How to Help Your Toddler's Sleeping Problems

Baby sleep problems are mostly about what a baby can't do yet. Toddler sleep problems are mostly about what a toddler wants, and I found that much harder to argue with.

A toddler who wakes at night has usually worked out that waking gets her company, and she's right. Your job is no longer helping a baby learn to settle. It's negotiating with a small person who has found she has some power and is delighted about it.

Night waking that ends up in your bed

This is the most common complaint of the toddler years, and I'd start by deciding what you want.

Plenty of families are perfectly happy when a child climbs in at three in the morning and everybody goes back to sleep. If that's you, and it's safe, there's nothing to fix and you can skip to the next section with my blessing. It only needs work if it's costing somebody sleep they need.

If it is, what changes it is consistency, and consistency is the first thing to go when you're exhausted. A child who's taken back to her own bed on six nights and allowed to stay on the seventh has learned that keeping on trying works, and she's learned that far better than the rule.

• Decide what the rule is when you're both awake and calm, and agree it between the adults before anybody tests it at two in the morning.
• Walk her back with as little talking, light and fuss as you can manage. Be kind, but not entertaining.
• Expect it to get worse for a few nights before it gets better, because that's what happens when something that used to work for her stops working.
• If she's frightened and not testing you, that's a different problem, and she needs comfort, not a rule. You'll usually know which it is.
• A gradual approach is fine. Sitting by the bed and moving the chair further away over two weeks works, and it's kinder on everybody than doing it all at once.

Early waking

Waking at five in the morning is less a sleep problem than a timing one, and there are only a few possible causes. Light is the first and the easiest to fix, because toddlers wake to light at the end of their last sleep cycle, and proper blackout is the cheapest fix there is. The second is a bedtime that's too late. That sounds backwards, but overtiredness breaks up the end of the night, so a child put down late often wakes earlier. The third is nap times that have drifted, and the fourth is hunger, which becomes real once toddlers are on three proper meals and burning through them. Nobody has ever fixed early waking by putting a child to bed later. I tried it for two weeks. She still woke at five and was grumpy all day.

The first night terror is frightening to watch, and it helps to read about it in advance, because everything your instinct tells you to do is wrong.

Your child sits up, screams, may have her eyes wide open, doesn't know you're there and can't be comforted. Then it stops, she lies down, and in the morning she has no memory of any of it. She wasn't awake, and she wasn't frightened. You were the only frightened person in the room.

During a night terror, stay with her, keep her safe and wait: don't wake her, don't try to talk her down, don't turn on the lights. Night terrors happen more when a child is overtired, so an earlier bedtime does more to reduce them than anything you can do in the moment. Nightmares need the opposite: go in, comfort her properly, and let her tell you about it. Shan's were about the lift, I think, though I never found out what the lift had done.

Climbing out of the cot

This one is about safety, and you can't put it off.

Once a child can climb out, the cot becomes the more dangerous place to sleep, because she can fall from a height onto a hard floor. Lower the mattress to its lowest setting if you haven't already, remove anything she's using as a step, and if she's still getting out, move her to a bed. Most children make that move somewhere between eighteen months and three years, and there's no prize for holding out.

Use a floor bed or a low toddler bed with a rail, toddler-proof the room properly, and put a gate at the door if she wanders. The whole room is now her sleep space, so it needs to be safe with nobody watching.

The nap transition

Most children drop to one nap between twelve and eighteen months and stop napping altogether somewhere between two and four, and the change is nearly always messy.

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The signs are the same each time: she fights the nap, or she naps and then can't fall asleep at bedtime, or bedtime slides an hour later and the mornings get earlier. Make the change gradually, not all at once. Shorten the nap to forty-five minutes at most, keep it early, and bring bedtime forward on days she doesn't nap at all.

I'd keep quiet time going even after the naps stop. Forty minutes of books on the bed with the door shut is good for a three-year-old and even better for the adult in the next room.

When to ask a doctor

Most toddler sleep problems are phases that pass. See a doctor about any of the following.

• Snoring most nights, mouth breathing, or pauses in breathing during sleep. This is the one I would raise soonest. It's common, it's treatable, and it's routinely missed.
• Excessive daytime sleepiness in a child who's getting enough sleep at night.
• Night terrors happening most nights, or continuing well into the school years.
• Sleep problems alongside developmental concerns, or a marked change in behaviour or mood.
• Restless legs, or a child who complains her legs hurt or feel strange at bedtime.
• Exhaustion in you that you can no longer manage. That needs attention in its own right, and it's the thing people wait longest to ask about.

This guide is general information, written to help you understand a topic and ask better questions. It is not medical advice and does not replace your own doctor, midwife or paediatrician. Anything that worries you about your baby belongs with them.

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