3 month old goes to bed too late! - Infant Care (up to 18 months old) Message Board

LEJ79 · 01-19-2008, 09:40 AM

My 3 month old insists on going to be after midnight every night. He will then sleep until 9 or 10 am, getting up once to eat. This would be fine, except that my husband and I both work and have to get up at 5:30 am. How can we get our son to go to bed earlier?

I wake him up when I go to work at 6:30 am to feed and change him, but then he goes right back to sleep. It doesn't make him want to go to bed any earlier. I've tried waking him up during the day, but he just cries and cries until he goes back to sleep. On the days that he does stay awake, he gets so overtired that it's terrible. Then, like last night, he cried for two hours before he finally went to sleep at 12:30 am. So, trying to wake him up and keep him up has not worked.

I've tried putting him down in his bed and letting him "play" by himself and I refuse to ineract with him after 10:30 pm. This has not worked either. He gets mad and cries and cries and cries.

Are we just eventually going to have to let him cry it out? I was told that we shouldn't do this before 4 months because he's not mature enough. Even then, I'm not sure if I'll be able to let him cry it out. He has GERD and the excessive crying is not good for that.

Help!! Any suggestions?

BioAdoptMom3 · 01-19-2008, 08:50 PM

This is very common with young babies. Chances are he will begin to naturally want to go to sleep earlier and earlier in the next month or two. Most babies begin to do that by the time they are about four months old. I know it seems like an eternity to you because you need to get to bed earlier yourself so you can get up early, but it really shouldn't be too much longer.

Nancy

LEJ79 · 01-20-2008, 07:17 AM

Thanks for the encouragement!

We usually give him a bath around 7:30 pm, then I feed him and put him to bed. He'll usually sleep for a couple of hours then before waking up around 10 pm. I was thinking that maybe we should try giving him his bath later so that when he falls asleep afterwards, he might stay asleep instead of waking up. Maybe we'll try giving him his bath around 10 pm tonight so that he'll be in bed by 11 pm. If that works, then we could slowly start moving the time up.

If that doesn't work, then I guess that we'll just have to keep trying and hope that this phase doesn't last much longer!

BioAdoptMom3 · 01-20-2008, 09:00 PM

Everything is worth a try. Good luck!

Nancy

LEJ79 · 01-21-2008, 06:59 AM

Moving his bath to a later time didn't work. He ended up not taking his normal two hour "nap" at that time of night (we tried to get him to sleep, but he was having none of it), but instead of going to bed earlier, he was just overtired and very cranky. He cried and cried and cried and it took us until 2 am to get him to sleep.

He is only getting about 13 hours of total sleep (day and night) a day. I think that is not enough for a baby his age. But we can't get him to sleep anymore than that. We don't wake him up and we encourage him to go to sleep at decent hours, but he just refuses. He is so cranky by the end of the day that he's impossible. And he keeps going to sleep later and later. Once his is asleep, he usually does a nice long sleep (yesterday was from 1 am until 9:30 am), but like I said earlier, we have to get up at 5:30 am for work. I wouldn't even be that upset about him staying up so late either if he were happy. But, he's not. He cries and cries and cries.

So frustrating...