Bedtime

[emcorb2]

I’m at a complete loss. Our little boy has always been an amazing sleeper but the 18 month sleep regression hit us hard.

We’re going on 6 weeks now of toddler battling us at bedtime, won’t sleep if we aren’t there, waking up numerous times a night etc. when he used to self soothe and sleep through.

We’ve tried to leave him in his bed to settle himself on a night time as normal, however he is standing up and banging his head off the top bars of his cot. So we obviously cannot leave him to try and self soothe when he is banging his head as he’s going to end up seriously hurt, but we need to start getting him back in the habits of his healthy sleep routine.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Are there crib protectors we can buy that are good? Is this a sign that it’s time for a floor bed? Honestly any help is appreciated.

Little boy is 20 months old for reference

At 2 years mine were in a single bed with a roll out bar. I found that they were banging themselves on the bars, and getting their legs stuck through the bars.
Do you think he’s too big for the cot and it’s disturbing his sleep?

He has plenty of room in his cot and it doesn’t disturb him during the night at all. It’s just getting to sleep because he doesn’t want us to leave he bangs his head off the top of the bars because he knows we’ll come in to stop him.
And he’s now waking up through the night crying for us which he hasn’t done since he was about 8 months old.

We are planning on buying him a floor bed for his second birthday in April just at a loss what to do until then - need him to stop banging his head and we need some sleep haha!

The 18 month regression hit ours hard and took an awful 4 months to fully pass. We did all we could to keep up with good sleep hygiene and good habits, it was hard, but in the end she went back to self settling and sleeping through. The main thing for us was to try not to stay with her while she went back to sleep, it sometimes meant she'd be stood up again before we got out of her room but we would lie here down again, tell her it's slept time, and give her a few strokes and try to leave again. It sometimes meant multiple returns to the cot, if I wasn't so full on about having her sleep independently i think my husband would have caved to staying with her, but when it all passed we didn't have any parent led associations to break which was great! The worst part of the regression was the split nights, she would be awake for up to 3.5 hours sometimes, it was truly awful and exhausting. We had to cut her nap shorter to eradicate that, from 2 - 2.5 hours down to 1.5. But the nighttime wake ups and early wakes persisted for longer and we had to ride it out. It left me a bit damaged to be honest, as it went on so long I developed fear of nighttime, I'm already an insomniac so it was very hard to deal with the level of sleep deprivation!

You tell very funny stories, so funny haha.
@geometry dash meltdown

At 2 or even his age I would just get a proper bed.