My husband and I are having some serious issues with our 8 year old going to bed. It had been ongoing for the past 3 weeks, and seemed to start after she had a couple of late nights over the Easter holidays.
She will go up to bed fine, however once in there she will keep shouting us in for trivial things, until eventually she will tell us that she is either scared or sad. We will try to deal with this - e.g talking to her about it, offering to sit in her room with her for a bit - but as soon as we leave, she gets out of bed and refuses to go back. This then leads to us getting frustrated and arguments follow, and these episodes last at least 2 hours, if not longer. She will then eventually admit she is not scared or sad, but was lying to get out of bed and that all she wants is to sleep in our bed. We do sometimes let her have 'sleepovers' in our bed at a weekend, but this means one of us has to sleep in her bed or on the sofa, as we also have a 2 year old who ends up in our bed and there isn't room for 4. We have explained to her why she can't sleep in our bed all the time.
We have tried everything - talking to her, pushing bedtime back, a rewards system - but nothing works. Quite frankly, when she is refusing to go to bed she turns into a child I don't recognise, one I would associate with a spoilt brat who has no boundaries, which is not the case in our house. It is causing us to be miserable, we can't get things done that we need to do in an evening, we're not spending any time together as once she goes to bed and it is by that time 10:30pm, we then spend the rest of our evening talking about it.
As I type this now, if is 5am and she has been awake since 2:20am, refusing to go back to bed and wanting to get in ours. I've had enough, I'm at the end of my tether and I don't know what to do anymore. We can't cope, we can't keep doing this. Please, please can anyone help? Has anyone any advice or know where I can turn to? Does she need to see a doctor?