Almost two year old suddenly won’t sleep in her cot

[Missymoomoo11]

My little girl who is soon to turn two (in March) suddenly will NOT go to bed in her cot?!?!
Shes slept there every night (bar when she’s at my mums and sleeps in a travel cot) since she was 10 months old. She’s gone into the cot wide awake and waves us off our the room.
Over the last week or so it’s been WW3 trying to get her in the cot to sleep. She will immediately stand up and scream and cry until we pick her up, this is going on for hours. Sometimes we’re able to transfer her back into the cot once she’s fallen asleep on us, other times not and she ends up sleeping with us in bed. It’s worth mentioning that she will gladly nap in her cot during the day. We’ve also been experiencing night wakes too which is extremely rare for us.

does anyone have any advice please? Is this normal at this age? Is it just a phase?

She probably needs to reduce her nap or have a later bedtime. Get a floor bed so you don’t have to transfer.

Very normal phase to go through, often around them wanting some control, and many start dropping daytime naps around 2. Does it actually matter if she is in the cot, as along as she is asleep safely?

DS went through a phase on making himself up a bed on the floor and went happily off to sleep (blanket & pillow on his rug next to the cot). I just popped him into the cot bed (no sides by that point as he could climb out) a bit later. Pick your battles, it will pass!

Our DS did this, probably around the same time. We were totally confused. Once we realised he wasnt going back to the previous arrangment, we did a slightly altered version of our usual sleep training method and after a couple of months he was back to normal.

Ignore if you're anti- sleep training but our approach was:
Usual bedtime routine and put in cot
Stay next to cot, stroking his back, singing, whatever, for ten mins
Say "I'm just taking a break"
Stand outside the room for 1 minute
Go back in, stay next to cot, stroking his back etc, trying to gradually reduce comforting until asleep.
Gradually, night by night or week by week, reduce the time you're in the room and extend how long you're out of the room, and then don't go back in after the break (we changed the "I'm just taking a break" to goodnight or something).

Edited to say we also shortened daytime nap to max 1.5hrs (but now he's happily in the cot again we have relaxed this)

We went through the same thing a few months ago shortly before DS turned 2 - apparently it's a really common time for sleep to go a bit mad, but it was one of the toughest periods we've gone through so far.

Thankfuly the intense cot refusal part was relatively short-lived. We ended up doing a few nights of sleep training at bedtime (going in to him in gradually increasing intervals, not picking him up but cuddling him in the cot and soothing him for no more than 1 minute at a time). It got better every evening, and by night 5 he was going straight to sleep and going through the night again.

Aldo still having a daytime nap, which we try and cap at about 70 minutes.