Still not sleeping through the night??

My daughter will be 2 in February and she has yet to sleep through the night.
Maybe once in a great while she will but in general, she doesn’t.
I have a hard time getting her to fall asleep in the first place and when she does, it’s as if she’s tossing and turning all night.
It seems like most of the time it’s nightmares (she wakes up crying) but I’m not sure if that’s it.
My eldest two have had no trouble sleeping through the night but with her, it’s totally different.
Has anyone gone through something like this? Should I be worried?

I’m afraid I can’t offer too much advice so much as sympathy–the little boy I was caring for will be three at the end of the month and he still isn’t sleeping all the way through the night, either. He is constantly getting up in the middle of the night, getting out of bed, and going to his parents’ room to sleep. Same thing–he wakes up crying from nightmares. They’ve tried a lot of things that haven’t worked, but maybe they’re worth a shot for you to see if they work with your little girl?

[name_m]Night[/name_m] light so the room doesn’t look so scary and dark if she wakes up, and maybe she can drift back to sleep.
GroClock, and tell her she “can’t get out of bed until the sun comes up” (this actually worked from about age 1.5 to 2 and a bit)
Pre-bedtime “Monster [name_m]Hunt[/name_m]” where you have a special toy that banishes all the scary monsters so they can’t come in the room at night (not sure if she’d understand this yet)
Explain where you are and what you’ll be doing when you put her down to sleep; “Mum will be in the kitchen washing up, and then she has to go to sleep in her bed too, just down the hall, so she’ll be very close and making sure nothing bad happens.”
Make bed into a “fort” (this was easy with him because he sleeps on the bottom bunk). The fort has anti-monster super powers, so you’re always safe in there.

We’re pretty sure it’s nightmares for him because he can tell us–“I saw monsters” or “it grabbed me!” (let me tell you, it is creepy listening to him talk about them!) Like I said, though, these didn’t really work for him. Well, they worked for a little while, but then they lost their excitement or something. We developed most of these in the last few months too, so again, not sure how many of them your little girl would “get” at her age, but they might be worth a shot if you want to try something!

If it isn’t nightmares but something else, I have no idea, sorry. :frowning: [name_f]Hope[/name_f] you find a solution!

When my first child was 2 we went to see a sleep doctor because she was waking crying an average of seven times a night, her sister slept through at ten weeks! We did nothing different, I think it was just their individual personalities. For what it’s worth here’s what helped us:

  1. Decide what you want to do and stick with it, don’t keep trying different things eg if they always end up in your bed anyway will you get more sleep if they just sleep with you all night? It’s won’t be forever and might get you ‘over the hump’ of broken nights

  2. Alternate nights with your husband so you at least don’t have to get up every single night.

  3. Be consistent - we always comforted by patting and went in as soon as she cried but decided two was old enough to have it explained that we wouldn’t be picking her up or feeding her. Lots of tears but she seemed to be more contented in her cot.

  4. What finally worked for us was a joint business trip when the babysitter slept over at our place, told her she was a big girl and if she woke up to just go back to sleep…and she did! Seriously, it was literally two nights and she slept through pretty consistently since. [name_m]Prior[/name_m] to this she had her cot in our room but we were able to put her in her own room a couple of weeks later.

  5. Company: we had another huge leap forward when we put her baby sister in her room, it helped enormously, especially since her sister’s a great sleeper. Now it’s unusual to be up more than once a week.

You have my sympathy - entering year three of total sleep deprevation is horrific, if anyone else did this to you it would be illegal and classified as torture!

I don’t have advice, you’re a far more experienced parent than me, but I wanted to say how reassuring it is to hear other people have difficulty getting their child to sleep. It’s so hard to talk about the reality because I feel as though all the mothers I’m surrounded by ‘just follow the Save Our Sleep routines and everything’s dandy.’ I hate the look of pity I get if I admit my child still feeds through the night!!

Oh, I am so sorry! Sleep deprivation makes everything so much harder. There is a reason that it is a tried and true torture technique.

Our son slept through the night from five months until eighteen months. We were like, wow, we are so good at this! Then he started waking up screaming every night, often multiple times and also refusing to go to sleep on his own. There was no traumatic event, we had just gone on vacation with him and co-slept with him the whole two weeks. He would obviously prefer to do this, but my husband can’t sleep this way, and if my husband can’t sleep, he can’t work and then we can’t afford a bed to co-sleep in.

We tried everything- he is terrified of night lights and also of light up stuffed animals, as it turns out. He is two now. I just got the [name_u]Baby[/name_u] Whisperer (by [name_u]Tracy[/name_u] Hogg) book out of the library and we have been working on her sleep methods. It is really working- we aren’t having to lie down with him to get him to sleep anymore, and he isn’t waking up as much and he is easier to get back to sleep when he does. He is usually sleeping straight through again now, but will wake up a couple of times a week and then one of us just goes in and pats his back and tells him to go back to sleep. Before we had to climb back into bed with him and wait till he fell asleep and then crawl out like cat burglars.

There was no crying it out or anything like that, which we liked. Anyhow, I have no idea if it will work for you, but I think it’s worth checking out of the library and trying, if nothing else has worked. I hope something works soon!

My daughter had trouble for awhile sleeping through the night. It was to a point where she was spending most nights, for at least part of it, sleeping in our bed. For us, it just took a little time getting her used to sleeping in her own bed - and staying there! We put a twin mattress next to her next and had a sleepover with her for about a week, alternating who stayed in there with her. Then, we took a few nights laying on the mattress until she fell asleep and then left the room. Then, we would stay for a few minutes and then leave before she was asleep. We couldn’t believe it actually worked! [name_u]Ever[/name_u] since, she has been sleeping all night in her own bed. Sometimes she still likes snuggle time with us and she will fall asleep in our bed, but she stays all night in her own.

It was a really trying time for us. Good luck, and I hope you can get her to stay in her own bed!

My 3.5 year old wakes up every single night still. He comes and gets in our bed or we have to lay by him in his bed til he falls abck asleep. He used to wake up crying and wouldn’t stop (we think he had night terrors b/c he would be inconsolable for about a half hour), but he is over that now, just wakes up out of habit. I don’t know how to prevent this. We are so tired in the middle of the night we just let him sleep with us or I sleep in his bed sometimes. Some people say I would never do that but until you’ve raised a child like this, you shouldn’t judge. My advice is to just take it a night at a time and realize one day he’ll grow out of it. My older two kids were much better sleepers. Good luck, I really don’t know what advice I can give as I am still going through this. Kids are just plain hard sometimes!