Split nights: when your baby likes to party

It's 2am and your darling baby is up and ready to party. Do you try to get them back to sleep or do you surrender, hop up and watch some Kardashians?

Is it something you need to actively work on, or do you let it ride out?

The midnight parties are what we call Split Nights in the biz. And they are relatively common in babies and young toddlers, but if they are happening a lot - say more than a few nights a week over 2-3 weeks - then it's often something that we can work on to fix.

Split nights are usually a sign that timing is off somewhere. The two driving forces to sleep are circadian rhythm and sleep pressure or drive. Our circadian clock is our body clock, the way that we are biologically wired to tell night from day. And sleep pressure builds up throughout the day- naps take the edge off - and we should have enough sleep pressure to fall asleep and stay asleep (as much as can be biologically and developmentally expected) in the night.

When our babies wake up for a party, that tells us that their sleep pressure has worn off. So they had enough sleep pressure to fall asleep, but when waking between sleep cycles, they don't have enough in the bank to send them back to sleep. They need to have a party for a couple of hours to build that pressure up again.

I remember the split night days - they weren't a super regular occurence in our household but I do remember surrendering a few times and making a cup of tea and having a piece of toast at who-knows-what-hour.

Okay, so say you've been dealing with it for too long - here's what you can do to play around with it.

• Consider your child's sleep totals. Are they taking a lot of naps in the day or are you spending time resettling them for naps when they could be up and ready to go?

• Consider their stage of development. Do they perhaps need less sleep than you think? Has your daily rhythm fallen behind their natural progression, and it's time to catch up by dropping a nap or lessening nap totals

• We want to condense the night sleep. So, at the same time as not resettling for naps and taking the pressure off long naps in the day, we want to push bedtime back that little bit later. You can start with just 15 min at a time.

• At the same time as pushing bedtime later, we want to have a consistent wake up time. This will be hard in the beginning if you've had a split night and you're inclined to let them sleep in in the morning, but this is how we will break the cycle. Try to keep it consistent. It doesn't have to be forever.

• Once the nights are condensed, and the split nights have resolved, you can start to shift bedtime earlier by 15 min or so every couple of days, and you can either keep the morning wake or experiment with letting it go.

Split nights can feel brutal, but they won't be forever. I hope this helps!

If you are still struggling with split nights or other things you can't quite nut out on your own; you can book a consult with us here.