Please help! Toddler only sleeping 8hrs a night

[CareBear88]

Please help!

My 19 month old has been an early riser on and off for months (5-5.30am). He had a few weeks recently of waking up 6-6.30am after I assume a bout of illness resetting his body clock. But now he’s back to 5-5.30am but is so tired and cranky! Last night he only managed 8 hours sleep total (+ wake ups) and he was already looking tired at 7am. I know early wakes can be normal for toddlers and I could live with it if I knew he was getting what he needs but he definitely isn’t and I feel so bad for him. Please can anyone suggest what we might be doing wrong?

Our usual routine:
5-5.30am: wake up
12/12.30pm - 1.30/2pm: nap for 1-1.5 hours
7-7.30pm: bedtime

Times vary slightly based on wake up times in the morning and wake up time from nap. We tend to go with roughly 5 hours between wake up from nap and bedtime. He tends to fall asleep within 10-20 mins. Sometimes he sleeps through, other times he can wake 1-3 times.

We’ve also tried putting him to bed at 6.30pm if he’s napped earlier, say 12-1.30pm and this can help him get closer to 10 hours sleep as he wakes at the same time. But we can’t get him to bed this early on nursery days as he tends to nap later at nursery (more like 1pm - which must be so hard for him when he’s woken at 5am but they don’t ever manage to get him down any earlier).

Does he sound over or undertired at bedtime? Any ideas of what might help??

Sounds overyired.on the days your home with him why dnt you put him down for a nap at 7:30/8am? I've always put mine down for st nap with 2hrs of wake up as they still have sleep hormones in their body so it means they have a good quality nap.

If he isn't gettin enough sleep at night, up the day time naps on some days

I reckon overtired. I’d go back to offering a morning nap, 2 hours after waking.

@Youcancallmeirrelevant@InTheRainOnATrain He’s been on 1 nap since 15 months. Would it not be bad to regress backwards at this point? He’s almost 20 months old. We were having all kinds of sleep issues before dropping to 1 nap too.

You need to increase the hours he sleeps for throughout the day, more sleep equals better sleep (usually) for children. Maming them wait for a nap then means they are overtired and that sleep isn't great quality.

Would he even notice if he had 2 naps? If my 19 month old yawns or looks tired as long as it isn't too close to bedtime i put him down for a nap. If its close to bedtime i bring bedtime a little bit earlier as once they are overtired it is so much harder

@Youcancallmeirrelevant I tried a morning pram nap this morning and he fell asleep easily and I capped it at 15 mins and then still put him down as usual after lunch but his nap after lunch was then not good. Woke after half an hour. Managed to get him back to sleep but only for another half an hour so he ended up getting about the same amount of sleep as normal but broken across the morning.

Anyone have any other ideas?

Why on earth did you wake him up after 15mins?! Thats not even a whole sleep cycle? No wonder he had poor sleep the rest of the day 🤦🏼‍♀️

Honestly OP if that is your attempt at trying something new i wouldn't bother, i'm out of this thread

If you cap a nap it would be at 45 minutes ie 1 sleep cycle, although in your case he sounds so overtired I probably wouldn’t be capping naps at all until I felt he well rested and getting decent quality sleep. Waking him after 15 minutes is utterly pointless; you may as well have not bothered.

@InTheRainOnATrain @Youcancallmeirrelevant If I let him
sleep 45 mins + at 9am, he would’ve refused to nap again all day or would’ve fallen asleep at 4pm and not gone to bed until 9/10pm. I don’t have a baby that loves to sleep. He needs sleep, but he’d generally rather not if it was up to him. He needs minimum 5hrs before bed normally otherwise we have a battle. The logic behind the 15 min Power Nap was to just take the edge off so that he’d be less overtired and have a proper nap after lunch, but alas that didn’t work out.

Hi, I feel like you’ve described my 20 month old exactly. Did you have any success with later wake ups?

@CrisssMum Hey. We had success with extending the time awake between nap and bedtime. We increased it by 15 mins and then stuck with that for a few days to see if it made a difference and kept doing that until wake up time was more like 6-6.30am. It worked a treat.

He’s now almost 2.5 years and we’re back in a similar boat and bedtime is closer to 9pm now so I think the nap will have to go soon! But generally the early wake ups seem to be due to undertiredness at bedtime - even though they seem grumpy and shattered during the day.

Perhaps try moving bedtime back/increasing the amount of time he’s awake before bed.