Returning to regular bedtime sleep?
Before the holidays, our son would go to sleep at night without a fuss on his own. We'd finish his bedtime routine, say good night, and leave his room. Sometimes, if he was not tired, he'd talk to himself, play with some toys, and ultimately drift off to sleep on his own.
During the holidays, we were down in LA/San Diego, and his routine was different. When we got back, he also started standing in his crib. Initially, we were afraid that he wouldn't be able to get down, so the first few nights, he got up, started wailing, and we'd go into his room to put him back down. But he got right back up, and we had to return to put him back down. It must have taken about 8-10 tries the first night. Within the next few days, he figured out how to get down, so we decided that we did not need to go back in to help him.
So we've gone back to the routine of saying good night and leaving his room for the night. However, he just doesn't seem to want to go to sleep at night! He cries and cries until he's tired and ultimately falls asleep. Initially, it was taking 45 min or so (of hard wailing!). The time seems to go down - one night, it was down to 10 mins. But in the last few days, it seems to have reverted to 30-40 minutes of crying over the last 10 days or so.
Is this just a phase? Do we need to wait it out? How long will he do this for?
1 Answers
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All I can say is that with our 1 year old, we've had our bedtime routines thrown out a few times already. At around that age, we had some troublesome teething and early separation anxieties, and for a while bedtime routines were on their head, there was a lot of clinging and wailing. Our pediatrician suggested that closing the child's bedroom door might make anxieties worse. So for a while there we went to her and comforted her a lot.
Everything is a phase... but what other reasons might there be to your child being unhappy? Teething not an issue?
I don't think that teething has been the issue... Not sure what else it could have been.
In the last week, his night time sleep got a lot better. But, he caught a cold over the weekend, so yesterday night was bad again.... : (
- Evelyn, Jan 25, 2010