Baby having split night

[Debz2503]

Hi,

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I have a 12 month old who goes to bed at 8pm. She sleeps well until abound 02:30 and then wakes for around three hours.

This has been going on for about two weeks and she is just absolutely wide awake.

She has two naps a day adding up to about 2.5/3 hours a day.

Does anyone have any idea why she wakes for such long periods at night?

We had months of split nights and have managed to reduce them down significantly with the help of a sleep consultant. In short they are mostly down to undertiredness/developmental leaps (these are short lived) and occasionally overtiredness. You need to think about the average number of hours your baby sleeps in 24 hours (naps and night). From there you can work out how many hours you can use for naps that will still leave enough for a decent night.
In this case 2.5-3 hours of naps seems quite a lot. My 11 month old needs to be capped at 2 hours or we get a split night. I think the average sleep need for this age is somewhere between 11 and 13 hours in total. So if your baby needs 12.5 hours of sleep in total giving 3 hours to naps only leaves you with 9 hours overnight.
I would play around with capping naps and later bedtime to condense the night sleep. Or a longer wake window before bed to increase sleep pressure so they can go the whole night without a long wake.

@Starsandstripes24 has answered perfectly. Both my DC will do a split night sometimes for fun but always if they’ve had too much day sleep/not long enough awake before bed. Both dropped to one nap very young. There’s so much online about overtiredness but I think undertiredness can be just as disruptive (more so, sometimes).

I do the ‘total sleep’ maths as well and only allow 2h for nap in the day. I also aim for 11 hours’ total awake time if possible so that leaves 11h overnight for sleep. Usually my baby will do 10.5h at a maximum.

I would also wake her in the morning if she’s sleeping in to make up for the bad night. Wake her at her normal time, go for one middle of the day nap, and then put her to bed when she’s been awake long enough.