5 year old scared at night and won't go to sleep

[dollymoo]

5 year old daughter for past 2 months will not go asleep until at least 10pm every night. Prior to this she was a brilliant sleeper, went to sleep every night at 8pm and that was it.

We try to put her down at 8.30pm each night and she comes out of her room every 5 minutes saying she's scared and or wants to play and asking questions. We bring her back to bed each time but she does the same thing and this is 2 months now. We have tried bath and massage before bed, plenty of reassurance and cuddles, stories, promising rewards. Nothing is working and on top of this in the middle of the night she makes her way into our bed because she's scared.

What could this be she has a night light, I'm so close to putting a flipping stair gate on her door.

Did it coincide with lockdown?

Is she tired enough? If she's going to bed when she's not tired, she has time to lie there awake and then scare herself and then gets into a cycle of not being able to sleep.

I would recommend looking into bedtime tokens or bedtime pass. If you Google it hopefully you'll find a description. Firstly have a family meeting about sleep, get your daughter to draw up some sleep rules. This gives her ownership as much as anything. Then make loads of bedtime tokens, way more than you need. It's fine if she needs to call you or get out of bed, but it costs her a token. If she needs an incentive, then if she has tokens left in the morning she gets a reward. Agree what she'd like before, penny sweets or pocket money maybe. So the first night you have so many tokens she really cannot fail. From then on you really gradually reduce the number of tokens. In the end you might just have 2 tokens or possibly even just 1, just in case she needs a last min wee or drink. A variation of this worked for my Dd when she used to wake up at 1:30am for 2hrs every night for a year. It was suggested to me by a sleep consultant. The first night my Dd used 35 tokens so do make sure you have enough, we made them together out of slips of paper with a sticker on and kept them in a bowl by her bed. Hope this helps!

Thank you for the suggestions and yes it does coincide with lockdown but when I talk to her about it she doesn't display any distress or worrys about it she just says she can't wait until 'sickness' is away and she can go to the park and see her friends. Although I have talked to her about it and that she is safe.

We've also got Dd a relaxing cd she likes that she can put on during the night if she's struggling to sleep. It's actually the Foo fighters played on xylophone! And also a 'worry monster' where she can write down our draw a worry and feed it to her monster, zipping it's mouth shut. So now I'm like the flippin tooth fairy every night, I have to sneak in and remove any slips of paper!

I think lots of children are struggling to sleep at the moment because they're just not tired enough. They're just not getting the physical, mental and social stimulation that they were.

I'd try to really maximise the activities during the day, physical (lots of fresh air if possible), mental and social. I'd also make sure she is up early enough in the morning, it's easy with lockdown to let mornings become a bit later than before.

I love the idea of bedtime tokens though. That sounds like a good method to try, in addition to just really wearing her out.

Just remembered with the bedtime tokens i rewarded Dd with a single piece of her playmobil box every night she had tokens left. It was a camper van set. We wrote all the bits of slips of paper and drew a slip out of a pot each morning. So some mornings she only got a tiny mug or a fork. It really kept up the incentive because she wanted the people and the van!

@nuffsaid you're defo right. School was the thing that sorted my Dd's sleep at last, we're having problems again now.

I was like this.The problem was that I just wasn't tired. I would lie there and every so often call downstairs, "I can't get to sleep." My mother's reply was, "You're resting your body." However, I never got up and went downstairs. I would often still be awake at 11pm.