A bath before bed should help calm your child. Maybe having a set “cuddle time” before bedtime will also help. Lay in bed with your child and cuddle and talk. I think this will help! And it will give you a great opportunity for just you and them time!! Good luck!!

I go over the routine of what we will do at bedtime right after dinner. “Tonight we will go upstairs and you will take a bath at 8 p.m., brush your teeth with lights out at 9 p.m.” One thing that seems to work better than anything else is telling my son that we’ll be in shortly to check on him once he lays down in bed. It relaxes him enough that he’s “normally” asleep within a few minutes. Never underestimate the power of mommy and daddy being there!

(I haven’t won anything on your blog yet and would love the Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting).

In order to get my child to bed on time during the week I make it a contest. Every night that Hanna gets to bed on time she earns 5 minutes of “stay up time” for Saturday evening. It works because she feels like she is being rewarded or following the rules and I don’t have to fight with her about going to bed because she wants to go.

A friend of mine give her child two tickets every night. She can come out of her room 2 times to get a drink or whatever, one for each ticket. Once the tickets are gone, she has to go to sleep. This gives her control of the situation and makes the transition to bed her choice.

Wow so BTDT with BOTH my kids. My oldest child was a bear to get to sleep. At age 2, instead of sleeping (depsite putting him in his room every night) he would insist on the light being on and scream for hours until he passed out from being so tired (8 hours was the longest). It was not uncommon to have him up at 10pm, 11pm heck even midnight. After his baby brother was born, he would only sleep (with out every light in the room on) if he was in OUR bed.

My youngest child always went to bed fairly well, but wouldn’t stay asleep (and would get up in the middle of the night).

After trips to the ped, the children’s sleep center, and book after book, this is what we did that worked.

To bring down bedtime. We slowly moved the time back 5-10 minutes each week. So if he was going to bed at 10pm, we would start putting him in bed at 9:50, then 9:40, then 9:30. After about 5 weeks we jumped by a half hour. We also made sure he was getting up at the same time everyday. Now to ensure he was getting to sleep, we worked on only this single issue. So we left him in our bed, with a bright night light, and even watching a movie. Within 8 weeks we had his bed time down to 8:30pm and was able to get it down to 8pm.

After that our next step was to get him to stay in HIS bed after we moved him back. To do this, if he got up to come back to our bed at night, we moved him back to his bed (again, we didn’t address any of the other issues).

Once we accomplished this, we worked on the light, again over time limiting the amount of light he could have (but never taking it completely away).

Finally, we got around to addressing him falling asleep in our bed (by this time he was almost 5). To accomplish this, we let HIM pick the date that he would start sleeping in his bed all the time. He picked May 1st (a few days after his 5th birthday) because (in his own words) at 5 he was a big boy who could start sleeping in his bed. And he did! Now he started talking about moving back in June (because he had only agreed to the month of May) but we countered with his own words.. big boy now can sleep in his own bed. So by a month after his 5th birthday we had him at a 8pm bedtime, sleeping in his own bed, with only the hall light on for a night light!

My youngest son was much harder (he was diagnosed with insomnia) and required sleep aids to help him sleep (which we did eventually wean him off and now only use them as needed).

We are not ones for routines at all, but both kids (now ages 8 and 6) are almost always in bed between 8 and 8:30 pm (sometimes we let the oldest stay up later and we give some more leeway in the summer and weekends) and if they aren’t asleep right away, they have to remain quiet and in their rooms (my oldest will sometimes read).

We also give warnings that bed time is coming (bed time in 20 minutes, bed time in 10 minutes etc) so the kids know its coming and are prepared (we use this even if they have to go to bed early which does happen).

Pick your battles and tackle each issue one at a time. Set your goals (remember to make they short so they can be achieved) and once you reach a goal, give it some time to set in before tackling the next issue. When my kids were younger I never thought we would reach the point we are today. I swore I was going to be putting my kids back in bed over and over every night until they graduated. But today, they go to bed when told (heck they will even send themselves to bed if they feel tired and I haven’t sent them yet), they generally fall asleep within 20 minutes of going to bed, and they sleep in their own rooms!

My husband and I are very lucky that our oldest is good about bedtime. Routines are firmly established with dinner, cleanup, baths, and reading. We have heard a really good tip from a class called “Love & Logic” that we are keeping in our back pocket for the future.

Make a deal with your children that they can stay up as long as they want with the light on as long as they get up in the morning at 6:00 (or whatever your regular time is to wake up) and they cannot come out of their room at night. (Bathroom would be the exception, but no 10 sips of water and bugging mom and dad.) Then, get them up at the appointed time and they still have to go to school. Warn the teachers about this and no matter how much they protest that they don’t feel good, they still have to go to school.

The longer they stay up, the better they will learn this lesson. By the time they make it home they’ll be ready to crash and be happy to go to bed. Lesson learned.

Note from post above: One of the points of trying this is noone can go to sleep on command, but if the kids stay in the room and are quiet and relaxed, that can help. In addition to showing them the consequence of staying up too late and why we have bedtimes for them.