Toddlers and Sleep: Three Strategies

I've just completed a {rather brutal} refresher course on toddlers and sleep. The three-word synopsis?

Don't get sloppy.

You see, we had been cruising along for more than a year with our little guy sleeping 12 hours at night—7 pm to 7 am—and though his naps have not been quite as consistently long as I'd like, he'd been doing pretty well with naptime, too. Our nearly-two-year-old little darling (and part-time mischief-maker) had been falling asleep quickly on his own, almost never waking up at night, and giving Mama dependably peaceful, baby-free evenings for so long that I'd almost forgotten the long months of hard work that it took to get here.

Then he reminded me.

It started with a 5 am wake-up. And then another one. And another. Sometimes he'd go back to sleep in his crib after I changed his diaper and settled him back in, though there were a few times that I resorted to putting him in bed with us. {NOOOOooooo!} On a couple of those occasions, he fell asleep, though I often did not—and the interruptions to both of us started taking their toll.

And then he started popping up repeatedly after we put him to bed at night, crying for Mama.

A few times, he woke us up in the middle of the night.

His naps were getting crummy, too, almost never longer than an hour and a half, sometimes closer to an hour, with him waking up crying and cranky, clearly not having had enough rest.

After about three weeks of this, I was starting to feel very much the same way I had when he was an infant and nowhere close to sleeping through the night. Is this ever going to get better? I can't function like this! I'm never going to get anything done again. What am I doing wrong???

So I called my sister. The fun thing is that for most of her life, as the ten-years-older sister I've been on the advice-giving side of our relationship. Besides being a real grown-up now, she has a little boy a year older than ours—the tables have turned!—and I am so thankful to be able to pick her brain.

Turns out, I had gotten sloppy.

Once diligent about bedtime, I'd let it slide—apparently a few too many times. When they're teeny, you miss bedtime by half an hour, and you immediately pay for it. With toddlers, you can fudge it a little, and they gleefully run around the house, making you think, "Great—no harm done." While you can get away with this from time to time, I've re-learned {the hard way} that too much of this parental slacking-off will mess up their little circadian rhythms. They still need 12 hours of nighttime sleep at this stage. Getting overly tired can make it harder for them to fall asleep, stay asleep, and sleep as long as they need to sleep.

Plus, the little darling/mischief-makers are getting wise. "Oh—I call for you in the middle of the night, and you come in? Excellent. I can get up at 5 am, and we can start to party early? Fantastic. Will there be Sesame Street involved if you're too tired to function?"

The first few times our little guy woke up crazy early, I went to him right away, thinking there was something wrong—after all, he never cried in the middle of the night unless there were an actual problem. I took the bait when he called for me after bedtime. In desperation, I put him in bed with us at 5:30 in the morning. It didn't dawn on me until it was too late that I had unwittingly taught him some bad habits that I would now have to break. You'd think this was my first rodeo.

• Strategy #1: When he called for me at bedtime, I let him cry. I set a timer for 15 minutes, then opened his door without going to him, told him is was night-night time, that I loved him, and that he needed to go to sleep. We had one rough evening with this, but he settled down after about 45 minutes, and that seemed to fix that problem. (Having Daddy go in instead of Mama was also helpful.) No more Mrs. Nice Mommy.

• Strategy #2: Remember that "sleep begets sleep." This one is counterintuitive—you think if they're waking up too early, you need to put them to bed later, that this will shift their entire schedule to the right, but that plan usually backfires, especially when they haven't reached a point developmentally when they need less sleep. My sister reminded me of this and suggested I put him to bed earlier, closer to 7:00 again, and within a couple of days, he was sleeping later again. One night, we put him to bed closer to 8:00, and he woke up again at 5:20—lesson learned.

• Strategy #3: Apply the "sleep begets sleep" principal to naptime, too. A few months ago, I thought I needed to push his naptime to about 1:00... or so... which worked pretty well for a while. In my recent desperation, I cracked open Twin Sanity to remind myself what I'd done with our girls, and lo-and-behold, I'd put them down for their naps at about noon at this stage. Today, I put him down for his nap at about 12:45 (even after he slept until 7:23 this morning), and he took a great nap—about 2 hours and 15 minutes. I'll be trying that again tomorrow, thank you very much.

Lessons learned! Six months after drafting this post, I'm finally getting around to posting it, and I'm happy to report that it worked! I hope this helps you and your little one(s) get some much-needed rest, too.

Sweet dreams,

Susanna