Completed messed up toddler’s sleep. Help.

[Donethistomyself]

I’m writing this in desperation and in tears, please be gentle.

My DS2 who is 2 in September has always been what we’d call a ‘good’ sleeper eg didn’t feed to sleep, self settles, has a comforter and we could put him in his cot and walk out, most of the time.

About a month or so ago he started getting really distressed being put into

Ffs pressed send too soon.

Distressed being put into his cot so I decided to change to his toddler bed.

At first it seemed to help although I did start sitting with him to fall asleep which was probably my first mistake.

I forgot to mention that apart from being a good sleeper he does go through phases of night waking where he just wakes for a few hours in the early hours then goes back off.

So he’s started doing the early waking again. And now his routine is all over the place and I keep messing it up more and more to try and help and I’m making it worse.

I thought he’d dropped his day time nap (my eldest did at 18mo) so he wasn’t napping apart from at nursery.

On days he doesn’t nap (if he misses the ‘window’ and it becomes too late to sleep in the day) he drops off straight away but wake around 2am. For hours and hours.

On days he does nap I limit it to 1-1.5 hours and don’t let him nap past 2.30 but he will not go to bed. He just seems wide awake.

I’ve stupidly fallen into the habit of taking him down when he won’t sleep because it’s just soul destroying being sat in the room with him whilst he messes around, and even tries to bite me and stuff and just wants to escape the room. If I take him down overnight I stick the tv on for him and then try and doze. He eventually drops back off around 5/6am.

I know I’ve got it all wrong. I’d prefer to use broadly ‘gentle methods’ to help get him back on track although I have left him to moan to sleep before. Please help, it’s starting to affect my diet, my marriage and I think my sanity a bit.

This sounds so tough, OP

It sounds a bit similar to DS1 who has always had a tendency to sleep badly when overtired (but be a good sleeper at other times). When he started to drop his nap, he was overtired if he didn't nap and then either woke up very early and/or woke up in the night (and would either doze and wake for hours or just be very awake for a couple of hours at a time) - or he'd nap and be a nightmare to get to bed.

Obviously your DS may be completely different, but what helped us was a) taking him out in the car after an early lunch so he'd fall asleep, then making him wake up after 20-25 mins or so - it was enough to stop him being quite so overtired but not enough to affect bedtime b) provoking a crisis in the night - it sounds awful but he got back to sleep fastest if I let things escalate so he ended up in tears and then had cuddles, rather than keeping things calm so he messed around for hours c) being firm about the tv at night - I did the same as you for the same reasons, and it quickly became a habit d) just muddling through till the phase passed.

Good luck OP, sleep deprivation is a killer and you have my sympathy.

Thank you so much.

Loads of really helpful advice there, your situation sounds really similar. I will nip the TV in the bud as of now. Today was a nap day so it’s just been an epic battle into bed.

I agree about the escalation thing, I do worry about him waking DS1 who’s just down the hall but he’s a pretty deep sleeper.

I think I need to speak to nursery about limiting his naps some more. At the moment they’re instructed to wake him by 2 but that can still be a 90 min nap at least. Trouble is they already say it’s so difficult to wake him. I swear he’d be nocturnal if I let him!!

Ah it's tricky when they're napping at nursery. DS1 was also out for the count once asleep for a nap and waking him was really tricky!

We were lucky that we only had one child when this happened. Though at the moment DS2 is going through a phase of having nightmares and running round the house howling, so I turn DS1's fan on to maximum when I go to bed to mask the noise - is something like that an option?

Good luck!

Operation ‘no bloody way are we going down to watch Peppa’ begins today 🤞🏻