Toddler struggling with sleep

[Smil95]

Hi all, I have a 2 year and 5 month old boy who has been having trouble sleeping for the last 6 months. Terrible night time sleep, awake for hours, goes to sleep late, wakes up early. The only solution we've found is to limit his nap to about 30 mins, which works well for him and he seems happy. After a lot of convincing the childminder said she will limit his nap time to 45 mins during the day. Unfortunately nothing changed... The only time he sleeps well and 11+ hours is if he's on half term ( he's at childminder only term time). When goes to the childminder during the day he sleeps around 8 hours broken up in the night....she has been claiming he doesn't sleep at all during the day when I ask her... I don't get it.. has anybody been through something similar?

Your CM wants him to nap because it’s easier for her and he’s in the nap drop phase where they’re little buggers by 3.30 if they don’t nap but if they don’t they don’t sleep at night.

This is very normal. I could always tell if my CM had let me DD nap or not. You need to be very clear that you don’t want him to, although you can’t force your CM to follow that. They also have certain things they have to do eg. When mine were dropping their nap id never take them somewhere in a buggy at 4pm because they’d be guaranteed to fall asleep but if your CM has a school run to do then she doesn’t really have a choice.

However I would not put up with a CM lying to me and if they ever did then that would be a red flag. I would always ask if they’d napped or not and I always got an honest reply even though sometimes it was not the one I was hoping for.