Ask Malia: Toddler can't fall asleep at night

My son Henry is 2.5 years old. As of two weeks ago he has had difficulties going to bed/falling asleep. He goes to preschool full-time. He naps at school 2.5 hours. On weekends he will sleep up to 3 hours for a nap. I put him to bed at 9 p.m. and he would typically fall asleep within 20 minutes. He now will take up to an hour to go to sleep. I am confused about this sudden change.

Henry has a strict bed time routine that starts at 8:15. We read books for a half an hour and then take a bath from 8:45-9:00. He has not had any life changes. I have wanted to potty train him but I am apprehensive because I want his bed time routine to stabilize again. He typically wakes up at 7 a.m. and averages 12 hours of sleep a day. Any advice you can give me to understand why this is happening and tips to get back to our original routine would be greatly appreciated.

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I suspect what is going on has to do with an imbalance of day and night sleep, along with changing sleep needs.

At 2.5, it is not uncommon for toddlers to begin needing less daytime sleep (i.e. a shorter nap), and a longer, more restorative nighttime rest, as they begin the long transition to ultimately dropping their daytime nap altogether at age 3 or 4. However, when toddlers have a very long daytime nap, this process gets interrupted. A daytime nap of 2.5 to 3 hours is generally too long for toddlers of this age. It prevents them from falling asleep at an appropriate bedtime, which leads to shorter night sleep and more overtiredness. This is a vicious cycle, because an overtired child will want to nap even longer, which will result in later bedtimes, more overtiredness, longer naps, and on and on.

I recommend shortening his daytime nap to under two hours for 3-5 days. On those days, move bedtime earlier by 45 minutes to an hour. He'll be sleeping easier in no time.

I think you would find my ebook Ready, Set, Sleep very helpful. I encourage you to check it out, read the section on correcting overtiredness, and let me know if you have more questions.

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Need more sleep? My e-book Ready, Set, Sleep: 50 Ways to Help Your Child Sleep So You Can Sleep Too is chock-full of mom-tested solutions to help babies and toddlers start sleeping well, tonight!

Hello Kindergarten, Goodbye Nap

While my family recovers from our back-to-school cold, please enjoy this timely post from my archives on helping new kindergarteners adjust to life without a daily afternoon nap.

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My 5-year-old just started all day kindergarten and is now having to go without her regular nap after lunchtime. She is so cranky when she comes home from school. How late is too late for a 5-year-old to nap? Should I let her take a nap when she gets home at 3 p.m. or keep her up to avoid ruining bedtime?

Gloria

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Hi Gloria,

Most kids won't have this problem, because only 20% of five-year-old children still nap. Many all day pre-K and kindergarten programs offer a brief afternoon "rest" period, and for many children, this will be sufficient.

Unfortunately, the minority who still take daily naps are in a tough spot. The late afternoon hours after school are generally too late for a young child to nap. Even 30 or 45 minutes of sleep will likely make it hard for them to be in bed early enough to get their required 10-12 hours of sleep. If a child is napping at 4 p.m., it's unlikely that they will be in bed before 9 p.m.

On the other hand, tweens and teens who need to stay awake later for homework and extracurricular activities may benefit from an after-school snooze. But for the under 6-set, late naps just make bedtime a battlefield.

But I'm sympatheic, because no one wants a cranky kindergartner moping around the house (or melting down while you're trying to make dinner). So what can you do?

My little scholar on her first day of school.Take the long route home from school. A "car" nap of 10-15 minutes may be sufficient to refresh a tired child without ruining bedtime.

Offer a quiet rest period after school. A book, a snack, quiet play, or a snuggle with a pet may help her refresh and unwind.

Move bedtime earlier. When children stop napping, they are ready for bed earlier. And with a longer, more restorative nighttime rest, she may have an easier time giving up the nap.

Switch to a.m. kindergarten. A 5-year-old who really depends on an afternoon nap may do better in a half-day kindergarten program. If full-day kindergarten is tiring for her, she won't get much out of the afternoon portion of the day anyway.

