19 month old and sleep is getting worse- moving her to her own room, any tips? xx

[rosierosa]

hi there.

my 19 month old has always been a rascal when it comes to sleeping, she went through a period of sleeping through about 50 per cent of the time, which was great, but now she seems to wake me up between 4 and six times!!

She settles herself with a bottle, which is good at night, but not in the middle of the night when she can't find it. She's still in my room and i need to move her - any tips on that? I don't know if i can face a lack of more sleep... argh...

Any tips would be great xx

When my DS was very little we had him in a bedside cot and he always fell asleep next to me, and he was in our room until we managed to move house to somewhere with an extra bedroom when he was just over two. We had absolute nightmares for several months at the toddler stage too - we figured out with hindsight that it was because the methods we'd used for getting him to sleep as a baby just weren't suitable for a toddler, and much of what we thought we were doing to help sooth him were actually keeping him awake till he got too overtired to be able to calm to sleep.

You need to think through what you would like the going-to-bed-routine to be when she's 4yo or so, and then think what little-step transitions you can make towards that between now and then. There is always fuss and tears when a routine changes because what young children like most of all is predictability and they hate it when things change, but clearly things do have change - and after a few days she'll realise that there is a new predictable and reliable routine that she can understand, and there won't be fuss any more.

Personally I would lose the settling herself with a bottle, she won't need this nutritionally any more and this is a key reason why she's not re-settling herself on her own so easily. It's completely normal to wake a few times in the night - even adults do so but we have got used to resettling ourselves without external props - we just look at the time, roll over and go back to sleep. We do this, subconsciously, by going through our normal settling process over the space of a couple of minutes. If your DD is used to the prop of a milk bottle, she can't do this. She won't be able to learn this all in one go, but the first step is enabling her to learn to get herself to sleep at the beginning of the night with only props that she doesn't need you for (e.g. cuddling teddy) and without you needing to go back into the room.

You may find that getting her into her own room is much less of a problem by comparisson. DS settled into having his own room very quickly when we moved house, we had so few troubles that I don't even have any special advice to offer!

Thank you very much for your advice, it's really helpful. I know that i need to break the bottle routine, it's just she's been such a bad sleeper that when it started to work, i was so pleased that i'm worried about what it might be like if she does n't have it, but i think i'm going to have to bite the bullet and try her own room too.

Thanks again. x