thank you so much everyone! Your suggestions and ideas are extremely helpful. Everything I was reading up on line wasn’t nearly as thoughtful and reasonable as what you guys have proposed here. I’m going to go home and print out this thread and highlight everything I think it will work for us. & I will write it down and I will try especially, the preemptive waking up. That is brilliant. I have never even heard of that before and that is a wonderful idea. I also like the wake up spot that she can make for herself so that she can get up and color or read without waking anybody up. That is absolutely fantastic. Again thank you so much and I’m so glad I asked you guys for some help. And just to clarify the brother that she shares a room with her twin brother. The baby either sleeps in her own crib or in our room in her bassinet if its really cold because the fuenace doesn’t really heat up her Nursery very well. Again thank you so much and I hope you guys have a wonderful day
Add me to the “stop treating sleep like something she can control” crowd. You wouldn’t respond well if someone yelled at you or punished you or put you on a behavior improvement plan for not being able to go back to sleep immediately after getting her back to bed. It would make you stressed and unhappy, and make it even harder for you to go to sleep, because after all it’s not like you can* force* yourself to sleep.
And it worries me some that she’s not just waking you up, but waking you up *crying *because she can’t sleep. That says to me that either she’s internalized that being able to sleep is a horrible, awful thing she’s doing just to be bad…or that she’s scared. I was an erratic, segmented sleeper as a kid, and being the only one awake in a dark, silent, empty-feeling house scared the loving shit out of me when I was small. Laying there in the dark and silence with nothing to do but wonder about every single little noise and dwell on awful things I was sure weren’t real (but might be!) just scared me even worse. And when I was scared I wanted comfort from my parents and woke them up. I’m sure it drove them up the damn wall, and around her age they told me I could come in if I wanted, but I had to be quiet because they were sleeping. So I started just dragging a pillow and blanket into their room on the really bad nights and sleeping on their floor.
Things got much better once they got me a tv for my room. I agree with WhyNot that it’s generally bad for sleep patterns, but having a little light and noise and movement, even knowing that I* could* have a little light and noise and movement, was a huge comfort and made it a lot easier for me to go back to sleep in my own room.
Agreed with most of the stuff here including ditching the reward chart. She’s obviously unhappy about waking up so there’s no need to punish her for it even passively by denying her a gold star.
If she’s allowed to sit on the couch after waking up and read or something, I wouldn’t get worried if she starts falling asleep there. After all, your real goal is that she gets a night’s rest and it ultimately doesn’t matter if she’s sleeping in her bed, your bed or the couch so long as she’s sleeping. I’d probably try and keep the activities very simple just because the last thing you want is her getting drowsy, then feeling obligated to clean/straighten up stuff and waking herself back up in the process. Better she fall asleep with a book on her chest.
Finally, the simple fact that you care enough about this to ask about it here, research and solicit advice means you’re obviously engaged as a parent so don’t worry about if you’re doing it right.
**Whynot **said what I was going to say, only better. Just be cool about it. She’s 6, she can entertain herself without waking you up every night if you set her up with the tools to do so. I assume you have a living room or some place she can go and quietly watch tv or read a book in the middle of the night.
Ding ding ding! It really can be this simple, if you let it.
Sleeping is one of the things I won’t punish my kids over, right along with bathroom stuff and eating which, for me, is the biggest one. As it happens, I’m dealing with all three issues in just one (of three) of my kids all at the same time right now. My three year old has recently decided that his sleep schedule should start between 11:30 and midnight and end at around 9 o’clock in the morning. It’s a bitch, especially on days the baby wakes up multiple times because, ideally, I’d go to bed shortly after the 8 o’clock bedtime I so desperately want the three year old to adhere to and then 4 am feedings wouldn’t seem so bad.
I’d just tuck him in his room and go to bed anyway but he’s figured out every other baby safety measure we’ve employed (baby gates, about 18 months; outlet covers, around the same time; the little plastic things installed inside cabinet doors so they can’t be so easily opened, 2 years) that I just don’t have any confidence that the cover on his doorknob will contain him and I won’t wake up to broken eggs in the oven, flour all over everything, and the effects of an attempted PB&J spread on the kitchen walls. At least you have age on your side and probably don’t have to worry so much about her being awake by herself.
I agree with Jophiel that you maybe shouldn’t leave activities that need to be cleaned up. Just let her know it’s okay to sit quietly and read a book if she can’t sleep.
** Silver Fire **. You should try turning the door knob around and locking it from the outside. Now he will probably quickly learn how to jimmy it open but it would give him something to do at night lol.
Change bedtime to 11?
They have to get up at 6:30 for school so I don’t think 11 pm is a good bedtime. That wouldn’t give her more than 7.5hrs of sleep if she sleeps at all. I think kids are supposed to get more than that.
I was thinking moving it earlier, actually. Isn’t 10 kind of a late time for an active six year old?
Also, maybe the bedtime routine is taking too long? Maybe do scripture & prayers after dinner, and then a shorter story-time right after the bath?
But what do I know.
You have my absolute sympathy and empathy as we’re going through the same thing. We have a three year old (3yrs & 2 months) who we transitioned to a toddler bed and, to him, this means bedtime is now optional and immediately pops out the moment your back is turned. He screams if we close the door but if we leave it open, he trucks on down the hallway or into the other bedrooms. We actually wouldn’t mind him being out of bed and playing quietly so much if he kept it to his bedroom so we’re planning on getting a gate for his doorway at least.
He used to sleep fine in his crib (lights off, door shut) but now that he has the freedom to get out of bed, he goes ape about the lights being off or his door closed. I think it’s not so much a fear thing (he has various nightlights including a wall light and ones he can turn on/off) as much as a “I want to play and hang out in the house and I know I could except you won’t let me” thing.
