2 1/2 Year Old Doesn't like to Sleep!

I don't have any suggestions, but wanted to let you know that my daughter, 2 y, 3 m old, is doing the same thing! She used to go down easy around 7:30. Now we're still putting her to bed by 8, and she's been up until 10! She is still in a crib, so we're having to go in every 30 minutes or so to settle her back down. She isn't crying the whole time, she's mostly content, just talking/singing to herself and playing.

We tried putting her to bed later, but she's still stay up for at least an hour. She did start sleeping later in the morning, but we have to wake her by 6:30 for us all to get out the door in time. She's getting only 9 hours at night, and she doesn't nap long at DC. She's definitely not sleeping enough.

I'm very interested in the suggestions you will get!

First, you are obviously not alone. We are going through the same thing - our 2.5 yr old daughter has always had a tough time with anything sleep-related (bedtime, naptime, where she sleeps, how long she sleeps, how she falls asleeps...) and YES, right now it seems like it takes FOREVER for her to fall asleep. We haven't gotten bedtime to where we need it, but here are some things that have helped us in the past 6 months:
- she has to nap. she may fall asleep 1/2 hr earlier if she doesn't nap, but not having her nap makes afternoons very long and cranky
- for a while, our daughter wasn't falling asleep until 8:30 or 9 (or later!), so we weren't really starting bedtime until 7:30. I read Pantley's "No Cry Sleep Solution" book and took some of her suggestions to heart, one of which is starting bedtime EARLIER. So now we start bedtime at 6 (6:30 at the very latest). Its take about a month of consistently having this bedtime and being consistent about our routine, but now she's falling asleep by 8pm (big difference for us!).
- toddlers love routines and familiarity. Even though our daughter is a pretty easy eater, I decided to eliminate the possibility of dinner-time battles - we have about 3 or 4 dinners that she really loves no matter what her mood, and thats all I do. I save "new" or "different" recipes for lunch time.
- speaking of food, even though we eat pretty healthy to begin with, we had to eliminate ALL processed sugar, artificial colour and preservatives, etc from our daughters diet (turns out she's food sensitive and all that junk was contributing to some nasty tantrums). The benefits have spilled over into having easier bedtimes.
- Finally, let me say that I am NOT an advocate of the CIO method, but my husband and I are learning to establish "bedtime boundaries" - that is, if our daughter is hungry at bedtime because she futzed around at dinner, she has to eat whatever was left on her plate from dinner (eliminating the bedtime snack dance we had been doing). and if she's squirmy and refusing to settle down in bed, she can squirm by herself (which she finds to be just about the worst thing in the world; she prefers to fall asleep with one of us in the room near her). its led to some big major 8pm tantrums, but after a few days she now knows what bedtime means.

Anyways, best of luck. I know every family, every kid, every age is different... I think the most important lesson that I've been learning is that behavior isn't changed in a day - habits take a while to break or build, so we have to be patient and consistent! Hard to do when everyone is tired, but well worth it.

HI,
I don't have any answers, but just wanted to let you know we are having the same issue. Our son is 2 and a half (our daughter is 15 months, in a crib in another room), and for the past couple of months, it takes 1-2 hrs to get him to go to sleep. I try leaving the room, and some nights will walk him back to bed 15-20 times. If I stay with him, he appears to be sleeping, but wakes as soon as I get up to leave. My husband has an easier time than I do, though he will still get up after my husband leaves the room. We have tried things, and I am sure others will have suggestions, but nothing has worked for us so far. Hoping it is a phase that will pass. (He does still take naps, usually about 2 hrs a day). Good luck!
best,
Kim

Is there anything small your daughter really likes? My daughter is a bit older -- she's 4 -- but she will do almost anything for a sticker. We've used sticker charts for almost every behavior we've wanted to change over the past couple of years, including staying in bed. We never had the constant popping up issues that you seem to have, but she would often come into our room and climb into bed with us (we coslept until she was about 2 1/2) and while she's always welcome in our bed if she really needs it, we would prefer she be in her own. So we just put a chart next to her bed and told her that every morning she wakes up in her own bed, she gets to pick out a new sticker for the chart. She still occasionally climbs in with us, but usually now it's for a reason -- she had a nightmare, or has wet the bed (sigh... we've recently taken her out of pullups at night... she usually makes it through) or some other reason she can't articulate in the middle of the night, but not merely because she's woken up.

Another method I've heard of but not used, is that you give her a specific number of tokens (small things that you can take from her) say 5, and tell her that is how many times she can get out of bed, and each time she does, you take one away, and then you slowly reduce how many you give her until she's only getting up if she really needs it.

Is there a baby monitor in her room? She may not get up as much if she knows that you'll hear her and come if she calls. She might just need to know where you are and that you're there if she needs you. I know that also helped our daughter, especially when I stood in her room and she went downstairs and listened to me quietly calling her name and realized that yes, we can hear her, even if she is quiet.

Hope some of this helps.

I also think your story sounds familiar, and unfortunately most of my advice is about the things we have tried that HAVEN"T worked. Of course, every kid is different, so some of these things might work for your daughter. I have two boys, 18 months and almost 3 1/2, who share a room and have since the youngest was about 6 months old. Bedtime ha s been 7:00 for years, although sometimes it ends up being closer to 8:00 by the time we get them into bed. Until recently, bedtime was not an issue: we put them in their room and left, and a short time later we heard no noises. However, for the past 1-2 months, the older one has been finding every excuse under the sun to talk to us, get out of bed, or disturb his little brother. The older one has a toddler bed (which he has been using for a while now), and the younger one is in a crib. The first thing we tried was telling our older son that once we tuck him in we are not coming back in the room unless he has gotten up to use his potty (we put one in his room so he couldn't say he needed to use the toilet in order to get out of bed) and needs help cleaning up. He hates having to tuck himself in, so if he gets out of bed and then can't get his "tuck," he does get upset -- but it didn't make a difference in his sleep patterns. He takes an extremely long nap (traditionally 1-4 or 5), so we thought perhaps he was getting too much sleep. We tried waking him up early from his nap, but he was just cranky in the afternoon and still didn't go to sleep any earlier. Then we tried skipping the nap altogether, but that had similar results. Next we moved naptime earlier in the hopes that he would naturally wake up sooner but still refreshed and then be able to go to bed earlier. Napping went fine, but nighttime sleeping did not improve. Last night we tried putting the boys to sleep in separate rooms. I will try it again tonight, but so far I am not sure whether we got any improvement other than not having to tell them to stop yelling at one another to go to sleep (which has been the latest antic; each boy says he can't sleep because the other one is making noise). The older one still didn't get to sleep until about 9:00. I think the younger one did fall asleep earlier than usual, but it took him a while -- probably because he was upset that his brother wasn't in the room and that he was sleeping in a different place (we put him in our bedroom, which is where he usually takes his naps).

So I haven't found the answer in our case.

However, I do one suggestion for what you might try with your daughter. I'm sure there are exceptions out there, but I really think 2 1/2 is too young for her not to be napping. Are you putting her down for a rest and she is not falling asleep? Or have you just given up putting her down at all? I have heard that overtired children can actually have more trouble going to sleep at night, which seems counterintuitive. I would definitely try to get your daughter on a nap routine. It's key that it's always the same time every day -- don't try to gauge whether she seems tired. Even if she isn't going to sleep, leave her in there for at least an hour for a rest. Eventually she will probably start napping (especially if she is already falling asleep in the car during the day -- this seems to indicate that the issue is not that she isn't tired). There was a period when my older son told me he didn't want to take a nap, and in fact he was not napping. He went from taking marathon 3-4 hour naps to taking no naps, just like that, and I was scared I'd lost my precious naptime with no warning. I kept putting him in the crib (he sleeps in a crib for naps because otherwise he gets up and plays) and telling him that he at least had to rest, and after almost 2 weeks of no naps, he suddenly resumed his old nap schedule.

Hi J.,
I don't really have any advise either, but am dealing with the same issue. My 2 1/2 year old daughter has been refusing to go to sleep at night as well. I stopped napping her because I figured that she just wasn't tired at night if she had a nap. Last night she was falling asleep on the couch at 5:30 as I made dinner so I made sure she stayed awake. I thought for sure she would go right to sleep at bedtime (8:00), but no such luck. Still an hour of getting up and turning the light on and coming out of her room. She shares a room with her brother (5), but he will sometimes fall asleep while she is doing all of this, or ask her to stop so he can go to sleep. So, now my game plan is to get dinner, baths, etc out of the way earlier and if she happens to crash on the couch just pick her up and put her to bed. She is clearly tired but just fights it and then is very cranky the next day, which is getting harder to deal with. Good luck and I hope you find something that works for you.
L.

It seems like this is a very common problem at this age! My advice is, let her play as long as she needs to in her room, but leave. That is what I have been doing with my son for naptime lately. He will play in his bed for 2 hours, it is more like quiet time than nap time. Is it possible that she is not tired at her bedtime and that is why she is buying so much time? Good luck!
Deb