14mo DD - waking earlier and earlier, now at 4am!!! Help!!!

[Threaders]

I'll try and keep this brief, as I have posted in here before, seems like I'm always banging on about lack of sleep on this site....

DD is 14mo. Never been a good sleeper. We have accepted that she'll never sleep past 06.30, but lately she's been waking at 05:30, then 05:15, then 05:00 etc etc.... this morning it was 4am. Just cannot take this.

Routine: She is normally tired by 6pm (has 1 x 1hr nap after lunch). We bath her, then she has a bottle and usually falls asleep straight after this, when we then put her in her cot. She then used to sleep through till 6ish. If she isn't alseep when she finishes her bottle, she needs our hand on her in her cot in order to fall asleep - if we just leave her, she screams.

I just cannot explain the early wake-ups. There's no noise waking her. I've checked temperature. I've tried with/without nightlight. I've tried shushing her but once she's awake she's awake. On desperate occasions (such as this morning), after trying to get her back off for 1.5hrs I eventually brought her into my bed where she then fell asleep for nearly 2 hours.

Is this an age where sleep can become.... well, shite? Could she be hungry? I don't think she's teething, there's no other signs. And is there a way of training her out of this need for us to settle her to sleep? She just gets herself absolutely hysterical.

Does she nap in the day? 6pm is quite early for bed some children never sleep full 12 hour at night so if she only needs 11 hours then for example 5am is as good as it will get. Early waking is the hardest thing to crack we are still fighting it with my 2 year old. Everything i have read and been advised is be persistent with message it is not time to get up and no attention or rewards eg going in your bed etc as this will encourages it. I used a helpful forum called babysleepanswers which helped with some of our issues. Good luck.

Thanks for the tip about the forum, I'll have a look at that.

Yes she naps in the day but only once and almost always just for an hour or so. When she gets home from nursery I just watch for signs of tiredness so sometimes she has her bath at 6ish and bed around 6:30, sometimes it's later than that but she's always in bed for 7:30 and regardless of what time she goes down she gets up at the same time in the morning. When it was 6, I was happy. Then it crept down to 5:30 - tolerable. Sunday morning it was 4am and this morning it was 4:30am - intolerable. I'm going to really try the CC method consistently from tonight but it worries me that her crying becomes more and more until she is sobbing and wailing hysterically.

God it's tough having kids sometimes!

The forum is good, we used it to initially improve my DD2's sleep when she was 8 months old and didn't sleep for longer than 1.5 hour stretch at night in one go.

We have since used it to try and tackle early waking but they do say it takes a long time and is the hardest thing to solve and can take up to over a month.

In some ways the clocks going back may help you as 4am becomes 3am which is the middle of the night, she has to go back to sleep...

I found CC hard but if you can't cope with leaving her to cry for 10 mins, don't, I always judged the cry for myself rather than set time limits and if she was getting v worked up I went in earlier.

I am probably the last person though who should be giving any advice as I still have a 2 year old who is a terrible sleeper...