DS is 14 months old. He slept through the night once in April, for one glorious week in October and another amazing week and December. Sometimes he only has one night wake up, sometimes two. At the beginning of this week it was four and the past two night it was six times! The only way to get him to go back to sleep is to nurse him. Is this normal for this age? DH and I are exhausted and at our wits' end. Any advice would be appreciated ...
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I think it is fairly normal/common for kids to wake up at night, even up til age 2 or 3. That being said, that doesn't mean that it HAS to be that way, if you are not happy with it. Have you ever sleep trained or considered sleep training?
Lo started STTN consistently at 13.5 months on his own, but we had previously sleep trained when he was younger.
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I agree that this can be normal behavior for some kids. We co-sleep so that we can all sleep through the night. It didn't start out that way but it's the only way DS will STTN. We didn't really want to sleep train because we are ok with the co-sleeping.
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@hilsy85: Your LO gives me hope! We sleep trained at 5 months and got DS to fall asleep on his own and only wake up 1-2x/night. I guess we will need to revisit sleep training, though. Ugh!
@mamasig: I nurse DS back to sleep which is the only way to get him to fall asleep right now. You have to do what works for you and keeps you sane, and, until this week, our system was working. DH isn't on board for co-sleeping, though. I don't really want to sleep train, either, but that may be our only option. Boo!
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@Katrocap: How does your bedtime routine go? For us, getting DD to STTN was very much tied to breaking her nurse-sleep association.
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I think it's normal for toddlers to still wake up at night, but I don't know any that do. We decided to give LO 20 minutes to figure things out by herself before going in, depending on how she was crying. We chose 20 minutes because going in earlier does nothing but rile her up. By the time we started this, the wake-ups were clearly habit and not necessary. She never fussed more than 9 minutes, and it lasted only 2-3 days before she was completely STTN.
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I'm in the same situation. DS is 19 months and wakes up multiple times every night. The quickest way to get him back to sleep is to BF but we have stopped that during the night, which improved things somewhat.
DS has always been a bad sleeper, he wakes up frequently and has a hard time going back to sleep. We've tried sleep training but he is so stubborn he'll easily cry for 3 hours straight, after which I give in. 1 or 2 hours crying I can handle but not 3. Things have got a lot better though and his wakeups are usually much shorter now.
I don't have a magic solution I'm afraid, some kids are bad sleepers and don't respond well to sleep training. I hope things improve for you, I know exactly how exhausting the lack of sleep for months on end is!
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DS1 started STTN at 13 months, when I night weaned by only sending DH in for wake ups. It only took a few days. My supply dried up shortly after, but ibwas ok with that.
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DS didn't sleep through the night until I night weaned him. I feel around the 1 year mark all of my friends children as well, sort of sleep regressed and started waking up a lot more at night than previously.
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Agh, no one has given a magic solution yet! DD wakes up 95% of the time, and just NEEDS a bottle. Even though though we're 100% cups during the day, she still demands a bottle when she wakes up. There's just no way I could refuse her - she would scream for 5 hours!!
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We had to do night weaning before LO came close to sleeping through the night. Probably around 7 months, we started restricting when I'd nurse him at night- if he woke up before, say, 1 AM, only DH would go in there, and might offer water, or might just try to soothe by rocking, shushing, etc. And then I'd feed him once per night, the first wake up after 1 AM. Prior to that point, he woke up every 3 hours.
Once he got used to not being able to nurse every time, the wake ups started getting less and less frequent till he was sleeping through the night around 11 months, which is around when I stopped nursing during the day anyhow, and would just nurse once at night and once in the morning, so it was kind of alongside a general weaning trend.
I'd work on the weaning aspect first- have your partner do the middle of the night wakeups as much as possible, try offering water instead of milk to see if that helps reduce the appeal of waking up, etc.
(But then again, I never had a kid who would scream for hours, night after night, so while I would expect some hard nights when you first implement night weaning policies, if you're consistently experiencing hours of screaming, that might not work!)
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