One year old suddenly not settling at night

[newmummytonoah2016]

Hi

I wondered if anyone's got any advice for why my 1 year old has suddenly decided she doesn't like to settle at night. The last few nights she has screamed blue murder at bedtime when having her bottle/settle time before she gets laid in her cot. To the point we can't do much with her but bring downstairs as we've got a 2 year old and it's really not worth waking him too. She's really inconsolable. Last night it took until half past 9 and then she woke up at 2 and was the same until half 5! I don't know what it is.

She's suffered from a bad nappy rash at the start of this week but that is looking so much better, but it's since then her sleeping has gone a bit to pot. I'm not sure if she's teething or not, she's definitely cutting some if not already cut them, they are still to fully poke through the gum I think. Just feels total guess work at the moment and we have no idea how to settle her back down again, she's fine in a daytime it's just nighttime and once she gets in her room and knows it's bedtime it seems.

Are you giving calpol at bedtime/when she wakes up to rule out if it is pain (whether teething or something else) that is causing your DD to be upset and hard to settle? I think her being fine in herself during the day could be a bit of a red herring because she will be distracted from the pain during the day whereas when lying in her cot in the dark at night she will be much more focused on it.

I think I’ve made the mistake in the past of thinking that it can’t be teething bothering my DS because he wouldn’t settle even after calpol when he woke up. But what I think has happened in the past is that I’ve given him calpol but because it takes a while for the pain relief to kick in, he gets worked up and upset so even when the calpol does kick in he’s too agitated to go back to sleep for a long time. So for night time wake ups that I’m pretty confident are due to teething I now give a dose of calpol and also some teething gel to provide some immediate relief.

Just a thought that might be worth trying tonight to see if it makes a difference. Hope things improve for you soon, it’s really tough

Thank you for your response. We're thinking it's got to be teeth! But she's having calpol most nights along with abesol and it doesn't seem to be helping with the initial settling 🙈. She's having it about half an hour before she's attempted to be taken and it doesn't seem to be having much affect she seems to get herself worked up once she's meant to be settling down.

She goes down for her morning nap an absolute breeze and still awake and she's asleep within a few minutes. So it baffles me a bit this bedtime fight at the moment.

We had a couple of wake ups from her last night once we had finally got her off but the settling her off was a lot better than it had been. I'm hoping it's just a phase, I seem to remember my little boy doing something similar and he came out of it before we knew it. Was just so very frustrating at the time!