There is a particular kind of small humiliation reserved for the parent of a four-year-old who still wakes at night. You have, by this point, read the books. You have done the sleep training, or you have decided against it. You have built the routine. You have given the child their own bed, their own quilt, their own water cup with the cap.
And still, at 2:14 a.m., the door of your bedroom opens, and a small person stands beside the bed, and you wake up.
The official literature is not very helpful here. Most of the pediatric sleep research focuses on the first three years, when the developmental questions are clearer and the interventions are more often studied. By the time a child is four, the medical assumption is that night waking should have resolved, and the failure of it to resolve is, the literature implies, a parenting problem.
I do not believe this is true. I think it is partially true.
Some children, like some adults, are simply lighter sleepers. They wake more often during the night, they are more easily disturbed by sounds and shadows, and they need, longer than other children, the reassurance of an adult body in proximity before they can go back down.
Other children wake because of identifiable causes. Sleep apnea, which is underdiagnosed in children, particularly in preschoolers with enlarged tonsils. Nightmares, which become more vivid and more disturbing between ages three and six as the imagination develops. Anxiety, which is real in children as young as four and which often presents at night.
If your four-year-old wakes nightly, the first thing to do is rule out the medical causes. A pediatrician who takes you seriously will ask about snoring, about restlessness, about whether the child sweats in their sleep, about whether they wake gasping. These are the symptoms of pediatric sleep apnea, and they are treatable.
If the medical workup is clear, the question becomes one of strategy.
The strategies are familiar from the toddler years, with some adjustments. The bed in the parents' room. The mattress on the floor next to the parents' bed, sometimes called the dock. The trip back to the child's own room with quiet reassurance. The trip back to the child's own room with no reassurance. The closed door. The open door. The hall light on.
The Tomlinson family of Auburn, Maine, have tried most of these with their daughter Cleo, who turned four in March and has woken between two and four times every night since she was born. Their pediatrician has ruled out sleep apnea twice. Cleo is, by every other measure, a healthy and cheerful child.
She is also, her mother Bryony tells me, simply not a child who sleeps through the night yet.
The Tomlinsons have arrived, after four years of experimentation, at an arrangement that works for them. Cleo has a small bed on the floor of her parents' bedroom. When she wakes, she comes in, climbs into it, and goes back to sleep. The parents are usually only briefly disturbed.
Bryony says that this arrangement has cost her, by her best estimate, the social approval of about a third of the parents she knows. She has been told, with varying degrees of subtlety, that she is creating a problem that will be harder to solve later. She has been told that Cleo will never sleep alone if she does not learn to sleep alone now.
Bryony does not believe this. She has noticed that Cleo, over the past six months, has begun some nights to sleep through without coming in. She suspects, based on no evidence but four years of close observation, that her daughter will give up the floor bed within the next year on her own.
If she is wrong, she says, she will deal with it then.
The most useful thing I have read on the subject of older-child night waking is a 2024 paper from a sleep researcher at the University of Helsinki, who followed two hundred Finnish children from ages two to ten and found that the strongest predictor of when night waking resolved was not parental behavior but child temperament, and that the difference between early and late resolvers was, by age ten, statistically insignificant.
In other words, the children whose night waking resolved at three slept the same amount, at age ten, as the children whose night waking resolved at six. The path was different. The destination was the same.
This is not, of course, a perfect comfort. The parent of a four-year-old who wakes nightly is not consoled by knowing that, in six years, the situation will have resolved. The parent of a four-year-old who wakes nightly is consoled by sleep, which is the very thing in short supply.
What I would offer, as someone who has been on both sides of this question with my two children, is this: the social pressure to fix the sleep problem is, in many cases, more harmful than the sleep problem itself. The pressure makes you doubt yourself, escalate, try interventions that distress your child, and then doubt yourself further when the interventions fail.
The child will sleep through the night eventually. Most children do. The cost of waiting is some interrupted sleep. The cost of fighting can be much higher.
Cleo Tomlinson, on the night I visited, came into her parents' room at 3:20 in the morning. She climbed onto the floor bed. She covered herself with the quilt her grandmother made her. She was asleep again in less than a minute.
Bryony, lying in the bigger bed, did not need to get up. She listened for the breathing to slow. She went back to sleep.
It is not the arrangement they imagined when they were expecting their first child. It is the arrangement they have. It is working.
