4 year old doesn’t sleep HELP!

[Mamawingingit1234]

Hi all,

My husband and I are so sleep deprived! Our almost 4-year-old doesn’t sleep through the night, he goes down really well but will wake between 11 and 1 then will just refuse to go back down in his bed. He’ll sleep happily in our bed but we don’t. Husband took to sleeping on the sofa and I’d have a terrible sleep with him wriggling, snoring and pawing my arm. We’ve tried putting him back time after time and he gets hysterical, cannot calm himself down. Husband started sleeping in the floor next to his bed, I struggle going through as I’m still breastfeeding our baby who wakes every few hours. However last night he wasn’t having it just screamed for me for about an hour until my husband hit his limit and I ended up going through with the baby and sat on his floor for 90mins until he feel asleep but by that time the baby was wide awake.

I’m so hesitant to do the cry out method as it breaks my heart hearing him cry while we ignore him but also he can’t settle himself he just gets more and more worked up.

It’s not sustainable to continue to sleep on his floor. We can’t keep having him in our bed. But I don’t know what to do.

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.

Has his sleep always been bad or is this a new thing?
Is he waking for the toilet/nightmare/because the baby is crying do you think?

You have my sympathies, my youngest (3) is a horrendous sleeper and always has been. We currently use a white noise machine which seems to help a bit.

Have you been able to identify an obvious cause for the waking? If there’s a new sibling, could it be related? Have you tried some good old fashioned bribery like a sticker chart for staying in bed, 5 stickers and he gets a small treat? I’d also get him a clock. It doesn’t need to be a gro clock, a cheap digital alarm clock should be fine at 4 presuming he knows his numbers and give him an acceptable get out of bed time as these dark mornings can be quite confusing to little ones!