Is there anything I can do about split nights?

[BruinBear96]

We've been up an hour and 20mins so far tonight. This is a regular thing. My 13 month old has gone through phases of split nights his whole life and if there is anything at all I can do to help him sleep better I'm willing to try it at this point.

Your poor things. My daughter (now 23 months) carried on with split nights for the best part of six months on and off from around 11 months.

She would wake around 1am and be up for up to three hours. Nothing would get her back to sleep, it was utter hell. She is my third too so I'd been around the block on sleep issues with my other two but this was something else.

The only thing that seems to have improved it, and this seems a bit woo but I was willing to try anything, was to use magnesium spray in her before bed following a friend's recommendation. Could be coincidence but she started being sleepier at the wake ups and then they have pretty much stopped now. I think there was a developmental aspect also as things seemed to calm down a little once her language started developing more.

Honestly at that age I did sleep training with mine. I know it’s not for everyone but I’m just saying what I did. I sleep trained my 14 month old last week who was doing the whole up from 1am-5am thing. His sister has epilepsy so between them I was up all night and it was killing me. He was sleeping through the night by night 3! Do milk/cuddles/story etc and then into their sleeping bag and lie them down in their cot. Set your timer on your phone for 15 mins and then go and do something - if they are still crying after 15 mins then go in if you want to but only to calm them down then start the 15 mins again. Same thing in the night. The main thing is you mustn’t rock them to sleep, if you do then as soon as they wake in the night they will need the same thing to get back off which can take hours and honestly just wakes them up more in my experience. Like I said, it’s not for everyone but I can tell you the entire family including baby is 1000% happier now. I still put my timer on when I put him down - last night he took 3 mins to go to sleep. Hopefully he will sleep for another couple of hours and I’m up at 5 whilst the house sleeps to do my run and get on top of the day! X

We had these for many many months! Such a pain. Eventually we paid for a sleep consultants help. The key advice was they are caused by the circadian rhythm becoming out of sync with sleep pressure. This could be caused by developmental leaps (but this would be for a week or two tops and then go away), overtiredness or undertiredness. Is baby tired, grumpy, etc during the day or is baby happy? More often than not it’s undertiredness.
I would look at the total number of hours baby is actually sleeping per 24 hours excluding the split night and including naps. As long as it isn’t radically different from the average which I think is somewhere between 10-14 hours, use this as a baseline of sleep need. So if baby is currently doing 9 hours at night and 3 hours in naps then it is 12 hours total. Then you might need to make changes such as later bedtime, drop a nap, shorted nap, etc to consolidate the night sleep. Often we are simply expecting too much sleep from them e.g. 12 hours overnight and then 2 hours + of naps on top of this. This would be a high needs sleep baby to achieve 14 hours total sleep and most won’t be able to sleep that much hence the split night.

@emjaycee it's awful, isn't it? We've been up for 3 hours some nights in the past. Last night was nearly 2 hours in the end. Never heard of the magnesium spray but like I say I'm willing to give pretty much anything a chance right now. I think if it is developmental it might be language as he's been walking for ages. But then again he's forever teething too, so who knows.

@Iamasentientoctopus I think that the answer might be here, and I've gone back and forth over the idea of sleep training for months. I've tried once or twice but I couldn't last longer than a few minutes of him crying before I broke so I stopped because it was just confusing and not fair on him. Ideally, me and DH probably need to pick a few nights to do it together to stop me giving in straight away. He's goes down to sleep at bedtime beautifully- goes in his sleeping bag, has a feed and a cuddle then goes down in his cot drowsy but awake and takes himself off to sleep...but then the nonsense in the middle of the night starts.

@Starsandstripes24 he's sometimes grumpy in the day but I honestly don't know what's what now, if he's tired or if it is his teeth bothering him or a million other things. He has 1 nap in the middle of the day that can be anything from 1 hrs 30 mins to 2hr 30mins then he goes down to bed around 7.30pm and sometimes sleeps through until 6.30am. But then other nights we're up for an hour (minimum) or 3 hours (at the worst). We have thought about capping his nap at 1hr 30, but everything I read suggests it isn't nearly enough day sleep for his age so it's confusing because then I worry he'll be over tired instead

My LG is nearly 21 months and we've had split sleep the past couple of days. She's normally a great little sleeper so when this happens myself and my husband are at a loss. Yesterday she was awake from 1-6am! The problem is she won't let us cuddle/rock her back to sleep. We give her a little drink, put a fresh nappy on, back in the cot with Ewan the sheep but she's still unsettled. We tried leaving her there but she gets so hysterical she's practically choking! We get desperate than and we put her in our bed with the TV on! What else can we do? Should we bring her downstairs to play and try and tire her out? Although both myself and my husband are in work the next day and the thoughts of doing that exhausting!!