One year of baby sleep issues - struggling

[Hilda23]

Hi everyone,
im looking for some advice / to hear other people’s experiences.
i have a daughter who is just over a year old. She has slept poorly since day 1 ( during her 3 rd day on this planet she and we stayed awake for 22 hours). Unfortunately, I had a difficult birth and had quite a long recovery but was not able to get much rest as my daughter wouldn’t sleep unless pushed in pram in the day or contact napping/ close to me at night. She was combination fed due to fussiness with breast feeding but largely breastfed. My partner and I tried ( what we feel) was pretty much everything to help her sleep ( with the exception of sleep training).
I was off on maternity leave for a whole year.
we developed a good routine over the months and I stuck to this where possible. She finally was able to sleep for short periods in her cot in her own room at around 6.5 months but would wake every 1.5-2 hours still throughout the night.
I switched to bottle feeding at 8 months as my daughter was refusing breastfeeding but this made little difference to her sleep.
At about 9 monrhs she slept for some good chunks in the night which was amazing ! This seemed to have coincided with her starting nursery part - time.

She is now one. I returned to work three days a week a few weeks ago and she goes to nursery 3 days a week. Her sleep improved for a while with some longer chunks of sleep at night but over the last month it has become really bad again and she’s awake 3-4 times in the night, or refusing to sleep, or awake at 4am good to start the day. Nothing has changed in our routine/ lives.

I know this is not uncommon but from talking to colleagues and friends, most people with little ones seem to have relatively good sleepers ( put little one down at 7 and they sleep until 7!) with the exception of phases of night waking.

My partner and I are both so so exhausted and really struggling with this. We have no family or friends nearby to help or give us a few hours of respite. We both work ( I have a tough job in mental health nursing) but the sleep deprivation is really affecting us. I’ve had back to back viruses over the last two months as LO has picked these up from nursery. It feels so relentless for us all.

just a few things to mention:
With the exception of viruses picked up from nursery, My daughter is fit and healthy.
She started weaning at 6 months and has a really good appetite ( no concerns here)
she is very very active / curious/ bright and reached milestones on the earlier side.
She has lots of stimulation in the day with us and at nursery
she will sleep for short bursts in the day at nursery but still won’t sleep at home in the day when not there.
i encourage her naps at the same times every day and these are generally short as she wakes up.
She is currently going through a phase of having biiiiig tantrums and whinging no stop all day and all night. She has recently had her one year vaccinations but doesn’t seem unwell. We take her to the GP whenever she seems unwell.

sorry for the long post. Has anyone had a similar experience ? Do I just have a baby that dislikes sleep ? I know there are phases / sleep regressions and the like/ all babies are different but ……. :(

thank you

Sorry you've gone through that. My little one didn't do sleep for the first 15 months. Fought every nap and bedtime and woke a few times a night. He also only took 30 minute naps too😭 I can't even give you advice on what to do because nothing I actually did made him sleep. At 15 months he just all of a sudden started sleeping through for 11 hours on his own. I hope your little one does the same or hopefully someone comes along with some advice on how they did it. 🤞

Could be a few things. There's usually a sleep regression around their 1st birthday, which is usually the main culprit. It will pass in time. Another reason could be teething. Both of mine were fine during the day while teething, but night time was shouty time until I realised what was going on and administered gum gel and some pain killers. Finally, is she walking yet? My first treated me to multiple wake ups at night until she could walk at 16 months old. My second also slept better once he could walk.

@Dyra thanks for your post and your reassurance. She started walking at 10 months. I thought the same as you with the teething- we gave her some ibuprofen last night and she was as bouncing off the walls until 4am.

Oh another thing! How many naps in the day is she having/attempting to have? Both mine had dropped to 1 nap by 9-10 months. Maybe try 1 nap time only during the day, and see if that affects her night sleep. If she's got a sleep need on the lower side of normal, 2 naps might be too much.

ETA: Hopefully it will happen for you soon. My DD was like yours, but once she cracked it, she became an amazing sleeper.

@Dyra she naps twice a day for about an hour. She is awake by 6am without fail so will nap at 9:30am and then again around 1:30pm. She’s a bit hit and miss with the afternoon nap but if she doesn’t have it, she struggles to stay awake in the evening and then has an earlier bedtime/ then wakes earlier in the night. Oh it’s so tricky !

There are some very gentle ways of sleep training. You don't have to let them cry it out but I do think it's important to teach them to self soothe.
https://www.babycenter.com/baby/sleep/baby-sleep-training-no-tears-methods_1497581

You can’t teach self soothing. You just teach them not to cry out for you.

people with little ones seem to have relatively good sleepers

Thats amazing sleep; to be fair, not pretty good!

We’ve also got no family support or respite. My son woke two hourly until 18 months, and is now 2.7 and wakes once a night, although he tends to settle back to sleep within a few minutes now. We tried EVERYTHING to get him to sleep more.

I investigated sleep training a lot, although I don’t believe there’s any gentle way of teaching your child that you won’t respond to them. Two close friends did it, one gave up after the fourth time of having to “reteach” it due to illnesses etc, and one has spent £6k on it for a son who sleeps worse than mine and she now feels is more clingy and shy as a result. It does seem like a much more popular thing on Mumsnet than anywhere else, which I presume is a generational thing?

If you take that path - which is absolutely your choice - you need to be prepared to redo it often and stick to the boundaries you chose.

if you don’t, it is a rough ride. I could never nap and he’s never been away from me for anything except nursery, no one has ever had him overnight. There’s no one I could ask to come watch him so I could sleep and at around a year old, he stopped letting his Dad settle him so I’ve done them all since then. It’s fucking hard work but you do get through and it does get better.

Not what you want to hear but DD was like that until we sleep trained. We did gradual retreat where we sat by the cot giving verbal reassurance then over the course of the week, moved further away.

In less than a week, she'd go straight off to sleep and stay asleep all night. She was happy to go in her cot and would ask for it, so I don't believe she was awake in the night feeling sad.

We had to gently refresh training maybe once. Didn't cost anything.

It wasn't enjoyable but it was less than a week, if you add up the crying and distress of a baby who wakes 3-4 times a night compared to that week, I know what I think is kinder. You're just teaching them that it's ok if they wake without a parent right next to them.

I know quite a few friends who stuck it out and the kids were still co-sleeping and waking several times a night at 2 or 3.

You get vehement anti sleep training views because people who go through all the stress and sleep deprivation refuse to believe it wasn't absolutely necessary, there must be something terrible about the plan b. Doesn't work for everyone but it's much better than being exhausted and resentful.

I'm not much help OP but I'm reading the C.A.L.M approach but Hannah love basically sleep training without crying it out I'm going to give it a go in the coming weeks, might be worth a read ?