31 October 2025 · Roshni Mahtani Cheung
Cofounder, Little Rei · Mother of one
How to Help Your Toddler's Sleeping Problems
Baby sleep problems are mostly about capacity. Toddler sleep problems are mostly about opinion, and I found the second kind a lot harder to argue with.
A toddler who wakes at night has usually worked out that waking produces company, and she's entirely correct. The task is no longer teaching a nervous system to regulate itself. It's negotiating with a small person who has discovered leverage and is delighted about it.
Night waking that ends up in your bed
The commonest complaint of the whole toddler year, and the one where I'd start by deciding what you want.
Plenty of families are perfectly happy with a child who arrives at three in the morning and everybody sleeps. If that's you, and the arrangement is safe, there's no problem to solve here and you can skip to the next section with my blessing. This is only something to work on if it's costing somebody sleep they need.
If it is, the thing that shifts it is consistency, and consistency is the one thing exhaustion destroys. A child who's returned to her own bed on six nights and allowed to stay on the seventh has learned that persistence works, and she's learned it far more thoroughly than she learned 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 conversation, light and interaction as you can manage. Warmth without entertainment.
- Expect it to get worse for a few nights before it improves, because that's what happens when a strategy that used to work stops working.
- If she's frightened and not testing, that's a different problem and it needs comfort in place of a boundary. You'll usually know which one you're dealing with.
- A gradual approach is legitimate. Sitting by the bed and moving the chair further away over a fortnight works, and it's kinder on everybody than the abrupt version.
Early waking
Five in the morning isn't a sleep problem so much as a scheduling 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 intervention available. The second is an overly late bedtime, which sounds backwards until you remember that overtiredness fragments the end of the night, so a child put down late frequently wakes earlier. The third is nap timing that has 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 a fortnight. She woke at five and was foul all day.
Around the same age
The first night terror is frightening to watch, and the reason to read about it in advance is that 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.
| Night terror | Nightmare | |
|---|---|---|
| When | First few hours of the night | Second half of the night |
| The child | Eyes open, distressed, not awake | Awake, frightened, seeks comfort |
| Do they know you? | No. Comforting often escalates it | Yes |
| Memory next day | None | Often remembers |
| What to do | Keep them safe, wait it out, don't wake | Comfort, reassure, settle back |
The practical response to night terrors is to stay, keep her safe, and wait, no waking, no talking her down, no lights. They cluster around overtiredness, so an earlier bedtime does more to reduce them than anything available 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 is a safety matter and it has a deadline attached, so it's here and not under general nuisance.
Once a child can climb out, the cot has become the more dangerous option, and the fall is 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.
A floor bed or a low toddler bed with a rail, a properly toddler-proofed room, and a gate at the door if she wanders. The room itself is now the 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 give up napping altogether somewhere between two and four, and the transition is nearly always messier than the arrival.
Mentioned above
Junior Blanket (120x180cm)S$105.00Shop now
Baa Baa Sheepz Head Pillow (Kids)S$59.00Shop nowThe signs are consistent: she fights the nap, or she takes it and then can't fall asleep at bedtime, or bedtime slides an hour later and the mornings get earlier. What works is a bridge and never a cliff. Shorten the nap, cap it at forty-five minutes, keep it early, and bring bedtime forward on the days it doesn't happen at all.
Quiet time in place of a nap is something I'd defend even after the sleeping stops. Books on a bed with the door shut for forty minutes 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 is a phase with a shape, and these are the things that aren't.
- 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 has stopped being manageable. That deserves attention on its own account, and it's the reason people wait longest before asking.
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.