Dropping the day time nap - 3yr old

[choceyes]

My DS will be 3 next week and has moved up to preschool at his nursery and no longer wants to nap during the day. He will sometimes fall asleep if we are out and about on my days off, but sometimes won't go to sleep.

Till very recently he used to sleep for about 2hrs so it is a big change. He will go to bed earlier now (about7- 7.30pm, used to be about an hour later.

I'm fine with him wanting to drop his nap and in a way it's nice to have a longer evening when he goes to bed early.

But the issue is that he is VERY tired around 5pm and he is so tired that he has been refusing to eat any dinner and keeps asking for his milk, which he has before bed, as he just wants to go to bed.
So he is going to bed without dinner (but will drink about 200ml milk) and waking up lots in the night sayign he is hungry.

Don't know what to do about this situation really. Fed up with serving him dinner and him not eating. And he is very difficult to control when he is tired and starts throwing things around and trying to hurt his baby sister. I resort to Cbeebies while I am trying to get dinner ready just to keep him occupied.

I have phoned and asked nursery to give him a nap at lunchtime again, but they say that they do give himthe choice of having a nap but he always says no. And he won't sleep on the way home in the pram either.

what time do you pick him up? Could you give him dinner earlier? Could he have a snack on the way home in the pram?

I pick him up at 4.30 and we are home at about 5.15. Dinner is ready just before 6. I do offer him a snack on the way home, and sometimes he will eat most of a banana. He does ask for a snack almost everytime, and we buy a banana from the shop. But he is just not interested in dinner..seems to tired by that point.

does he have a hot meal at lunchtime? You could maybe just do a very quick snacky dinner e.g. sandwich, fruit, crackers, cheese, yoghurt, etc and then he wouldnt have to wait till 6pm to eat.

I would tell him that he doesn't have to go to sleep in the afternoon at all, but he just has to have 'quiet time'... reading a book or listening to a story under a blanket or something. No TV or running about. Eight times out of ten he'll drop off and the other two times it'll give him enough downtime to recharge the batteries a little.

DD1 is 3.3 and if she doesn't sleep then has to have a lay down on the sofa watching Cbeebies. Having a rest is just as important and can be enough to recharge the batteries. If she falls asleep then thats fine too.

However we are having the opposite issue. Before she started nursery she was starting to drop naps and wouldn't nap every day. Now she's started preschool every morning, she is ready and asking for a nap as she's 'had a busy morning'. She sleeps for about 2 hours! Yesterday she went to sleep at 1pm and I had to wake her at 4pm!
Dread to think how she will manage when she gets to full time school!!

Ds1 dropped his nap before 18mths but he got suddenly more tired when he moved up to preschool. So his bedtime moved right forward to 530 to 6. In that phase, i essentially gave up trying to feed him "dinner" and gave sandwich, oatcake ,pitta and cheese on the way home. If he didn't eat much, he got cream added to his milk to get him thru the night (he's always been skinny btw in case you're wondering about the effects of the cream).
Good luck, it passes!

On the days you're working I would try & make dinner the night before and have it ready to reheat in the microwave the minute you get in the door so he's eating by 5:30 & days off tea at 5pm. I'd be giving him a mid afternoon snack (& check with the nursery if he's having something there).
DS2 dropped his sleep just before he turned 2 and it did take a while to get into a new routine -we too had to bring dinner forward as he just got too tired to eat. I'd definitely avoid giving milk in lieu of dinner as you've already discovered the results of that & you don't want it to become a new habit.
TBH, sometimes my DS will nod off but I just make sure it's only 30/40minutes & that doesn't usually impact bedtime as long as he lets off steam afterwards!

Can he have a hot meal at nursery? If so then I would just give him a quick snacky tea as soon as you get in (sandwich/toast/etc) and have him in bed by 6.30.

You could also try giving him something like warm weetabix to fill him up abit before bed if he wont eat alot.

Daisy - He doesn't like weetabix or anything like that. I do give him a Goodies biscuit most days.

I think he is just going through a fussy food stage. Even though he had a sleep at lunchtime yesterday and wasn't tired at dinner time, he still wouldn't eat his dinner. It's been going on for a couple of months now though, just wonl't eat any dinner and it's driving me up the wall.

It is a nightmare to get him to sleep at night if he's had a daytime nap. Yesterday it was nearly 9pm and he woke up in the night too, twice. and his sister a few times too. I am exhausted!

I'd give him a substantial amount of food on the way home (anything portable) and put him to bed at 6pm, or even earlier if you can manage it. I'd expect bedtime to need to be 1-3 hours earlier than it previously would once the nap goes. You might need to give him an extra big breakfast.

We have been through a period of teatime shenanigans with slightly older DS. At my Mum's suggestion, I did a couple of weeks of only 'favourite' teas (for us think was pizza, fish fingers, baked potato, pasta with smooth sauce in rotation) - this seemed to break the habit of the bad teatime behaviour a bit and was better when we went back to normal selection of meals.

You could add that to suggestions above?