I'm quite embarrassed admitting this but does anyone else have a child who still won't go to bed on their own at 10 years old? DD1 has always been very sensitive and has lots of fears - dogs/lifts/spiders etc and we have always done our best to give her some confidence etc. The upside is she is a high-achiever at school and has many friends.
All this greatly affects her (and our) life, the main example being that I have to take her upstairs to bed and sit in the anteroom outside her room (which btw she shares with her 4-year old sister) until she is fast asleep. This can take anything from half and hour to 3 hours each evening. Therefore I'm losing my evenings and getting very stressed about the situation which isn't improving (has been like this for approx 9 months).
You may think - well ok just leave the room and make her go to sleep on her own, but if I do leave, she becomes hysterical and begs me to stay like her life depends on it. This has got so bad in the past that it has woken up DD2 and totally stressed out the whole family. She also regularly wakes up during the night and comes into our room refusing to leave. Because I'm so desperate for sleep I often swap beds with her and she ends up with DH for the rest of the night!
She was referred to a child psychologist in January and so far we have only seen her once for the initial assessment - God knows how long it will be before the next one. In the meantime I'm feeling quite desperate and really worried that my DD will always be over-anxious in life.
Anyone else experienced this please? I can't help feeling this is all my fault and I've failed DD in some way. (DD2 is completely different - no problem at all so far).
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Behaviour/development
10 year old can't sleep alone! Sorry - a bit long.
56 replies
CarofromWton · 26/09/2008 20:55
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