2 year sleep regression

[Anonymous]

DD will be two in a month. All of a sudden bedtime is a nightmare, she’s fighting naps and waking up in the night or starting the day at 5am.

If I leave her to cry the crying becomes extreme. All she wants is someone to lie with her but that’s not sustainable.

How do you solve this? We never had it with our older kid.

[Anonymous]

Tell us her schedule so we can give advice. We sit with our kid until she falls asleep. It’s not the end of the world.

[Anonymous]

Lots of outside play time… running around

[Anonymous]

Time. Some of them sleep worse than newborns.

[Anonymous]

Honestly at this age, if it's coming out of nowhere, it's almost always a schedule issue. Some kids need more or less sleep than others so you may just need to make some adjustments.
Good luck, it can be a rough ride sometimes.

[Anonymous]

Before this started her schedule was very consistent:

6:30 AM Wakeup
11:30 AM - 1:30 PM Nap
6:30-7:00 PM Bedtime

She goes to daycare and they keep kids very active, prioritize going out in all weather etc. She loves to walk and walks all over the city vs. being in a stroller so she's getting a lot of movement.

Now she is fighting bedtime, waking up around midnight screaming bloody murder and hard to soothe and waking up more around 5:30am. The nap is hanging on by a thread.

[Anonymous]

I think more than 10 hours awake time is probably a good start. Since you can’t control the daycare nap schedule as much, I would push bedtime later. Many kids only need 10-11 hours with a nap. I think 7:30 at the earliest, 6 hours between nap and bed. It’ll take some time to adjust, but this does seem like a schedule issue. Also think it’s pretty young to drop a nap, I think when you increase daily awake time that would hopefully become less of an issue too.

[Anonymous]

It could be a schedule issue, but it you try making those adjustments and it doens't help, you can also work on her ability to fall asleep on her own.

Around this age, we started experimenting a little bit with stuff like nightlights, letting her look at picture books in bed for a bit (something for her to do when we left the room that felt comforting), or encouraging her to sing to herself or talk to her stuffed animals. I remember we also got a star projector at one point that helped (the stars moved and it would kind of hypnotize her to sleep) and also tried playing music in her room. Whatever we could do to help ease that transition from our bedtime ritual with her to her falling asleep.

We also would have some short periods of time where we might go ahead and lie with her until she fell asleep. If she had bad dreams, we'd do this. Also if there'd been any household disruption that might be making her need a bit more contact with us. But it would be maybe 1-3 nights and then we'd go back to encouraging her to fall asleep on her own.

If she's crying and crying, Ferber technique is worth looking at. I know people freak when they say that name, but it's actually great for this age (I wouldn't use it on a newborn) because the idea is that you provide reassurance but then encourage them to go back to sleep on their own (and then extend the time between going in to give them chances to fall asleep on their own). You don't need the book, just find the system in a blog post or something. I think it would be a good approach for a 2 or 3 year old who is asking for you to stay until they fall asleep every single night -- you are right that's not sustainable forever and they do need to develop some skills in this area.