Don't miss a post! Subscribe to The Well Rested Family to have sleep news, tips, and tactics delivered to your inbox or feed reader by clicking here.

Need more sleep? My e-book Ready, Set, Sleep: 50 Ways to Help Your Child Sleep So You Can Sleep Too is chock-full of mom-tested solutions to help babies and toddlers start sleeping well, tonight!

Ask Malia: Three Quick Questions From Across The Pond

Dear Malia,

We live in a small town in England and it is very difficult to receive sleep or lactation advice out here. Though everyone here is super nice and helpful, I would like more professional advice.

Liam is our first child so it is all new for us! He is breastfeed and is not sleeping through the night yet, which is fine. I do not want to push him, and we are planning to start him solids at six months.

The issue is, he naturally gets up at 8 a.m., so our day starts later than all the sample sleep schedules I see out there. I try to fit in three naps a day but by the time of the third nap, he might as well go down for the night.

Here are my questions. I hope you have time to help!

1. For a five-month-old, is it better to have two shorts naps ex (9:30 – 10:30 a.m., and 1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.) then bedtime at 5.30 p.m. OR three shorter naps ex (9:00 – 10:00 a.m., 1:00 – 2:00 p.m., and 5 – 5:30 p.m.) then sleep at 7:30 p.m.?

I know it seems really similar but I find if he sleeps at 5:30 p.m. sometimes he will just sleep through the night, he doesn't want to get up!  So far either way, he gets up around 7 or 8 a.m.

Most children his age have three naps per day, one in the a.m., one after lunch, and short nap (30-40 min) around dinnertime. I would lean toward maintaining a three-nap routine if possible. If he seems extra tired, ill, or like he need the extra sleep on a particular day, you can always put him down at 5:30 p.m. But you run the risk of having him start to wake up far too early if you put him down at 5:30 p.m. every night.

2. I currently am still rocking him to sleep but I really like your idea of holding him for 20 -25 mins, then shaving two mins per day. It’s the best idea I found so far as I do not want to try CIO. But generally I only need to rock/shush him for about five minutes and then he will fall asleep. Does this mean he is overtired?

No, it does not necessarily mean he is overtired (though he may well be). It means this process should be easy and quick for you! Just make sure you stay with him in his room until he is in a deep sleep for the first few days, which takes about 20 minutes.

3. I try to let him have a nap in his cot once or  twice a day, for about 30 - 45 mins. He will naturally wake up. But once a day, I will hold him so he will nap longer and sometimes if I let him, he can nap for three hours. So then I try to wake up him but, if I try to wake him up around two hours, he's mad! Is this because he is in deep sleep or he is overtired?

If his other naps are only 30-45 minutes long, he may not be getting enoug naptime in. So he may indeed be overtired, which can result in the crying when he wakes up. I would begin trying to encourage longer naps in his cot. One way to do this is to gently increase the amount of time he is awake before naps by 10 to 15 minutes per day. At nearly six months old, he may be able to stay awake for 2-3 hours between naps. Many times, babies need a shorter activity period in the morning but can stay awake longer midday. So you could try having him awake by 8, nap 1 by 10, nap 2 by 2, and a brief 3rd nap around 5:30 or 6 p.m.

Don't miss a post! Subscribe to The Well Rested Family to have sleep news, tips, and tactics delivered to your inbox or feed reader by clicking here.

Need more sleep? My e-book Ready, Set, Sleep: 50 Ways to Help Your Child Sleep So You Can Sleep Too is chock-full of mom-tested solutions to help babies and toddlers start sleeping well, tonight!

Tune In: Screen-Addicted Tweens?

Limits, schmimits. Though the American Academy of Pediatrics sternly advises parents to limit kids' recreational screen use to no more than two hours per day, it appears that parents are turning a deaf ear. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, kids ages eight to 18 spend upwards of seven-and-a-half hours daily using entertainment media. Even parents who do set limits admit that their kids use screens more than they'd like. Who hasn't succumbed to temptation and gratefully allowed kids to zone out in front of a DVD or video game during a long car drive or a boring dentist visit?

