Sleep Cycles

Understanding your toddler sleep cycles will help you fathom why your toddler keeps waking up at night and why you cant sleep! Having this information may help you rationalise what is going on and help you keep calm in stressful times.

It might also motivate you to teach your toddler to settle herself so that she can go back to sleep on her own when a new cycle starts again.

When your toddler sleeps she will drift into drowsiness, down to light sleep and into deep sleep (non-REM sleep). She will then wake up a little and go into REM sleep which is a light sleep. Your toddler may repeat this pattern again and then stay in a light sleep for the rest of the night with another deep sleep just before waking up.

Adults on the other hand generally cycle through the sleep stages but young children move in and out of them much more often.

However, sleep cycles vary for each child and some toddlers may repeat the cycle of going from non-REM sleep to REM sleep about five times in the night. Every child is different but the outcome all parents want is for their child is sleep well and for everyone to feel refreshed the next day.

Every time your child starts a new cycle they may wake up, turn over, sit up or even talk and then lie back down again and start the process. If your child is used to being helped to go to sleep then when they wake up at the start of each cycle, they will have learnt that to go back to sleep they need help – they need you!

Everyone is woken up…and we know the rest!

The cycles will be interrupted when your child is unwell or teething. If she is in discomfort they will wake up more and will be starting the cycle more times and will have more periods of light sleep. And so they are likely to wake up more…

The key to sleeping better for everyone is for your child to learn how to go back to sleep on their own so that at the start of each sleep cycle they go back to sleep by themselves.

In the Sleep Training section we will explain different methods to help you train your child to do this.