It's normal for toddlers to wake in the night
Many normal healthy toddlers wake regularly in the night.
It's hard when I tell parents this, because often they're very worried about how they'll cope. They might have heard that their child should be sleeping through from early in the first year of life.
But I need to be honest about what I know is the truth, both from my experience working with families over many years, and also from the research.
Most babies, and plenty of toddlers too, will wake every couple of hours during the night. At one year of age, depending on the research studies we look at, perhaps half of our little ones are sleeping through most nights. But the other half are still waking! By two years of age, most of our little ones are sleeping through most nights, but there are still some who wake regularly in the night. These toddlers are completely developmentally normal, just slower to completely consolidate their night-time sleep.
Once parents know that waking to their toddler in the night is a normal part of parenting, it's amazing how quickly they adapt. What really matters is that
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Everyone gets back to sleep quickly, after your little one has woken you
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Your toddler is not waking excessively.
It's best not to look at the clock in the night, because sometimes your toddler might sleep for more than two hours and other times less. Often (though not always) your toddler has a bigger block of uninterrupted sleep in the hours immediately after bedtime. This is another reason to work with your toddler's body clock so that his bedtime is closer to your own, and you benefit from that bigger block of sleep - if yours is a toddler who has that!
This is a challenging time of life, regardless, and you may feel more exhausted than you'd imagined possible a lot of the time! A great deal of self-compassion, and some ways of managing difficult thoughts and feelings, are required. You'll also need the support of others.
But trying to make your toddler not wake in the night often creates stress and distress around sleep, which worsens parental exhaustion. Because sleep training methods can disrupt our little ones' body clock settings, sleep training and all the advice that comes along with it (which you might not even identify as belonging to the sleep training approaches) often actually make sleep worse over time.
The quickest way to get your toddler back to sleep in the night is a breastfeed, if your toddler is breastfed. Some families use a bottle of milk, if their toddler is still bottle fed. (You can find out when you might stop the bottle in the night here.) Toddlers feed in the night as much for the sensory motor nourishment as for the milk, so it doesn't really help to try to separate out the two.
Selected references
In the studies below, it's important to remember that an average or a mean is just somewhere around the middle. There will be normal little ones who wake more, and normal little ones who wake less. Averages or means can be quite misleading!
| Authors | Year | Country | Summary of key findings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Santos et al | 2024 | Brazil | 40 - 62% of parents of over 5000 12-month-olds self-reported night waking in previous fortnight, on average twice a night. 6% reported more than 3 times a night |
| Paavonen et al | 2020 | Finland | Parents of 2,500 12-month-olds and 950 24-month-olds self-reported waking an average of twice a night at 12 months, once a night at 18 months and once a night at 2 years of age |
| Pennestri et al | 2018 | Canada | 43% of 388 mothers recruited in pregnancy were assessed by self-report at 12 months. 43% reported their baby did not sleep for 8 hours without waking. |
| Dias et al | 2018 | Systematic review | Studies that used direct measures (polysomnography or actigraphy) to measure night waking found2.5-49 night wakings between 6-12 months on average |
| Price et al | 2014 | Australia | 5107 parents of 0-1 year old children completed 24-h time-use diaries. Average no. of night wakes at 10-12 months was 0.7 times; at 15 months of age 0.5 times a night; at 2.5 years 0.2 times a night |
| Galland et al | 2012 | Systematic review | Night wakings at 11 months were on average 1.1 times a night (range 0-3.1); between 1-2 years = av 0.7 times a night (range 0-2.5 times a night). |
| Mindell et al | 2010 | 17 countries (online survey) | 29,287 parents completed internet-based Brief Infant Sleep Questionnaire, showing that night-wakings occurred on average twice a night for children in the first two years of life, and about 1.5 times a night for 3-5 year olds. No difference in night waking between predominantly Asian and predominantly Caucasian cohorts |
Dias CC, Figueriedo B, Rocha M, Field T. Reference values and changes in infant sleep-wake behaviour during the first 12 months of life: a systematic review. Journal of Sleep Research. 2018:doi:10.111/jsr.12654.
Galland BC, Taylor BJ, Elder DE, Herbison P. Normal sleep patterns in infants and children: a systematic review of observational studies. Sleep Medicine Reviews. 2012;16:213-222.
Mindell J, Sadeh A, Wiegand BH, T, Daniel YG. Cross-cultural differences in infant and toddler sleep. Sleep Medicine. 2010;11(3):274-280.
Paavonen JE, Saarenpaa-Heikkila O, Morales-Munoz I, Virta M, Hakala N, Polkki P, et al. Normal sleep development in infants: findings from two large birth cohorts. Sleep Medicine. 2020;69:145-154.
Pennestri M-H, Laganiere C, Bouvette-Turcot A-A, Pokhvisneva I, Steiner M, Jeaney MJ, et al. Uninterrupted infant sleep, development, and maternal mood. Pediatrics. 2018;142(6):e20174330.
Price A, Brown JE, Bittman M, Wake M, Quach J, Hiscock H. Children's sleep patterns from 0-9 years: Australian population longitudinal study. Archives of Disease in Childhood. 2014;99:119-125.
Santos IS, Eschevarria P, Tovo-Rodrigues L. Are nocturnal awakenings at age 1 predictive of sleep duration and efficiency at age 6: results from two birth cohorts. Sleep Medicine. 2024:100105.
