How to cope when your kid won’t sleep.

As a baby, my second child was a terrible sleeper.

First he had day-night confusion, a common but exhausting condition in which the baby sleeps during daylight hours and is alert and hungry all night, like a vampire. Then he settled into a schedule of waking up four or five times per night, always happy and excited, as though eager to find out what the rest of us were doing without him.

I spent his first year in a heavy haze of sleep deprivation, frequently fantasizing about injecting caffeine directly into my eyeballs. But this, I knew, was normal — I just had to wait out those early months, and then the baby would start sleeping and I would recover, if not my full faculties, then at least the ability to keep my eyes open for the duration of a day.

I am still waiting.

My little kid is three-and-a-half now. He goes to preschool. He is learning to write his name. He still takes hours to fall asleep, frequently wakes up in the middle of the night, and is often up for good at 5 am.

His difficulties are relatively common — up to 30 percent of children between 2 and 5, and 15 percent of school-aged kids, regularly have difficulty falling asleep or sleeping through the night, according to data from the National Sleep Foundation. That means that millions of American parents are lurching through our days like zombies, some of us going years without an uninterrupted night of rest.

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