When a new sibling arrives
The baby is here and your two-year-old has stopped sleeping. That is extremely common, it is not really about sleep, and treating it as a sleep problem is why it often lasts longer than it needs to.
3 min read
A new sibling changes the older child’s position entirely. Attention is divided, routines shift, and a great deal of the household’s emotional energy has gone somewhere else. Bedtime is when a young child has least distraction and most need for you, so that is where it surfaces.
What looks like regression - waking at night, refusing bed, demanding the parent who is feeding the baby - is usually a request for attention, made in the only currency a two-year-old has.
What helps
Protected one-to-one time, daily. Fifteen minutes, phone away, entirely theirs, named as such. This is the actual intervention and it works better than anything done at bedtime.
Keep the older child’s bedtime unchanged. Same person where possible, same routine, same length. This is the last thing to sacrifice, not the first.
Make changes before the baby arrives. Room move, cot to bed, nursery start - all six to eight weeks ahead, so they are not connected to the baby.
Let them help, genuinely. Fetching a nappy, choosing a babygro. Being useful is different from being displaced.
Expect regression in other areas too. Toileting, speech, feeding, wanting to be carried. All normal, all temporary.
Two at night
Agree who does what before the night starts, in daylight. A common arrangement is that one parent owns the baby and the other owns the older child, and the roles do not swap mid-night - a toddler who discovers that crying summons the parent currently feeding the baby will keep testing it.
Stagger bedtimes if they share a room, and put the lighter sleeper down first. Accept for a few months that both children will not be asleep at the same time.
Fifteen minutes of undivided attention in the afternoon does more for bedtime than anything you do at bedtime.
How long
Four to eight weeks for the sharpest phase, though it comes in waves for several months and often returns when the baby starts crawling and interfering with their things. It settles considerably once the household finds its new rhythm.
The older child’s bedtime
Protect it as far as you possibly can. It is the point in the day where an older child most needs undivided attention, and it is also the point where a newborn is most likely to be feeding constantly. Something has to give, and if it is always the older child’s bedtime, that is what the regression is made of.
The workable arrangement is usually that one parent owns the older child’s bedtime, entirely, several nights a week, with the phone away and the baby elsewhere. Twenty minutes of that is worth more than an hour of divided attention, and it does more to settle the night waking than anything you do at night.
What to prepare in advance
Anything that would otherwise happen in the same month as the birth should happen six to eight weeks before it: moving the older child out of the cot, into a different room, or starting nursery. Done later, they get connected to the baby in a way that is hard to undo.
It is also worth deciding in advance who does the older child’s bedtime in the first fortnight, and protecting it as a fixed arrangement. Working it out each evening, when a newborn is cluster feeding at seven o’clock, means the older child’s bedtime is what gives - which is exactly where the regression comes from.
When to stop troubleshooting
Speak to your health visitor about extreme distress lasting months, aggression towards the baby that you cannot manage, or loss of skills that does not recover. And say something if you are struggling yourself - postnatal depression and anxiety are common, they are treatable, and being asked about it is part of the job.
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