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4 year olds separation anxiety is destroying me

26 replies

Shalamadama · 27/02/2023 19:38

DD4 has the most awful separation anxiety at the moment. I can't shower without her sitting on the loo waiting for me and crying. I can't get dressed without her clinging onto my legs. I can't eat or drink anything at the table without her sat on me clinging onto me for dear life and telling me how much she loves me.. I can't do anything at all. The night times are the worst. I used to love putting her to bed but it's just positively awful and prolonged now. She makes me come up and down the stairs a number of times for hugs and kisses and cries and screams until she gets her own way. She cries and cries thinking I'm leaving her if i go downstairs for 30 minutes to eat my dinner. The times I've relented and brought her into my bed she fidgets so much I just can't sleep. Then I go to work with 3 hours sleep. She wakes up several times in the night asking if I'm there and I have to answer before she goes back to sleep. She's now scared of the dark. I've put a nightlight in her room, play soft music all night long, she sleeps with a photo of me and my hoodie that smells of me. She never used to need all of this to go to sleep.
I feel destroyed.
I'm a single parent to her, dad only has supervised contact in a contact centre. She's always been v attached to me but this is just suffocating.
Please, what else can I do. I can't cope with such little sleep and every evening full of dread and despair just got her to sleep :(
What I don't understand is she's actually fine at nursery and even fine at the contact centre, she does ask for me but not to this scale.
Please can anyone offer any words of wisdom?

OP posts:
Are your children’s vaccines up to date?
samqueens · 02/03/2023 22:17

I mean how hard it is to go without an evening night after night, not as a one off (obviously!)

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