Girl of almost 3 years - 15 hours awake with a lot of energy

[jamie2154]

My girlfriend has a baby girl who's nearly 3 yrs old. She regularly stays awake nearly 15 hours every day, and during the times that we do try to put her to sleep in the afternoon, it's difficult to get her to slepe, and she doesn't seem to nap more than 1 hour. We have tried giving her a routine of going to sleep earlier, but she doesn't want to sleep, even after a very exhausting day filled with lots of walks and playing in the playground. She just has so much energy.

She quickly upsets the youngest by grabbing anything that he is playing with, making him cry. Then we send her to her bedroom for punishment, and she screams endlessly SO loud and starts hitting the door. We give in after about half an hour, and just let her out. We have tried doing this for almost a year now, but it doesn't seem to help and she doesn't seem to learn.

She seems to often struggle to listen to her mother's instructions. She often disrupts dinnertime, making it difficult for us to eat our meals.

When playing in the playground, she darts from one piece of equipment to another within the space of about 30 seconds, seemingly unable to make up her mind.

It is generally giving her mum many headaches and tiring and stressing her out constantly.

Does anyone have any similar experiences with a child of this age?

Are you in the UK @jamie2154? If you are I'd recommend she speaks to her HV and asks her to assess her DD using the Ages & Stages assessment tool.

With the sleep, at almost three, she may well be ready to drop the nap, and she may sleep more easily at night if you do drop it. It's not easy to fall asleep if you're not tired, and so children will then often play up (quite reasonably, really, most of us wouldn't fancy lying in the dark when not tired). She may also just not need very much sleep. At that age, my eldest was going to bed at 8, up at 6, maybe 6.30 – a bit more sleep than you're talking about, but not loads. Her younger sister seems to need even less sleep, so might well be similar to your little girl by the time she's almost three.

In terms of sending her to her room, at this age half an hour is an eternity, and she may well feel abandoned and genuinely distressed – as well as having long forgotten taking the toy. If you do want to do timeout or naughty step, I think the advice is 1 minute per year of age, so 2 minutes, maybe 2.5, and somewhere close to you.

However, for a lot of children, time out/naughty step isn't that effective, and it works better to have a consequence directly and logically linked to the behaviour you want to discourage. At her age, it also needs to be immediate, short and sweet. She takes the toy, you tell her no, and give it back to the littler one. If the littler one cries about it, attention on the wee one, minimum attention on the one who snatched. Balance that with lots of praise and attention for good behaviour (however brief!). That said, she is so young, I would still be using distraction quite a lot – 'no, your brother/sister had that. Let's give it back, and you play with this one.' She's not going to have the self-control to distract herself with a different toy – you need to help her. And it will take a lot of repetition.

Can she focus on an activity she likes (not counting TV or videos/games on a phone or tablet, though)? I think the baseline is again 1 minute per year of age, so again you'd only be looking for her to stay colouring or building blocks or whatever for 2-3 minutes. Toddlers are chaotic!

A fair bit of not listening and disruption is normal for the age, but obviously there are limits. Without more details, it's difficult to say where your wee one falls. 'Toddler's choice' helps a lot (two choices, both acceptable to you, apple or banana, red shirt or green shirt, walk up the stairs or be carried, etc., end result either way is she eats snack/gets dressed/goes upstairs to bed).