what works for you, no sleep is honestly a killer!

It's been happening for about 4 months. He's never been rocked or held to sleep, he goes straight into his cot and has always been happy with that.

And then yes, as other posters have said, it is being absolutely rigid that there is no getting up before a certain time. At all, for anything. You might have to make that time 6am for a while and then slowly work towards 7.

My alarm goes off at 6am anyway as I have to get up for work so for him to stay in his cot until 6am would be bliss! I am concerned that refusing to let him get up before 6 will just result in two hours of screaming though which I could handle, but doesn't feel fair on our other child.

Is he in a bed he can climb out of, OP? Our two year old is in a bad and we've childproofed her room so if she gets up and quietly plays it isn't an issue. Of she were stuck in a cot we'd get lots of screaming.

Update: we skipped his nap yesterday and I was quite surprised that DS was in a lovely mood all day. I thought he would be an overtired mess but he was perfectly happy which does make me think maybe he doesn't really need the nap? He was asleep by 7.20pm and woke up this morning at 4.45am which, while obviously still very early is a full hour later than the previous morning so it's a step in the right direction!

Oh, excellent OP! Progress.

Great news! I read somewhere once (I've read a lot about sleep as my DS was such a terrible sleeper!) that you have to try a change in routine for 2 weeks before saying whether it works or not. This makes sense to me as we have done a lot of flying internationally and I used to find it would take 2 weeks for the kids to adjust after changing time zone.

What time does he have breakfast? When ours start doing early waking it means that he's hungry/growth spurt etc, so he ends up with a plate of porridge or Weetabix last thing.

He usually has breakfast about 6/6.30. We did wonder if he was waking due to hunger so started giving him something to eat in the evening to see if it would make him sleep longer but it didn't seem to make any difference.