Please please help

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Can somebody please help me with my family sleep situation - I'm at my wits end.

I have two DC: DD is 5 and DS is 3.5. Ever since birth, DS has been an awful sleeper. As a baby he woke every 40 mins or so. Ever since he has been in an actual bed, he will come into our bedroom and will scream and cry if we don't let him come into ours when we try and encourage him back into his bed.

When going to sleep, he requests one of us to sit on his bed, or actually get in his bed with him. He requests various toys in bed with him (sometimes the size of a remote control car). This whole falling asleep ritual can take around 1.5hrs every night, and then he wakes at around 11pm, 2am and 4am before being up for the day at 5.30-6am.

He's clearly overtired a lot of the time (falls asleep in the car on the way to nursery).

Things we have tried:

• gro clock (ignores it)
• leaving lights on / making it dark
• warming room / cooling room
• putting warm socks on him
• calm bedtime story before bed
• putting him back to bed every time he gets out

I'm conscious that his crying and tantruming wakes DD so as much as I'm open to taking a firm line, I don't want it to affect anyone else!

The only thing which he likes is to be in our bed all night every night. I keep reading "this too shall pass" but it's been 3.5 years and it's worse than ever.

I'm on the verge on engaging some sort of professional because I can't go on like this, we're constantly shattered and irritable!!

Thanks in advance for any wisdom 😞

Sleep training. Teach him to fall asleep on his own at bedtime with no 'crutches' (you, toys, being stroked etc.) and he will know how to resettle during the night when he wakes (we all wake, just some children don't know how to go back to sleep on their own).

Now how you do this at 3.5, I don't know. We did all of ours much younger, when they couldn't physically get out of bed.

I think it's time to read the Riot Act OP.
I had a rubbish sleeper who would wake in the night until 2.5. By that stage she could understand a firm conversation that says "in the night, you stay in your bed by yourself. Mummy is a person too and I need sleep if we are going to have a nice day tomorrow. If you wake mummy tonight I will be VERY cross". Then be very cross in the night.
Be consistently cross every night they disturb you and see how you've got on after 2 weeks.

By 'very cross' I mean raised voice, pointedly saying "no, [name] it's nighttime. Go back to bed now or no swimming/cafe/after school biscuit tomorrow"

I'd just let him sleep with you if it gets a good night's sleep, he won't be there when he's 21

I am very much in the camp of @Redlorryyellowduck. I couldn’t do what @WineIsMyCarb is suggesting with a child that young. At that age they get so upset in the night and can’t do logic therefore I think it’s quite cruel to give them the kind of riot act you suggest. Obviously this is a choice for families to make individually and there is no set right or wrong but if he is happier in your bed with you at his age now I think that’s totally natural. After all animals don’t not sleep with their young, in nature mother animals have their babies in the nest which is what having the children in bed with us has always felt like to me. And it won’t go on forever, even my now eight-year-old who was very dedicated to cosleeping gave up once she was at school and too knackered to keep doing musical beds.

My advice would be to make your sleeping space more hospitable for you your partner and your little boy if that’s where he wants to be, whether that is by extending the sleeping is based in someway (blowup bed?) Or having space elsewhere in the room that your partner or you can sleep in (take it in turns?) This way no one is being relegated to a spare room in the adult relationship, but your little boy won’t be distressed and the likelihood is getting him to sleep will be easier so you lose less of your evening.

I can understand your resistance to this especially when you’re at work and you’re busy and you’re tired and you just want your own space, but you’re on the home run now I think. My girls are now eight and six and no longer want to come and sleep in our bed routinely, they just grew out of it and that seems to have been the case for my friends children as well . But then maybe I’m just a lazy parent but it certainly won’t we had more sleep when we gave into the cosleeping rather than trying to fight it.

Thanks to all of you for responding! I have actually tried reading the riot act (which I didn't enjoy) but it didn't work a jot. Even nursery have commented that he is very difficult to reason with/bribe. He doesn't have the empathy to care whether or nit mummy sleeps and he doesn't care enough about anything (parties, swimming lessons, TV) to make a difference if we remove the privileges. This is unfamiliar territory for me as my daughter was very easy to persuade.

I don't mind him being in our bed if we slept well, but he is a very noisy sleeper (snores like a grown man and continually grinds his teeth and smacks his lips). There are also occasions when he doesn't WANT to come in our bed, he just wants me to sit with him (at 11pm, 2am and 4am) until he falls asleep, which I'm worn out from doing.

He needs to get to the point where he can self-settle because clearly when he wakes up he is unable to go back down.

There have been a couple of occasions where I've heard a noise downstairs at 2am and gone down and he's just down there happily playing with his toys, like it's the middle of the afternoon

If he snores like a grown man, he needs to see a GP. That is not normal for a toddler and is likely overly large adenoids or tonsils blocking his airway. He can get them lasered and its quick and easy. It may well be that it is the blocked airway that keeps waking him up.

Oh really? I hadn't considered that. I just thought it was because he had a cold, but then he does always snore..