Almost 7 year old won't sleep alone

[janine0187]

Hi all,

This is going to be a long winded message. So my almost 7 year old daughter used to sleep in her bed and then would come into my bed in the middle of the night. No big deal.
Anyway then something happened a which I can't remember what it was and we started putting her to bed in my bed and stay beside her until she would fall asleep. You could possibly leave and she'll be still asleep but in the last 2 or 3 weeks it has gotten worse. She wakes up instantly when we spent up to 2 hours to stay beside her until she's fully asleep. It's actually worse when hubby is on. She wakes instant after he spent forever to get her to go to sleep. Now she's a routine girl and because of covid she had been out of school since mid December which I do think had an impact on her as well.

Now it has an impact on all of us though as it's always just one parent downstairs for an evening relaxing, never two.

So I thought tomorrow is going to be the day of her going back in her own room. I am sure she will kick up a storm. Even when she slept in her own bed we would have to sit by the door until she's asleep.

I would love to put an end to this as it is very stressful. Her older brother is afraid of the dark and has his phases sometimes too but he goes to sleep by himself with no one near him.

When we went through this with my similarly aged child, I drew him a social story of what his new bedtime would look like (me sitting in the doorway instead of in his bed), and he accepted it pretty well. It did take a while, and I had to reassure him. The key thing was that I used different sized blocks to represent things that take different amounts of time, so tooth brushing was quite small, but falling asleep quite long - he was getting fed up that it wasn’t instant.

He does have ASD which can really make going to sleep hard for him, but the social story would work well for any child I think.