18 month old sleep issues

[jessmke]

I know 18 months is a very common time for sleep disturbances, just wondering how long it has lasted for all of you?

My DD is nearly 19 months and for the last week or two her sleep has become much more difficult. Crying at nap time and bedtime which has never been a problem for us before, naps are getting really short and disturbed, and she's been waking up hysterical at least once a night. For those of you who have gone through this with your toddler, how long did it last?

Also I'm not really sure how to deal with her. She has always self settled and rarely cried when it's time to go to sleep so I'm not really sure what to do about this new behaviour. She is not a cuddly child at all, so going in and giving her cuddles does not help. Since getting passed the need to be fed at night the only reason she really wakes has been due to teething or illness, so we would just go in and give her some medicine and then lay down with her for 15-20 min until the meds had a chance to kick in, then she was happy to be put back down in her crib where she would fall asleep on her own. Now if we go in her room when she wakes at night she gets even more hysterical, if we try to lay down with her she just wants to grab at her books or just screams "down" over and over and struggles and fights to get off the bed. We've resorted to letting her "cry it out" when she wakes at night because she will scream for 15-20 min and then just fall back asleep, whereas if we go in to her and try to comfort her she will be awake for hours. I hate just sitting across the hall listening to her scream and cry but I feel like it's the best option for getting her back to sleep as quickly as possible. How did you all deal with the night wakings at this age??

 

[sunshine2014]

I could have written this!! Except my biggest problem is shortened naps. I wish I had advice to offer, but I don't. I've been told this won't last, but I'm also searching for tips. Our babies sound the same though - reaching for books, wants to be put down to play lol

 

[jessmke]

I could have written this!! Except my biggest problem is shortened naps. I wish I had advice to offer, but I don't. I've been told this won't last, but I'm also searching for tips. Our babies sound the same though - reaching for books, wants to be put down to play lol

Yes she is definitely waking at night wanting to play and explore and gets very frustrated with us when we won't allow that to happen. Which is why just leaving her alone in her crib seems to be the best option for now, even though it makes me feel like a bad mother! I feel pretty useless as a parent because I have no idea how to comfort my own child or how to get her to sleep because she has always just naturally self settled, she has never required rocking/nursing/shushing/patting etc. So now I have no tools for helping her get back to sleep! I feel like we've just made things worse for ourselves today because we re-arranged the bedroom to fit a second crib in with her. Normally I don't think this would have phased her, but with her new sleep issues I have a feeling we are in for a couple of crying episodes tonight when she wakes and realizes that things are different.

 

[MindUtopia]

It actually sounds a lot like a night terror. It's almost like sleep walking. They are awake but not really and often inconsolable. I know when my daughter has one, if we try to pick her up, she just fights it and gets more hysterical. What has worked for us is either just going in and sitting there in the room, but not talking to her or trying to touch her (often after 10-15 minutes she settles down and goes to sleep again on her own or wants a quick cuddle and then back to bed), or we just turn the light on and wake her up fully (because they are sort of sleepwalking and no aware they're actually awake), this wakes her up and then we can use our usual tactics to get her back to sleep (cuddle and rocking in the chair before she climbs back into bed). I find basically you either need to snap them out of the night terror or just keep them safe so they don't flail around and hurt themselves until they snap out of it on their own.

Some of it will of course just be disrupted sleep (like during daytime naps) and you really just need to figure out new strategies that work. We had issues with going to bed at bedtime around 20 months and we started a new routine where she'd have her cup of milk, she'd climb into bed awake and then I'd stand outside her room and read her several books. She would get sleepy enough that then I could shut the door and walk away. Before I just would have put her to bed sleepy and gone away. So it's just really experimenting to find what works for her.

Otherwise we bedshared from birth to 3.5 which worked great and meant we didn't really have to get up out of bed when there were night wakings, so we generally got plenty of sleep even when she was up 4 times a night. But I know probably not practical to start now if it's not what you've been doing all along.