good luck with the health visitor, hope she can help.
I totally sympathise -like many I have struggled with this scenario for a long time. DD1 is a determined young lady and has been hard work when it comes to sleep. I used to lie with her holding on to a handful of hair until she was asleep and then creep out after a boring half hour or more...every night dreading it and yet every time we tried to stop it we got the night long tantrums and constant waking and demanding to come through. We cracked it when she was about 2 (I think, or maybe a little older). We used a combination of ideas from loads of advice from friends, family and hv.
~First we accepted that whilst we had a routine, it wasn?t working. We started by enforcing a strict quite/nap time from 12-1pm before lunch every day - took about a week for her to start sleeping for nearly the full hour rather than moan and complain nut we stuck to it and it worked - with help from curtains drawn, insisting she stay sin her room with door almost closed, relaxation CD on (fantastic - really works) and a pile of books. I read the first one and she flicks through the rest for 5 mins then drops off.
Then we stopped all snacks other than a piece of fruit midafternoon and moved dinner forward to 5.30pm making sure that there were no sugar hits in it - dessert are no longer the buttons yoghurts or other treats that I occasionally gave - if she has anything like this it is for lunch so she can burn off the energy burst in the afternoon.
Then we kept harping on about "dinner, bath, bed" until she got to anticipate the routine as the inevitable order of events and non negotiable and not a nasty surprise to be argued about at the end of every day. Sounds obvious but until I consciously used this rather than just presuming I did, I don?t thnk she really knew that this was our routine even though we did it most of the time - now it is fact and she doesn?t question or challenge it anymore. During dinner we would keep reminding her that it was almost bathtime and during bathtime would talk about which pjs she would wear, which story she was going to have etc. to keep her mentally prepared for it all - and it really really works, honest.
Another thing we started to do was the rule that after dinner, once upstairs we stayed upstairs so there was no distractions like the phone, doorbell, television, running around etc. just bathroom and then bedroom. We also got into the habit of DH setting up the bedroom while I did the baths - he would close the curtains put the dimmer light on, get the pjs out on the bed and a story out that we chose while in the bath. Sounds rather dull or stepford wife type routine so fixed and rigid - but we were desperate people anxious to crack this awful nightmare routine - and we did. We didn?t go out of the hosue at night as a couple from the day she was born as she had never ever slept through - and if she wke the only person that she would allow to comfort her and put her back to bed was me - we tried once and had to come back after half an hour. Now we can leave them whenever we like/need to.
Sorry to go on but it is a topic close to our hearts and I wish I established a better routine earlier. I hope our routine doesn?t sound like a military camp and I know all families are unique and need to find their own way of doing it. I got advice from loads of people and through trial and error came up with a plan that worked for us and meant that I could finally watch Eastenders again instead of sitting in a dark room having my child dictate when I could leave (about 9pm in the old days).
We moaned about it and put up with it as we honestly thought we had tried everything and just hoped she would "grow out of it" - it took our hv to tell us that it was actually affecting her health and development as uninterrupted sleep is so important to their mental development and knock on constant tiredness affecting behaviour and learning in the day to make us change and thank God we did. Good Luck