My Toddler Keeps Playing When She Should Be Sleeping
Even if your little one is a superstar sleeper, you might be surprised one night to hear the sounds of singing or babbling over your baby monitor at 2:00 in the morning.
It’s not nearly as concerning as crying, but it can still leave parents wondering what to do in order to get their little one back to sleep.
In today’s video, I’ll explain why this always happens around the same age, and what to do when your little one suddenly starts breaking into song when she’s supposed to be asleep.
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– Hi, I’m Dana. Welcome to this weeks video.
One thing that can happen in the toddler years is that you may find your child is just awake for long periods of time in the middle of the night. She’s not upset. She’s not crying. In fact, she seems quite happy in there. She’s telling herself a little story. She’s doing some singing. She might be banging her feet against the wall. She seems like she’s having a grand ole’ time, but yet, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning. So why isn’t she asleep?
This is actually a fairly common scenario and I hear it a lot. Now it can show up at nap time too so I’m gonna give you some tips for both the nap scenario and the middle of the night. What happens though when toddlers kind of hit this little burst of, that I call, a language burst?
So somewhere before the second birthday like the 20 month mark roughly, a child is just learning at such an accelerated pace and the main thing they’re learning is language. They’ve already mastered all those other skills like crawling and walking and whatnot. Now they’re focused on language and so periodically while they’re mastering this skill, they’ll go through a little burst where they just seem to be picking up words. Everyday they know more and more.
Now the brains got a lot of hard work to do because not only do we need to figure out the words, get them out of our mouth, we also need to store them in places in our brain so we can remember them later.
And so what’s happening then and in the middle of the night she’s having this little wake up and it’s more because of the language acquisition than anything else and she just needs a little bit of time to process all of the learning that she’s doing and it tends to show up at nap time or it can show up in the middle of the night and you’ll hear exactly what I described. You’ll hear singing. You’ll hear chatting. You’ll hear just noise making of some kind and this is all a part of the process.
This is actually good news ’cause it means she’s learning to talk which is very exciting in a child’s life and in your life as well. So my advice is to just let it go. You don’t need to intervene. You don’t need to do anything. You don’t need to rearrange her schedule. Just know that this will pass.
It often takes a week or two before it finally fades out and she starts sleeping through the night again or taking that nap again. It’s tempting, especially if it shows up at nap time, you might be thinking, oh my gosh, is she done with napping? Maybe she doesn’t need to nap anymore. Give it a couple of weeks and see if it doesn’t blow over. Chances are high it will and she’ll go back to taking those great naps again.
The good news is there’s nothing for you to worry about. There’s nothing for you to do. Just maybe put in some earplugs and go back to sleep.
Thanks so much for watching today. Sleep well.

If your baby, infant or toddler is having trouble sleeping through the night, help is just a click away! The Sleep Sense Program has helped over 57,00 parents to get their kids sleeping 11-12 hours through the night AND taking long, restful naps during the day. If you’re ready to get started today – I’m looking forward to helping you!