So what's the result of all this screen time? Authors and experts say that many tweens run the risk of dangerous screen addictions. I wrote about the trend in Too Much Tech? Tweens and Screen Addictions, for the September issue of ParentMap magazine, and I'll talk about it today on KING 5 Parent to Parent (Channel 6/16).

Tune in at 8:20 a.m. or catch it online at king5.com.

Ask Malia: Is It Sleep Regression?

Dear Malia,

Our son is now 6 months old. He started out a great little sleeper and by 4 months he was having sleep regression issues. We were able to get him to sleep from 6 p.m.-3:30 a.m., but then he would be up for an hour or two before going back to bed. We tried to correct that for about two weeks and did not get anywhere. Then he cut his first two teeth, now he is back to being up every couple of hours.

I tried to go back to the pacifier to help him soothe himself to sleep, but as soon as it falls out he wakes up crying. Now my husband is very frustrated that I gave him the pacifier back and have created this mess. I am not sure what to do to get him back on track now.

His daily routine is:

7 a.m.—wake up

8 a.m.-10 a.m.—nap 1

12 pm – 2 p.m.—nap 2

4 p.m. – 5 p.m.—nap 3

7 p.m. —begin bedtime routine. Change diaper and clothes. Go to the bedroom and cuddle/rock while he gets his bottle. After his bottle we cuddle a little bit more to make sure his belly doesn't hurt. By this point he is normally relaxed and will fall asleep with some patting. Some nights we can put him to bed with no problems and he will sleep until 3:30 a.m. Other nights he could be up every hour and very upset. We haven't been able to figure out how to keep him asleep. We tried giving him his pacifier back since that helps him fall asleep fast, but once it falls out he wakes up. 

Hope you can help—we really need some sleep!

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First, your situation is not uncommon. In fact, I suspected what was going on from the first few lines of your email, but peeking at his daily routine confirms it: I believe he is napping too much during the day. Although many parents believe that babies should nap for two hours at time, long naps like this start cutting into nighttime sleep quickly when there are two or three of them in one day. Once babies pass the newborn stage, many simply can’t take a couple of two-hour naps, plus a third nap, then go to bed at 7:30pm and sleep through the night. They just don’t need that much sleep. Even more importantly, they need enough awake time during the day to build up an appropriate drive to sleep all through the night.

"Undertiredness" often causes long night awakenings and fussy, on-and-off night sleep. I wrote about it in Ready, Set, Sleep and also wrote a blog post on the topic: Not Too Tired, Not Too Wired: Correcting Overtiredness and Undertiredness.

At six months, most babies can handle being awake for up to 2.5 hours at a time (though many need a shorter awake period first thing in the morning.) Many have two full naps, one morning and one afternoon, followed by a shorter nap around dinnertime.

I suggest a schedule as follows:

7 a.m. wake
8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. —nap 1
12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. —nap 2
5 p.m. to 5:45 pm—nap 3
Bedtime routine 7 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

Try keeping his morning and afternoon naps to 1-2 hours each, and aim o keep his total day sleep under five hours.

When extending his awake times, do so slowly (10-15 minutes per day). He will likely be quite tired for the first few days, but of you stay with it he will begin sleeping more soundly at night and have less trouble staying awake for longer during the day.

As for the pacifier, he is so close to the age when he can replug himself (as long as he is not swaddled). If he is swaddled and you don't want to stop swaddling, you'll have to determine whether you want to continue using the pacifier until you wean the swaddle, and his arms are free to replug himself. If you aren't swaddling, I would begin having him work on replugging during  the day to encourage that skill. Put him in his highchair or on his play mat with the pacifier in front of him and have him practice getting it himself.

Hope this is helpful. Please let me know if you have questions! And good luck!

Don't miss a post! Subscribe to The Well Rested Family to have sleep news, tips, and tactics delivered to your inbox or feed reader by clicking here.

Need more sleep? My e-book Ready, Set, Sleep: 50 Ways to Help Your Child Sleep So You Can Sleep Too is chock-full of mom-tested solutions to help babies and toddlers start sleeping well, tonight!