Toddler waking up at night

[asidd]

Hello everyone,

I have a very pressing matter at hand. My son (20 Months old) wakes up every night after sleeping for around 2 hours (for the past 2 Months at least). He then stays awake for at least 2 to 3 hours and then sleeps for 8 hours. We tried putting him to bed at different times, but nothing helps. He takes one nap during the day (he has been doing that for at least a year now, so one nap is nothing new for him).

Sometimes he is crying when he wakes up, sometimes he is happy. When he is crying, he just keeps on crying until he is awake and then wants to play.

This waking up at night is destroying his schedule and is very disturbing for us. Any tips or ideas you guys have?

Thanks in advance!

My son has just turned 2 and is doing the exact same thing, I could have written your post. Wakes up 1 1/2 to 2 hours after bedtime then for a couple of hours then sleeps for a good 8ish hours after that. He has always been an awful sleeper, can count of one hand the amount of times he has slept through so not much of an upheaval for us but a pain since I am due to have baby no2 any day now 🤦🏼‍♀️

They go through some massive developments at this age with their speech improving so much and their level of understanding becoming more comprehensive. At the moment nothing has really worked for us either so just riding it out until it passes :) one of the things we do is don’t go into to see him unless he is really crying because it disturbs him and wakes him up more which seem to make a bit of a difference but still not much.

You could try introducing a night light, that works for some littles ones, unfortunately not mine 😂

A lot of people will probably suggest moving them to a toddler bed, but it’s actually not advised to do that until they are 3 for safety reasons, plus you would spend hours putting him back into the bed for him to get straight out.

Our little one sleeps next to our bed in his cot and is pretty used to his cot. We do have a night light since we also had our second one just 5 months ago. We are totally clueless at this point what to try. Our next step would be to try make him take two naps instead of one. Since the first part of night sleep is actually a nap.

Can you try reducing the nap he has..make it really short? Sounds like he's not tired enough at night. Can you move him out of your room? Maybe he sees you and wants to play?

So we tried giving him milk when he woke up for past few nights and it seems that he was hungry and that's why was waking up at night. He sleeps right after and all seems much better now. Thank you so much everyone for your responses. Now we just have to figure out what to give him in the evening so that he is full and doesn't wake up during the night with hunger.

Drop the day time nap

How long is the daytime nap? I would be capping that. I'd take 15 minutes off every few days until the night waking stops. Split nights is common and it does stop.