4yo won't sleep till 10:30pm

Sorry but you gotta switch preschools to one that will let the older kids go into another room and play quietly while the little ones sleep.

We had this exact issue with our 4 yo. What solved the problem for us was explaining the problem very clearly to the preschool teacher (not going to bed til 10:30 is obviously a problem) and getting her to agree to cap his nap at 30 minutes, and also putting him on a very low dose of melatonin at bedtime (1/4 mg). This worked to solve the temporary problem, and now he’s in kinder and falls asleep within minutes at 8pm. Good luck!

In the exact same boat with my 4 year old. Our preschool has a nap room and a quiet time room where kids can quietly play. Once he switched rooms and dropped the nap, bedtime became 7pm. Better for everyone. Prior to switching to the quiet room, they would wake him up after 1 hour which also helped. Either way they were very willing to work with us and I’d be disappointed if my kids preschool had as little flexibility as yours. 

Oh, how I wish I had advice for you, but I am going through the exact same thing with my 3 yo. It is hell. Almost every night devolves into her throwing a tantrum because she’s up WAY too late, her screaming wakes her baby brother, and then I’m up until 11 soothing everyone back to sleep. I’m following in desperate hope that someone has answers.

Switch preschools. The late bedtime is the sign to drop the nap. If the school can’t adjust, you should leave. With the nap gone, you can probably have her in bed at 7:00-7:30, asleep by 8:00 at the latest. 9:00 is probably too late if she’s not napping. 

Agree with the previous poster. Switch preschools. She’ll be fine. That said, there’s a parenting and control issue here too. I’d consult someone like Rebecca Freeling. For her entire elementary school life she’ll need to be asleep by 8-830 - many kids go to sleep earlier. You need tools to get control of her now. She can lie quietly in bed, she cannot bother her sibling. Get tough. She may be energetic but she’s also testing you. 4 year olds are challenging! That was our hardest year. There need to be clear and swift consequences for misbehavior. I’d bring your little one to sleep in your room and she sleeps alone until she can treat him with compassion and respect. 

Ugh, sorry to hear that you're going through this. Maybe you've already discussed this with her preschool teachers, but are the kids allowed to do a quiet activity on their mats? i.e., play with blocks or look at books? Maybe that will keep her awake during the rest/nap time. 

Otherwise, will she listen to audio stories/podcasts? The Moshi app is not free, but has a LOT of calm/sleep stories and music, and you can create playlists in the app (so you could create a playlist for her ahead of time). There are also lots of kid podcasts; Molly of Denali, Story Pirates, Circle Round. 

Hope things improve and you get some good rest soon!

Yeah, it sounds like she's outgrown her afternoon nap.  She's fallen into the cycle where she's up late, tired during the day and then actually falls asleep at naptime and then stays up late, repeat. My daughter's preschool let the older classmates outside or rest quietly during nap time. I think it's probably time to look for a school targeting older preschoolers.

If you were having a problem with staying up late without a daytime nap, it would be a different set of advice.  My daughter is a night owl and I couldn't get her to fall asleep early. My doctor suggested using some children melatonin for a week to get her sleepy earlier and wake up earlier to reset her sleep cycle. (she does not take naps during the day)  It worked pretty good, now she's in bed at 8pm. 

I second the new preschool suggestion (as challenging as that will be). Not shifting her to no naps is really challenging. Our 4 old just started no naps in June and he is still going to bed at 9pm and up at 6-6:30am. 

Even with no nap he has an insane almost of energy. I will say that sometimes, the reason we can’t get our son to bed earlier is because he can’t calm down enough to relax almost like he is trying to keep himself awake. Here are the things we have done to tire him out or chill out of an evening:

• