4 year old not going to sleep and awful behaviour

[Allegrogirl]

4.8 dd used to go off at night perfectly at 7.30ish, bliss! She is now refusing to stay in bed and I feel I've lost my precious evenings. This has been going on for several months. I work 3.5 days and have a 1 year old and I am feeling frazzled.

DDs behaviour swings from lovely and well mannered to rude and defiant. I just wanted to cry today. She is exhausted and I think a little anxious about starting school.

Any tips for getting her to sleep, or at least saving my sanity? Feeling quite angry and tearful right now.

My oldest started this when she was 2.5 when no 2 arrived - ironically had no 2 because no 1 had been such a good baby - 12 hour a night sleeper!! She would'nt go to sleep, up 99 times, someone had to stay with her, hour upon hour and then she and I were grumpy all day!! til eventually i told the HV who made an appt with doc and we were given some medication which helped her calm down and drop off - they prob don't do this now i am ancient! but it did seem to help at the time!! Actually after a couple of weeks with the med she settled back to being the lovely girl she was before - until - exactly a year later it reared its ugly head again!! so off i popped to the docs and got the stuff again with exactly the same result - THEN - exactly a year later it started again and we realised it had something to do with the lighter nights!! And now my 8 y old has been doing the same but this time i used Bach rescue night remedy - 4 drops on the tongue and that seems to have helped too! So although I'm not much use to you really - it may help to know that others have been there and maybe you could a) try the Bach remedy- although mine might be a placebo effect which will work better on 8 yr old than 4 yr old or ask your HV for advice!!

My four year old dd does the same. We had this problem a few months ago and we would sit outside her room until she went to sleep, kept telling her to get back into bed. After about 30 mins she was asleep. She has started messing about again at bed time so we are back to sitting outside her room again.

You have my sympathy - DS goes through phases like this. Have you tried reward charts? When we went through a really bad spell we introduced a cd player so now DS listens to audio books for a while once DH/I come back downstairs.

Gah posted and lost it!!!

Basically DD now 4.5 was like this a few weeks ago and it drove me potty, I really need my evenings to myself!!!

What has worked is every night that she is bad she loses one of her favourite toys to the shed (she gets a warning first) and then if the next night she is good then she earns it back.

She totally resisted this and hated it with a passion and it took three nights of her losing toys before she realised I meant business and then she started to earn them back. She has now been fine for the last week, long may it last!!!

A bit of tough love might be called for here because when she starts school that in itself will be completely knackering - couple it with not enough sleep and she will be an unhappy nightmare. Plus - not unreasonable to want your precious evenings, and at 4.8 this is luck-pushing more than anything else. You know she can self-settle - yes, she might be a bit anxious but this is pushing the boundaries to see where they are more than anything else (there will be lots more of this, I'm afraid :o).

So yes - some sort of reward/bribery/penalty system. Some way of getting across to her that you've reached a tipping point. And it will pass, I promise.

You say it has got worse over the last few months. Could it be due to lighter nights? A black out blind and a temporary reward system has made a big difference with dd1 who is 5y