Hi,
Our youngest daughters' behaviour has become terrible at bed time. Never been great, recently has got steadily worse. We've been afraid of dealing with it in case it causes upset and noise and keeps elder daughter awake when she has to go to school next day. However, we've got a two week break for Easter coming up and it seems the ideal time to try something.
So we need a plan of action. Trouble is we have no idea what to do.
There are two problems. The first - and most recent - is that she now becomes dreadfully upset at bed time. We have a nice bedtime routine, dressed for bed (bath two nights a week), stories with some warm milk and cuddles, then bed. She's always enjoyed the routine and still does but now, on being put to bed, she refuses to lie down and when asked to repeatedly starts to kick up an enormous fuss and refusing to do anything constructive. This escalates until whoever is sitting with her either shouts or walks out for a while which escalates it more and the cycle continues until she's so exhausted she has no choice but to settle down. As I say, this is recent, and we have no idea what triggered it. We tried introducing a new aspect to the routine to calm things down - after put in cot, songs or stories with the lights out. That worked for two nights, and then the end of songs or stories became the trigger for the fuss. So we stopped that and it went back to lying down being the trigger.
The second problem, which has been going on pretty much since she was born, is that she won't go to sleep by herself. I know this is a far more normal, natural and common issue but it'd still be nice to have a go at cracking it while we're changing the sleep routines. We didn't (and don't) want to let her cry it out but she seems of an age now where we could hopefully start to make some progress on this - our eldest was around this age when she seemed to suddenly and quite naturally decide she was happy going to bed alone. To try and get round this issue we tried a stop-start technique a little while ago: we'd read stories that involved characters going to bed by themselves, point this out, then put her in her cot and leave her for 5 minutes before going back and waiting 'til she was calm again before leaving. Tried that for nearly a week but had no effect so we gave up. Worth noting that our attempt did not coincide with the sudden onset of fuss and crying at bed time so they don't seem to be related.
The health visitor came recently and suggested we try and get her used to being alone in her room by leaving her briefly and swapping round more - at the moment Mum does the first 20-30 minutes and then I do the rest until she's asleep, often another 30-60 minutes. But that looks to me pretty much identical to what we tried before and didn't work.
Wits end. Really not sure what else to try. Suggestions gratefully received.
Cheers,
Matt