When your toddler is awake for long periods in the night or won't fall back into deep sleep

Dr Pamela Douglas5th of Dec 20245th of Dec 2024

australian first nations child sleeping

Is your toddler showing one or more of the following exhausting behaviours during the night, as a pattern over time? Is your toddler

Awake for long periods
Breastfeeding for long periods
Unable to fall back into deep sleep for long periods
Waking as soon as you put her down
Only sleeping when in contact with your body?

Then your toddler has developed excessive night waking, which can result in quite awful parental sleep deprivation! Your toddler's two sleep regulators have become disrupted. Her sleep pressure isn't high enough to sustain blocks of sleep, because her body clock is out of sync with yours, and with day and night.

If this is your situation, a reset of your little one's body clock is required! It might take a couple of weeks to return to normal night waking, as you try out various strategies and do a reset of her body clock, but families typically find that nights - and their lives - with their little one become easier and more enjoyable, once they've done this.

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When your toddler won't settle back into the cot at night

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Why won't your toddler settle back into the cot at night?

Cots often don't work for families, especially as your little one moves through the second year of life. It's not that your toddler is resisting sleep, or intentionally resisting the cot, though you might hear this.

Here are reasons why toddlers might start waking whenever they are put into a cot.

You might have been told that you should be putting your little one into the cot drowsy but awake, so that he doesn't develop a 'bad habit' of going to sleep at the breast, with the bottle, or being held in your arms. (This is part of the sleep training approach.) Unfortunately, trying to put your toddler down in the cot drowsy but awake can be very unhelpful. Many (or maybe even most) families find their...

When your toddler is awake for long periods in the night or won't fall back into deep sleep

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Why won't your toddler settle back into the cot at night?

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