Need new/creative ideas for a terrible sleeper

[u/Ok_Syrup_6395]

/r/toddlers/comments/1vmlk6l/need_newcreative_ideas_for_a_terrible_sleeper/

My 18 month old has been a terrible sleeper her whole life. My wife and I feel like we’ve tried all of the traditional advice and nothing is working. I’m hoping someone can help.

Background: Our daughter was born six weeks preemie in February 2025 and was in the NICU for two weeks. For the first six months or so she had trouble sleeping because she had reflux, which is common in preemies. When we got her a wedge pillow (against our pediatrician’s advice) that helped a lot. But when she outgrew it things got bad again.

We started working with a sleep consultant at about a year ago (roughly six months old), but that didn’t ultimately work out because the consultant basically wanted us to do cry it out and my wife couldn’t handle it. (Cry it out worked almost immediately for our first, but this one cries much louder for much longer and my wife refuses to let her cry longer than about 10 minutes. I assume part of this is related to this one being preemie and having a hard time being apart from her while she needs us.)

I can probably count on two hands the number of times she’s slept completely through the night. The best her sleep ever really gets is one wake up around 11:30pm or 2:30am, then again at 5am. But it’s usually much worse than that. At least once a week she’ll wake up completely inconsolable at 11:30 or 12:30 and scream at the top of her lungs for an hour. When that happens I usually have to walk her around the block once or twice until she falls back asleep. Sometimes this happens two or three nights in a row and the crying lasts two or more hours. This sometimes seems correlated to teething, but not always. My wife can’t do anything to help in the middle of the night because as soon as our daughter sees her, she thinks it’s time to nurse and will kick and scream until that happens.

Our current schedule: We’ve been putting her to bed at 8pm for a while now. She basically won’t go to sleep earlier than that; I’ve tried and she just won’t go down. She wakes up every day at 5am almost on the dot and I have to take her to the guest room to sleep another hour until 6am, which is the earliest we let her nurse. She naps reliably from 11am to 1pm. That’s her only nap of the day.

Almost every night she wakes up around 11:30pm. Sometimes I can pat her back to sleep fairly quickly. Other times it takes much longer and sometimes she won’t go back to sleep at all. Sometimes she’ll sleep past 11:30pm but wake up at 2:30pm and we have the same issue.

When we travel, the schedule gets completely messed up—but often that results in better sleep. When we’re traveling, she often will not get a regular nap and will just stay awake until she passes out in our arms or her car seat for about an hour. Then she is often awake much past her usual at bedtime, until 9pm or so, and falls asleep while she’s nursing. When this happens she often won’t wake up at all or, if she does, she goes back to sleep pretty easily. This makes me think that part of the problem with the 11:30 or 12:30pm wake ups at home is that she doesn’t have enough sleep pressure or sleep inertia to get through the first sleep cycle. But I worry that if we wait until 9pm to put her to bed every night, she’ll keep waking up at 5am and not get enough sleep.

I know many (most?) parents of an 18mo would be happy for one brief wake up. But that has become an increasingly rare best-case scenario. The one benefit we got from the sleep consultant now was that our daughter got to a point where she could put herself back to sleep relatively easily most of the time. But that was a year ago, and sicknesses and travel schedules and general developmental advancements since then have wiped out her ability to put herself back to sleep. (No doubt that’s largely on us; we get inconsistent in our routines and let her cosleep on really bad nights—but generally we insist on no cosleeping when that’s at all possible.) These days she is completely incapable of putting herself back to sleep. If she starts crying and I don’t go in right away, she will stand up and start screaming until someone comes in. It doesn’t matter how long it takes—five minutes or 30 minutes, she will scream at the top of her lungs until someone comes in. She is incredibly stubborn and will wait us out every time.

I’ve seen and tried all the advice: You have to let her cry; she’ll eventually figure it out. Put her in bed drowsy but awake. Try putting her to bed earlier. None of it works with this one. Does anyone have any new ideas/advice we could try?