Question
For the past year, my only-child, eight-year old (nine in 2 weeks and about to start 3rd grade) has been impossible going to bed. It takes her hours to go to sleep; there's constant talking from her bedroom. She asks my husband and me to stay awake until she goes to sleep, and half the time, she succeeds in getting my husband to sit on the bed with her until she falls asleep.
For most of the summer, she's been coming into our room when we are asleep in the middle of the night, making a pallet with pillows and sleeping on the floor. We don't even hear her. In the summer, it's been tolerable. But with school starting in a few weeks, I want her to stay in her bed and get a good night's sleep. It's also completely disrupting any private time I have with my husband.
Before last school year, she was also easily able to spend the night with friends and with my parents. Now, she will not stay with friends for sleepovers, and she tortures my parents also by waking them up a million times.
And we spent several months seeing a counselor who suggested we do reward charts for sleeping in her bed all night (didn't work) and ended up convincing my daughter she had "anxiety" almost like she had strep throat or an ear infection. So, we quit with the counselor, and I considered it to be a waste of time and money.
Now the kicker is that we made her go to sleep-away camp this summer and I'd warned her counselors about her sleep issues when we dropped her off. My daughter had a great time, not a tear was shed, and her counselors said she wasn't remotely homesick.
I'm at my wit's end, she's controlling our sleeping lives, and I cannot figure out how to make it stop.
