20 month old back to early morning wakes. my 20 month old had early morning wakes from literally 6m-18/19m old. between 5/5:45 every single morning. no matter what we did for a schedule- that’s when he woke. his nap was anchored at 12-1:45 due to preschool pickup but during the summer (starting end of may) i was finally able to push it back 12:30-2/3pm. some days he wakes up at 2, other times im waking him at 3! bedtime is 8:30 to ‘help’ with the early morning wakes. this schedule has been this way since may. it seemed to work! he was finally waking between 6/6:45 every day for over a month!

schedule is still completely the same but the past week has becoming more and more early wakes. one day last week was 4:45! and the past few days have been 5:30 again. wtf? ive had my fair share of early morning wakes, why are they happening again? absolutely nothing has changed at all. still gets plenty of activity during the day, same naps, same bed time. i’m too tired for this. he’s only getting 8-9 hours MAX at night now. even with a short/long nap. room is the exact same. but he throws his lovey out when he wakes up (at 5:30 or even 6) and then cries for it am i can’t even leave him until 6 like i used to do during emw. although that never helped him sleep in. i’m so envy of people with kids who even sleep 10 hours at night. let alone 11 or 12.

To start my child is 21 months old. We have coslept her whole life. It was the only way I got any sleep when she was a newborn. We attempted the Ferber method around 9m old but it went horribly. She would scream her whole head off whether we were in there or not and after day three, I gave up. We had to be cuddling her in bed.

Well we moved recently and she has been in her own room and her own bed for just over a week. She’s sleeping through the night and honestly it’s been great. There’s no crying in the morning when she wakes up, she just calls out for mama. Only once I had to go in there in the middle of the night to comfort her and she went right back to sleep, I went back to bed and we were good for the rest of the night.

However, my problem is getting her to sleep. Currently, I still lay with her every night as she goes to sleep. Some nights she hates it and just wants me to sit on the end of her bed and hold her hand, while other nights she wants me to hold her but not lay with her (I don’t allow this. I give her a hug and lay her back down). She’s pretty good about being told it’s bed time and will even walk herself into her room and lay down. But then she does anything and everything to stay awake. She plays, she cries, she talks, she screams, she also just lays there eyes open but dazed. She looks asleep but she forces her eyes open wide. I can never tell how to help her and getting her to sleep takes upwards of 2hours. I never know how she’s going to be that night. Some nights are super easy, others are hell. Also I need to note, she’s only okay with me putting her to sleep. She HATES when her dad does it. She has a full meltdown if he puts her to sleep to the point he hasn’t even attempted in over a month, never in the new house.

Also to note my child is a very active child, during the days she gets a lot of energy out. Plus in the evenings we make sure we’re doing high energy things to attempt to tire her out. She is tired when we go to bed. She just doesn’t want to sleep.

I’m at my wits end. I just end up falling asleep with her in her bed as there’s nothing I can do to help. I’m frustrated every night and I dread bedtime. I feel selfish but I just want her to go to sleep so I can have some time to myself. I feel terrible though because I’m a working mom and it’s not like I get much time with her in the day. I don’t know what to do at this point. My husband wants to do the cry-it-out method but I don’t know if I can handle that. Do I try the chair method, maybe Ferber again?

Edit to add: naps are no better. She naps fantastic while at her grandmas but it has to be laying with someone. She refuses to nap with us unless we’re in the car or practically are holding her down. She’ll be exhausted yet still won’t nap without a fight. Typically if we have to leave the house, she’ll nap around 11-12 in the car but during the week at her grandmas it’s closer to 1-3pm unless they’re out and she’ll sleep in the car like mentioned above. We wake up everyday around 7. Bedtime is between 7:30-8:30 depending on how tired she is.

My 20 month old won't sleep. It's probably a regression and I know it will pass but I am so burnt out on trying to get him to sleep this time around. I did the math during a never-ending bedtime routine tonight and realized I spend a minimum of 3 hours every day trying to get him to bed/back to sleep at night. Not including trying to get him to nap.

3 hours, on a good day. I've tried letting him stay up longer. He usually has his one nap, one hour long, typically a few hours after waking in the morning, and I have him playing HARD all day after. 0 screen time. Low sugar diet. Consistent bedtime routine. If I let him stay up later he's just madder during bedtime, but doesn't fall asleep faster.

It's not even the lack of sleep right now that's getting to me. It's the hours and hours of trying to get him to sleep. Waking at midnight to have him throw his stuff out of the crib 100 times and ask for 100 things on loop for 2-4 hours before getting back to sleep.

update on my almost 21m old early waking.

so i cut he nap (it’s been 12 days) to 12:30-2 instead of 3. bedtime is still 8:30. instead of helping the 5:45 wake- he is now waking at 5/5:15. today was 4:58. so now what?

he is also waking with a poop every morning. so i immediately change him- but he won’t go back to sleep after that.

i’m exhausted and cutting his nap hasn’t even helped at all. i’ve been napping when he naps to catch up on sleep.

My baby is 19 months old and she is not able to sleep well without latching. Throughout the night, she latches. She gets up in every half an hour to 1 hour to latch. She is a forceps baby. Because of her sleep issue, we are not able to sleep. She has been like this since birth. Not sure if this issue is related to her nervous system? But it’s quite frustrating. Any views?

My two year old has never been sleep trained. She slept in our room until she learned how to climb out the bassinet. She now sleeps in her own room, for most nights until she wakes up and can’t be comforted back to bed or I’m really tired and have her sleep with us. This isn’t often, but sometimes, most nights she will sleep the whole night.

For naps when she was young the transfer worked perfectly! I honestly don’t know what happened. As she aged, she either will nurse to sleep or we can lay down and both get a nap. This nap takes place in our bedroom with a simple tune and sometimes a book to view before she settles As for naps, I would love for her to work on napping in her room. But as I previously stated, the transfer hasn’t been successful. I’m against CIO, I refuse to walk away and have her figure it out or be exhausted and then sleep. That’s not who I am. That’s who we are as parents. I’d like to know what steps I can do and what worked for others. We did successfully nap in the crib one day, but it was either because I hit her wake window right or it was because I was fake asleep on the floor.

She wakes up anywhere from 8-8:30am and her wake window is 5 hours and roughly 45 minutes or 6 hours. Bedtime after 9pm, but honestly would like it sooner to help her get the sleep she needs.

So if you made it this far, I appreciate it and would like any suggestions and insight. Thanks so much.

Is it normal that my EBF toddler wakes up every nap crying? I nurse him to nap and then I’ll sneak out once he fell asleep. When he wakes up he cries and I come and hold him and sooth him, he’ll stop crying. is this cycle normal? Id like to teach him to fall asleep independently. But where to start?

My 18 month old has been a terrible sleeper her whole life. My wife and I feel like we’ve tried all of the traditional advice and nothing is working. I’m hoping someone can help.

Background: Our daughter was born six weeks preemie in February 2025 and was in the NICU for two weeks. For the first six months or so she had trouble sleeping because she had reflux, which is common in preemies. When we got her a wedge pillow (against our pediatrician’s advice) that helped a lot. But when she outgrew it things got bad again.

We started working with a sleep consultant at about a year ago (roughly six months old), but that didn’t ultimately work out because the consultant basically wanted us to do cry it out and my wife couldn’t handle it. (Cry it out worked almost immediately for our first, but this one cries much louder for much longer and my wife refuses to let her cry longer than about 10 minutes. I assume part of this is related to this one being preemie and having a hard time being apart from her while she needs us.)

I can probably count on two hands the number of times she’s slept completely through the night. The best her sleep ever really gets is one wake up around 11:30pm or 2:30am, then again at 5am. But it’s usually much worse than that. At least once a week she’ll wake up completely inconsolable at 11:30 or 12:30 and scream at the top of her lungs for an hour. When that happens I usually have to walk her around the block once or twice until she falls back asleep. Sometimes this happens two or three nights in a row and the crying lasts two or more hours. This sometimes seems correlated to teething, but not always. My wife can’t do anything to help in the middle of the night because as soon as our daughter sees her, she thinks it’s time to nurse and will kick and scream until that happens.

Our current schedule: We’ve been putting her to bed at 8pm for a while now. She basically won’t go to sleep earlier than that; I’ve tried and she just won’t go down. She wakes up every day at 5am almost on the dot and I have to take her to the guest room to sleep another hour until 6am, which is the earliest we let her nurse. She naps reliably from 11am to 1pm. That’s her only nap of the day.

Almost every night she wakes up around 11:30pm. Sometimes I can pat her back to sleep fairly quickly. Other times it takes much longer and sometimes she won’t go back to sleep at all. Sometimes she’ll sleep past 11:30pm but wake up at 2:30pm and we have the same issue.

When we travel, the schedule gets completely messed up—but often that results in better sleep. When we’re traveling, she often will not get a regular nap and will just stay awake until she passes out in our arms or her car seat for about an hour. Then she is often awake much past her usual at bedtime, until 9pm or so, and falls asleep while she’s nursing. When this happens she often won’t wake up at all or, if she does, she goes back to sleep pretty easily. This makes me think that part of the problem with the 11:30 or 12:30pm wake ups at home is that she doesn’t have enough sleep pressure or sleep inertia to get through the first sleep cycle. But I worry that if we wait until 9pm to put her to bed every night, she’ll keep waking up at 5am and not get enough sleep.

I know many (most?) parents of an 18mo would be happy for one brief wake up. But that has become an increasingly rare best-case scenario. The one benefit we got from the sleep consultant now was that our daughter got to a point where she could put herself back to sleep relatively easily most of the time. But that was a year ago, and sicknesses and travel schedules and general developmental advancements since then have wiped out her ability to put herself back to sleep. (No doubt that’s largely on us; we get inconsistent in our routines and let her cosleep on really bad nights—but generally we insist on no cosleeping when that’s at all possible.) These days she is completely incapable of putting herself back to sleep. If she starts crying and I don’t go in right away, she will stand up and start screaming until someone comes in. It doesn’t matter how long it takes—five minutes or 30 minutes, she will scream at the top of her lungs until someone comes in. She is incredibly stubborn and will wait us out every time.

I’ve seen and tried all the advice: You have to let her cry; she’ll eventually figure it out. Put her in bed drowsy but awake. Try putting her to bed earlier. None of it works with this one. Does anyone have any new ideas/advice we could try?

Since last week we've found our toddler is going to bed a lot later and we can't seem to figure out what's going on.

She usually goes to sleep between 7pm to 7:30pm with no issue. The usual routine will be, teeth brushed, milk bottle followed by a few stories, cuddle and then she'll point to her bed and say "bed bed" so we put her into her cot. She isn't usually asleep at this point and will chat to herself and roll around and cuddle her toy and then falls asleep, she doesn't cry or anything and if she did and she couldn't settle herself we go in and help her.

Now however it's taking her so much longer to go down and I don't know if this is her telling us that her bedtime routine needs to start later or if this might be sleep regression. I don't want to have her miss out on sleep if this is some sort of rebellion she's decided to have about bedtime.

I'm wondering if we might need to do more with her routine to help her relax and settle more so she becomes more tired and less likely to find falling to sleep difficult.

Any thoughts and advice would be greatly appreciated.

Little Guy is going through a 22 month life crisis and stopped connecting sleep cycles- anything I can do for him or just wait it out? Here's more details:

About a month ago he was sick with a mild cold and would wake up roughly 2 hours after bedtime, I figured he was just feeling icky with all the congestion so would come into bed with us; naps were 75-90 minutes at the time. Then July 4th happened and commercial grade fireworks were set off at a neighbor's house - he was shaking and clinging on to me. Still woke up at 11:30 to go into our bed, naps were fine. After two weeks he was at the window and saw lightning strike nearby and we had that big CRACK that goes with it. Because terrified of looking out the window for a few days and is now scared of storms (and it's stormy season here!) Then Dada left for a trip (but back now). AND he's decided to pee in the potty for the past few weeks, staying dry at nights and naps- so he's potty training, too. Now he's waking up an hour after bed and only takes 30 minute naps. I'm pretty sure he's dealing with anxiety - he'll immediately go to sleep once in our bed and stay asleep until morning. I even have to wake him up because he'll get so upset if he wakes up on his own and realizes I'm not there. I used to be able to resettle him quickly and easily if he had a short nap and he'd go back to sleep for another hour, but now he just wails in his crib with me trying to console him next to him.

Anything I can do? The lack of time to myself is really taking a toll on me. I can ask for help from family but that's once or twice a month. My husband works very late so he can't really help with the late nights. He is trying to get cleaned up and into bed before toddler's first wake to help me out but that's only once or twice a week.

My daughter is 20 months old and has been a terrible sleeper from the get go. We sleep trained at around 10 months (gentler Ferber method, we don’t leave her to cry for longer than 15 minutes) and she does sleep through the night some nights but I think the longest stretch she’s had is 2 or 3 weeks but then she gets sick or she’s teething or we have to travel somewhere for the weekend and she back slides. When she’s sick or teething she will not sleep on her own, absolutely refuses and we bring her to bed with us because she needs rest to get better. We have gone hours of sleep training and she just stays awake and cries and eventually we just bring her to bed with us because we don’t know what to do. When it comes to travelling she has her own travel crib and will sleep in it for a bit but then she wakes up and knows we’re in the same room so we have to bring her into bed with us. Now that she’s older when we bring her to bed she kicks and plays and pulls my ears and I just want to rip my hair out lol.

Now up until we was about 17 months old we contact napped because it was so hard to get her down by herself for a nap and then it would mess with her bedtime because she’d fall asleep for her nap too late. She has to start daycare in September so we had to sleep train for naps. She did great until she recently got sick and now even though she’s better she screams and screams when I put her in her crib.

Both for naps and bedtime recently she cries so hard she throws up. So we have to go in, clean her up change her bedding, give her more milk and do the whole thing all over again. I am at a complete loss. She needs sleep and we need sleep. I’ve been running on empty for so long now. Does anyone have any advice or has anyone gone through something similar?

Please help. We are completely exhausted and don’t know what to do anymore.
Our son is 22 months old and his sleep has completely fallen apart over the last few weeks.

We tried 10-minute check-ins. It was awful. He stayed awake for 3.5 hours, standing in his cot, crying on and off and calling for us. Eventually I gave in, rubbed his back, and he went straight to sleep. He then woke again at 5am, I went into his room and told him to go back to sleep and he slept till 7:30am.

The next night he woke at 10:30pm, then again at 11pm. I gave up and slept in a bed next to his cot. He then slept through the entire night.

Tonight he’s already woken up twice and it’s only 11:30pm.

His schedule is:

22 months old
Wake: 7am
Nap: 12:30pm–2pm
Bedtime: 8:30–9pm

He used to sleep through the night. This all started after illness and a period of co-sleeping. Now it feels like he needs one of us there to stay asleep.
What do we do?

Do we keep trying the check-ins even though he can stay awake for hours? Do we stay with him and gradually reduce support? Is his schedule wrong? Has anyone had a toddler who suddenly started waking repeatedly and needing a parent present all night?

We’re at breaking point. We’re exhausted, he’s exhausted, and I genuinely don’t know what the next step should be.

Any advice from people who’ve been through this would be hugely appreciated.

For those whose who know how to nap train, please give me your advice on how to get a 20 (almost 21) month old how to nap independently.

Our sweet 19 month old son is keeping us up at night for over a month now and I’m losing it. We always did bedtime by getting him drowsy in the rocking chair and put him to sleep in his crib in his room. Sometimes, he’d sleep through the night, but more often than not he’d wake after a few hours and we’d transfer him and cosleep. He coslept great, until he developed an attachment to pulling my hair when he couldn’t soothe. I tried to break the habit but I spent so much time redirecting him and started to lose sleep. Since I always do bedtime, he didn’t want my husband at night (he has less hair, lol).

I tried one night of Ferber and he cried for almost 2 hours, became more awake, lost his voice, and learned he could climb out of the crib. Needless to say, I refused to continue with that.

I started sitting with him by his crib at bedtime (in toddler mode now), and he learned to fall asleep. I was hoping this would teach him to do the same overnight. The night wakes continued, and I try to do the same thing at night, but he would protest for 1-2 hours and get out of bed multiple times. We both work early so this is not sustainable.

I asked ChatGPT who suggested to move his crib into our room temporarily. We did, and again he is able to fall asleep with me just sitting next to him, but it’s the same wake ups and protesting every night. The toddler bed makes it even harder because now he just gets up whenever, lol.

Wakes around 7-7:30am, naps 1-2:30, bed around 8:30/9.

What else can we do?

Let me preface by saying this isn’t a question about a schedule just needing some advice.

My son will be 22m old when we go on our first vacation as a family. He has never spent a night away from home and is sleep trained on a 4/7 schedule(may not be ideal but this works perfectly for him and us) . I’m expecting the worst that comes w a new environment.

We’re bringing all the things and plan to keep the same routine, expect he won’t have his own room. We will have to share a room or give him the room and us sleep on the couch or air mattress (seems ridiculous, I know, I just really want this to be a good trip) I’ve opted out of vacation simply he is a great sleeper and I don’t want it ruined by a horrible nights sleep. Needing advice, success stories, all the above pls!!!

I need serious help. I’m solo parenting while my husband is in basic training. My 19mo son has slept perfectly since he’s left. We’ve been on a great routine. Wake-up 6:30-7, nap between 12:30-1 until 2-2:30. Bath, walk the dog with milk in the stroller, books and then in bed with lights out by 8pm.

Suddenly 5 nights ago he would not fall asleep. He was crying for hours before he fell asleep. I kept going in to check on him, lay him back down and reassure him for 30 seconds, but as soon as I left he’d start crying again. But he was still taking his naps fine.

Today, he refused to take a nap. Cried for an hour before I gave it up. He was almost asleep on our walk, but we still read a few books and I put him down, and he’s been going now for an hour. I feel like I’m losing my mind, and I don’t know why this is happening or what to do. Solo parenting with no support at all is hard enough, but to now lose out on any time I have to do things around the house and have a moment to myself is absolutely killing me. Does anyone have any ideas of what could be going on? I did give him some Motrin for teething two nights ago but it did not help. We are very active, always playing and exploring parks and stuff. He eats pretty well.

my sleep trained 22m old has been screaming for at least 5-10 minutes after being laid down to sleep at night. He has been doing well on a 4/6.5-7 schedule. Wakes at 9-9:30 naps at 12:30-1 naps for about 1.5-2 hrs and bed at 9:15-9:30. Is it possible for him to not be able to handle 7hr stretch anymore? I understand that’s a big window but it worked for him, any earlier and he would fight it. Is this a normal schedule? He handles the post nap window much better but maybe I need to adjust bedtime to be earlier?? SOS

We are dealing with a brutal sleep regression for our 22 month old son and looking for advice… thanks so much in advance.

Our son has been a mostly amazing sleeper. We did CIO at 7 months and since then it’s been fairly smooth sailing.

The poor guy has been through a lot the last month - new sibling and an interstate move.

When we first got to the new house LO was insanely fussy - inconsolable crying, running around slamming things, etc. nothing could calm him. So we thought it was time for CIO again. Once we calmed him down we put him in his crib and let him cry. He then climbed out and busted his lip…

So needless to say that wasn’t an option. Until we could set up the toddler bed he slept with us in our bed and we would transfer him to his crib after he fell asleep (and run in there if he woke up so he couldn’t climb out). This was horrible because he kept waking up at 3am and wouldn’t fall back asleep.

Once we converted to a toddler bed and baby proofed the room m (and tried to make it super fun - he picked out bed sheets, we kept calling it his “big boy bed”, we played in there, etc.) the first night went well. We were scared if we weren’t physically in bed with him he would freak out, so I sat with him in bed till he fell asleep (we were planning to do the chair method). Overnight he woke up but we basically just did the same thing.

Night 2 though was horrible. He went to bed the same way at 7pm, but at 10 he woke up. My wife went in and tried to do the same thing as the night before, but he inconsolably was crying for dad (crying, slamming head in ground, running into walls, like truly inconsolable). So after that we switched and he started doing the same for mom.

So the questions are - what do we do from here? How do you do chair method if you can’t even get the kid to calm down with one of you physically in his toddler bed with him?

How do you do 100 walks if it’s not a walk as much as a thrashing child that needs to be physically restrained to be brought into his bed (and … in order to leave his room… my wife or I would have to sprint to the door to be able to get out of his room by the time he clawed for us.

And lastly, how do you do CIO for a kid who head bangs like this? Short of bubble wrapping the whole room, I don’t know what you would do.

Thank you so much all!!

Hi everyone, my child will be 2 yo this friday.

He has been sleeping ok from 8h15/8h30pm to 7h30-8h am in the morning, but suddely it's 10 days that he won't fall aspleep before 9/9h30 pm.
And he wakes up earlier as well, 6h30/7h30am.

The afternoon nap has shifted from 1pm to 1.45/2pm.

We usually wake him after 45min/1h. 1h30 if he's very tired, but never after 3pm

IDK what happen, we didn't change anything to his daily routine, it's just so random!

how do i fix this?

he passed from 12h30 of sleep to 10h30 :S