BEGGING for Bedtime Help
I am at my absolute wits end. Sleep has been a struggle literally my daughter’s entire life, and I do not know what to do anymore. I’m going insane. She is four now, just started Pre-K and still will not sleep alone. She still wakes multiple times a night. Refuses to go to bed unless someone lays with her until she falls asleep. Then she wakes a few hours later and sneaks into our bed. If we take her back to her own bed, all heck breaks loose and the entire house is wide awake at 1am. We have tried multiple times to get her to a place where we can tuck her in, read her a book and leave the room. It never works. She immediately freaks out and chases after us. We have tried to just hold firm but every single night for nearly a month she would have an absolute MELTDOWN for hours before finally just passing out absolutely exhausted and delirious. She screams at the top of her lungs, gets violent, and cries the entire time begging to stay up or sleep with someone to the point she is hyperventilating and nearly vomiting. We have brought this up to her pediatrician multiple times over the years and we keep being told it’s normal and she will grow out of it. When she was an infant I was awake for days on end because she would NOT sleep, no matter what we did. Swaddle, rocker, swing, car rides, bouncer. Nothing worked. She would fall asleep and then immediately jerk herself awake and scream. This would go on for hours until she became so exhausted her body couldn’t go on anymore. When she was 8-12 months, she would try to launch herself out of my arms if I tried to rock her or hold her. If she thought I was trying to put her down for a nap or bed, she would go absolutely feral. For about three years, I got maybe 2-3 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. Mostly because my husband would take over on weekends and after work to let me nap, not because she was actually sleeping. She would stay awake for days if her body wouldn’t shut down first. We’ve tried adjusting the sleep schedule, white noise machines, multiple types of nightlights, calming music, melatonin, weighted blankets. You name it, we’ve tried it and a combination of other things. Literally nothing has worked. I cannot keep doing this every night. Bedtime is at 8pm and this can go on until midnight or later. I just don’t know what to do anymore. It was over an hour tonight of a full on crash out, nothing I did to try to calm her down worked and she screamed and cried until she finally just passed out. We can’t do this every night before school but we cannot keep laying in her bed with her for two hours begging her to go to sleep or co-sleeping anymore. She will not nap during the day at home or at school, so how she has the energy to force herself to stay awake and fight us so long I do not know. I’m on my hands and knees BEGGING for help at this point. I don’t think her doctor really understands what I’ve been trying to tell her. This isn’t a “I’m thirsty, I’m hungry, can I tell the dog goodnight?” type of stalling or push back. She flips a switch and dang near blacks out until she falls over every single time. I’ve never seen a child go this berserk over sleeping in their own bed, let alone just going to sleep period. She’s acted like she’s absolutely terrified of falling asleep her entire life and I don’t know what to do to fix it.