18 month sleep regression - reassurance please!

[rottiemum88]

DS is almost 18 months and for the past 3 weeks his sleep has been HORRENDOUS. He's never exactly been a brilliant sleeper, but from around 13-14 months we seemed to turn a corner and he went from waking hourly through the night to waking only 2-3 times, dummy straight back in and back off to sleep. Getting him to sleep at the start of the night was never an issue... until now 😩

The last few weeks he's started to take between 2-3 hours to fall asleep. Nothing about his routine has changed. We still do bath, story and then lie down to sleep (we co-sleep), but despite seeming tired as normal, he refuses to sleep and is generally an absolute pain, crawling all over me, standing up and jumping on the bed, asking for water, kicking me. He's perfectly happy until he eventually succumbs to sleep through sheer exhaustion, by which point it's at least 9-10pm, I'm beyond frustrated, shattered and starving if I've not managed to do dinner pre-bedtime routine. Every few nights he'll also wake again in the middle of the night for 2-3 hours and we go through the exact same again, which is even more soul destroying.

I've read about the 18 month sleep regression and I suppose I'm clinging on to the hope that this is it and there's some prospect of it improving in the near future. I work full time as does DH, so after dealing with his horrible sleep for the first year and a bit we finally seemed to catch a break and were somewhat getting back to our pre-sleep-deprived selves... and now this. Please someone tell me it gets better?? Or do I just have a terrible sleeper that I'm destined to struggle with forever?

My DS never came back from the 18 month regression and we lost good sleep for a ridiculous amount of time.
We didn’t help it though as I was shift working and so sleep deprived that we moved him into a travel cot in our room, he slept better then.
This was for a few months, once back in his own room he was 2+ and could get out of bed and run through into ours. We let him get into our bed.... we bribed him with some new toys at about 3.5 and that worked for a bit. He stil; favours our bed, we deal with this by letting him have a sleepover each week in it.

Realistically you just have to do what works for you at the time.

We’ve now got DD, she’s under 1 and we are both working full time. She’s also a rubbish sleeper. I’ve come to terms with being destined to always be tired 🤣

Hopefully the next poster will be more positive..!

We had the exact same experience, DS turned a corner at 13 months and just needed resettling. Then went through hell with the 18 month sleep regression too. The good news is it lasted for roughly 4-6 weeks (foggy memory) and then he started sleeping through completely and properly forever! Or at least so far, he's 28 months now.

So there is hope OP. I think the regression was horrendous for about a month then started to taper off.

Thank you both for your replies.

We plan on trying (again) with moving him to his own room soon, but wanted to wait until this phase was over... if it ever is! If we only have a few more weeks of it until things improve then I'm sure we'll find a way to get from one day to the next in the interim. Don't really want to think about the prospect of it staying like this forever! DH is also a bad sleeper who suffers from diagnosed insomnia and I've always had a fear deep down that DS will take after him and never have 'normal' sleeping habits.

Either way, we're not brave enough to try our luck with another, so he'll definitely be growing up an only