Two other things came to mind
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Temperature. If you have the heat cranked up, and are dressing her in warm PJs, and/or flannel sheets, she may be getting too hot. Remember that heat rises so the top bunk is considerably warmer than the lower one. Consider dressing her in lighter pajamas and giving her lighter bedding and seeing if this helps.
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Noise - Crying indicates that she may be fearful. And at night when the house is quiet, and everyone else is asleep, little noises can be very frightening. Try running a fan or play white noise (you can buy a sound machine for $20 on Amazon, or download white noise from iTunes and play it on some cheap speakers), which will help block out all the house creakings, snoring, etc.
If I had your challenge I would make up a little bed for her in my room where she could tiptoe in to sleep if she was scared and couldn’t sleep in the middle of the night. Maybe a cot right next to my bed so she could feel close to me.
The more safe and accepted she feels, the easier it will be for her to grow out of it. The more frightened and unsafe and wrong she feels, the longer it will last and the more likely it will scar her.
Speaking as a scarred, sensitive insomniac myself.
I can’t believe I didn’t think of mentioning this! It saved our life three separate times, when Widget went through wide-awake-at-4am phases. The version we did was a little different, though: we went in an hour before she was due to wake up, rather than 15 minutes, and rather than actually waking her up we just poked her till she murmured and wiggled, then let her go back into deeper sleep.
It absolutely worked, every time. After a week of this, her sleep pattern had reset itself and everyone went back to sleeping normally. So if DSeid’s variation doesn’t work for your daughter, it might be worth trying ours. (Although I have to warn you that apparently it doesn’t work at all on our younger daughter…)
I wish I had known this, lo those many years ago. I’m filing this away for my friends with young kids.
Mine will sometimes take his blanket and his Pooh bear and curl up at the end of the hall right outside our bedroom door (when we aren’t even in there ). And sometimes I’ll just let him fall asleep there and move him later.
Baby gates, ugh. He didn’t even figure out that he could climb over them, like other kids do. Nope, he figured out that if you put a toy in the doorway and push the door closed, the gate pops right out. Or if you put enough pressure on this one particular spot, the gate’s door flies open.
He’s a climber, too. There is no such thing as “out of his reach.”
Obviously nothing magical about the 15 minutes and the wake up should be just barely, pretty much like you did. Opening eyes and mumbling is all you want. Thing one to remember is that the waking up is not the problem. That is normal sleep cycles. We wake up several times and typically fall right back to sleep never even remembering we had been awake. This sounds like it is after a first sleep cycle. More commonly the issue then is night terrors: these happen in kids who are going to bed overtired the deep sleep phase before waking is so deep that they do not quite make it into the waking world. They act possessed, screaming and looking right through you (or sometimes sleepwalking), but are not really awake, then wake fully and go back to sleep easily. They do not remember it the next day. This child seems not to have that (for that the best approach is going to bed earlier although scheduled awakening is sometimes used there too). She instead seems to have had a hard time going back to sleep one night and now when she wakes up she is getting anxious that it will happen again and that anxiety is self-fulfilling and keeping her up. Hence a week or two of eliminating the issue (and she will not remember your waking her) will get her over that fear and back to her baseline good sleep habits. But there are many good approaches to choose between.
This is very different that the circumstance Jophiel is in, an issue with sleep onset. For that there is pretty much no question that some variation of “extinction” would be recommended by almost anyone. Variations range from hardcore holding the door shut and letting him go ape until he collapses, to the other gentle extreme - sitting on his bed until he falls asleep at first then sitting across the room, then in the doorway, then in the doorway without your face visible, then in the hallway only responding every so often with an “I’m here, love you, g’night.” (Of course doing that you sometimes find yourself asleep on the hallway floor at 3 am.) And many points in between depending on what any particular family can be consistent with. All need the defined ritual as part of bedtime. Some advise holding off bedtime a little at first to make falling asleep a little bit easier to associate with these rituals having preceded the go to bed part and then methodically but somewhat rapidly moving back earlier as they’ve begun to stick.
Good Luck!
I have no idea if this is relevant to the discussion, but I think your daughter probably isn’t going to bed early enough considering she has to get up at 6:30am. The usual caveats stand about every child being different, but all things being equal a 6 year old should get 10 hours of sleep a night. I wonder if you would be better served by putting her to bed at 9; that might
a) change her sleep cycles so she doesn’t wake up at 2am, or
b) give her an extra hour of sleep total, even if she does still wake up in the middle of the night.
That said, as stated by others it’s probably just a phase. Good luck to you, I hope you get it resolved soon!
Look like you’ve gotten lots of good suggestions to try. As I’m sure you know by now, parenting is more a method of trial and error than anything else!
We did something similar when my 9-year-old was waking us up in the middle of the night. I kept some blankets and a pillow by my side of the bed and told him that if he woke up in the middle of the night he could make himself a bed and sleep (or read - there was a booklight too) on the floor, but under no circumstances should he wake us up. That went on for a while. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I think he gradually transitioned himself back to sleeping through the night in his own bed.
I had a problem with a non-sleeping 6-year-old also. It solved itself…she turned 7.
We went through this when my son was that age – maybe a little younger. He wanted to get in bed with us, guaranteeing disrupted sleep for me or my husband. I set up extra sofa cushions next to the bed and told him there wasn’t enough room for all of us in the bed, but he could “bunk” on the cushions if he wanted. It only took a couple of times before he stopped asking, “Can I get in bed with you?” and began asking “Can I bunk in here?” He eventually grew out of it altogether, of course.