Hi, I'm Nicky from Little Ones,
and today I'm going to answer the question:
why is my toddler taking ages to go to sleep at night?
Toddlers are very interesting creatures,
and they can be somewhat complicated.
The main reason we generally find that toddlers
are taking forever to go to sleep
at bedtime in the evening,
is because they've napped too long in the day,
or their nap is too late in the day.
And generally, we'd be looking at
by around two and a half to three years old,
your toddler will have reduced and then dropped
that daytime nap altogether.
And children who are holding on to a long daytime sleep
or any amount of daytime sleep, really
beyond three years old, are going to really struggle
to go to bed in the evening because they're just not tired.
They have a lot of staying power
and they are very, very strong willed,
and if they're not completely tired and ready for sleep,
there's going to be a million reasons
that they need to get out of bed
when you're trying to put them to bed in the evening.
Now the tricky thing is,
your toddler is not going to necessarily,
naturally lose their nap or decrease their nap hours
because, um, why would you?
So, and toddlers are busy, busy little beings,
and, you know, a lot of them might be at daycare or
preschool and they have really busy days,
it's very exhausting being a toddler.
So, if it was up to a toddler
they would hold onto their day sleep as long as they could,
and then, of course that's going to wreak havoc
with their bedtime settling, which is not ideal
because they're going to be missing out
on that more restorative sleep overnight.
So, it does come down to you having a bit more control
over your toddlers napping.
And yes, that is going to mean that by the time
they start reaching a particular age,
and you notice that they're still napping for two hours,
but now actually they're mucking around
for an hour at bedtime, you sort of need to go
"Okay, maybe it's time that we start cutting
that daytime sleep down."
And you would do it gradually, and you would do it every,
you know, couple of days so it's not sort of
all of a sudden you've gone from napping for two hours
to napping for 15 minutes.
And the idea is you're just going to slowly cut that sleep
down, so that they'll start settling quicker at bedtime
in the evening.
And when talking-- when I'm talking about bedtime,
I'm talking somewhere around seven o'clock.
So you certainly wouldn't want to be putting your toddler
to bed much later than that, especially once you've started
to reduce and then completely remove that nap.
So that's their daytime naps, now,
toddlers are also relatively challenging when it comes to,
can be challenging when it comes
to their bedtime behavior as well.
And I'm sure you will realize that your toddler
will literally do anything they can
for attention and for reward,
and that doesn't always necessarily mean good attention.
A lot of toddler behavior stems from getting
any kind of response, positive or negative.
So, they very, very quickly learn that
if they're doing something,
even if its yielding a negative response from you,
that's still a response,
that's still a reason to not go to bed,
and so they're going to keep doing that behavior.
We, um, it's quite hard to sort of give you an exact answer
for how to fix this with your toddler's bedtime,
it depends really on your child's age,
whether they're napping or not
and what their sleep environment's like,
whether they're still in a crib,
whether they're moved to a bed,
and all of those sorts of factors can play into it,
as well as their diet.
But, we do in our Toddler Sleep Program
have a whole lot of different solutions
in a section we call Toddler Tactics,
which looks at how to deal with resisting bedtime,
or habitually getting up, and how to deal with habit waking
in the night or if they keep getting up out of bed
and coming into your room,
or if they're waking early in the morning.
So once you've made sure that it's not something
that's happening in their day that's impacting
on their night, then we can start looking
at what's causing that repetitive destruptive behavior
in the evening, and work towards getting your toddler
calmly into bed at a decent time.
And don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel
for a lot more baby and toddler sleep videos.