Reply to Toddler goes to sleep late

Forum Index » Infants, Toddlers, & Preschoolers

Reply to "Toddler goes to sleep late"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]OP, I'm going to go against the grain here and say it is not unusual for 2 and 3 year olds to develop some trouble falling asleep at night. My kid was not in daycare and took a short nap until 3 and then dropped it altogether at 3, and she still sometimes struggled to fall asleep at a reasonable time.

I think it was because her brain was accumulating all this new knowledge, once she was pretty fluent with language, and thinking about it all kept her up at night.

The two things we did to ease these phases (she went through several between 2.5 and 4) were:

* Offer calming tools and activities that can help relax the mind and fall asleep. We allowed her to look at books in bed, listen to gentle stories or sleep meditations on a bluetooth speaker (we controlled the stories by phone from the living room), used a star projector light that moved to help lull sleep, and when all else failed, would lie down next to her and close our eyes and ask her to do the same until she fell asleep (last resort because we didn't want her to become reliant on it, but also most effective -- deployed when we felt it was necessary to make sleep happen)

* Follow good pre-sleep routines that tended to result in best sleep. A post-dinner playground visit, even if just 20 minutes, followed by a warm bath, snuggles and book reading, and then consistent tuck in routines, tended to provide a good transition to relaxation time, which led to better sleep. More rushed evenings, skipping an active playtime or bath, or variations in bed times from day to day, tended to cause her to be more wound up and have more trouble settling.

It's a process but having come out the other side, she learned some good tools for falling asleep on her own but will also ask for help when she needs it. She's 6 now and will read in bed on her own after we read to her, and then decide on her own to turn out the light by about 8pm and close her eyes and fall asleep. Very occasionally she still struggles falling asleep, and on those nights she will ask us to play a story on the speaker, or occasionally to come lie down with her for a few minutes. This is pretty rare and often happens after a challenging day of school or a shift in schedule (jet lag, daylight savings, getting over being sick) so we are okay with it -- she will fall asleep within 5-10 minutes so it's not burdensome for us.

It's not always about the nap. Learning to fall asleep once you achieve a higher level of cognition is a skill that takes effort. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics