Bedtime with 4.5 year old is absolute hell! Please help

[HeyGabby]

It's been like it for months, she's constantly knackered and her behaviour has gone down the toilet accordingly. But she just won't go to bed at nighttime.

We've tried lullabies and audiobooks, laying with her, blackout blind, lavender pillow mist but whatever we do she just doesn't go to sleep until around 9:30pm. I then have to wake her up for school in the morning and she's always so tired so the day always starts badly.

For context: She doesn't watch any tv on weekdays, most nights she comes to walk the dog with me and also bikes/scoots home from school so I feel she gets enough fresh air/exercise. After school we tend to just potter around, she does 1 club a week and has tea at Grandma's once a week.

What time do you get her up in the morning?

Have you asked her about it?

What time does she eat? What times bed?

7:30am for school. On weekends if I don't wake her she naturally wakes around 9.

Wake her earlier for a couple of days.

Bedtime tokens might work. I can type it out from my laptop tomorrow.

Also wake her at weekends at the same time.

Sounds counter intuitive but make bed time earlier.

Are you leaving it too late? If I didn’t have mine in bed by a certain time I knew it would be harder and they’d be up later. Could you try half hour earlier? I have an early riser though so def over tired

We've spoken about it and she claims she isn't tired.

We eat between 5:30-6pm but she isn't a big evening eater when she's had lunch at school so she usually only has a bit.

I turn the light out for bed at 8pm, we have stories/cuddles and a chat before then.

Wake her up earlier at weekends. Her natural rhythm has shifted to 9-9, you want it 7-7.

8pm is too late. Get her in bed for 7pm with blackout blind up, read a couple of stories and then lights out. Her natural rhythm is now 9-9ish and you want it earlier. Get her up at 7am every day.

So she’s having 2 nights a week of 12h sleep and 5 nights a week of 10h sleep. That averages about 10.75h of sleep a night which is within the normal range for a 4.5 yo.

If you want her to go to bed earlier I’d first try consistently waking her up earlier including at weekends. If she’s telling you she needs around 10.5h-11h sleep at night I’d start by getting her up at 6:30am and aiming to have her settling in bed for 7:20ish, to be asleep by 8pm.

What is she doing till 9:30? Just lying quietly?

Lights out at 8pm is very late for a 4.5yr old. Mine is in bed for 6:30, lights out shortly after, but never later than 7. Wake her earlier and start bed time earlier.

My grandchildren’s sleep routine is as follows-
7pm bath / shower, children stay upstairs after this.
7.15 teeth cleaned and pjs on.
Joint story in parent’s bed.
DC1 goes to own bed by themselves whilst DC2 taken to their bed by parent, white noise turned on, lights off.
Parent tucks DC1 in.
Quick ‘night night’ to both children, doors closed. Minimal chat, no songs, no music, both Dc generally asleep by 7.30
If one of them gets up, a parent returns them to bed - minimal conversation ‘it’s sleeping time now, back to bed’ kind of conversation.

Interesting that people think it's too late. It was 7:30 but I pushed it back because it was taking longer for her to go to sleep, I thought maybe she needed less. Il try earlier tomorrow.

She will lie quietly for a bit, but then often she will start trying to get our attention, asking questions, claiming something hurts or she needs a plaster, hasn't got such and such toy. She will try almost anything as an excuse!

I know she's tired. I can see it in her face, and her behaviour. To be honest it's making life quite miserable, I feel like I'm on eggshells because she's so ratty all the time.

You need to put her neck to bed, no chatting just say bedtime now. Every single time. Also agree with earlier bed and earlier wake up

can you lie quietly with her in the dark?
or an audio book

Keep at it with earlier for a good week, and have her up at 7am in the morning.

Every time she asks something, return her to bed with the same boring phrase "it's bed time now". Stop engaging where you can. If she's not getting out of bed then shout up "you don't need us, it's bed time". Put a leak proof flask with a drink in her bed. Pre warn her that "it's bed time so you don't need toys" and if she asks for any, that's your response.

So you can look up bedtime tokens. I think they're are since articles written by Harvard on line. It's a technique that was suggested to us and supervised by a sleep consultant when my daughter was four and a half. We used it to manage night-wakings, but it was originally conceived as a technique for bedtime. So the idea is first you have a family meeting and you agree sleep rules. We got our daughter to draw these up into a book, she drew pictures to say no shouting, no getting out bed, and she came up with the rules herself of what good sleep looks like and she kept that by her bed and that gave her a sense of ownership. You then make tokens so we made 50 odd tokens and they lived in a jar by her bed. If she gets up in the night, it's fine, but it costs a token. If she's got tokens left in the jar in the morning then she gets a reward so we made that high stakes, we bought a Playmobil set with a camper van, tent and some people that she really wanted. Every time she had tokens left in the morning, she got to lucky dip a slip of paper that would say which piece she got. It was really high stakes for her because she obviously wanted the people, but sometimes she would get a fork or a small item. We found it was really effective we went from 32 wake ups the first night down to about six wake ups in just a couple of weeks. Maybe even less than that. It's important that at first you set the child up for success so we had 50 tokens to start with so we knew she was absolutely going to win the prize in the morning, and then you really gradually after maybe a week start to reduce the amount of tokens in the available to them, so they have to work a little bit harder. With us we found that over about a month we were down to zero night waking, which was a bloody miracle because we'd had a year of this and were near divorce just to get some sleep. We tried all the usual things like just return them to their bed without talking, to punishments, rewards, and I think the reason this worked as it kind of gave my daughter control and it was a little bit of a psychological approach. Good luck. My DD is 11.5 now so this too shall pass. She's never the best sleeper in the world but as she's got older she doesn't disturb others she just listens to an audio book in bed and waits it out.

I ask mine if she has anything else she could possibly think of as an excuse to get out of bed. After that I really don’t engage. Some do just take a bit of time to fall asleep.

I try to not drag it out. Make each step of the process as fast as possible.

I think this is fairly common when they start school, they’re exhausted but their minds are taking in so much information they can’t switch off easily.

I couldn’t bring myself to wake early at the weekend though!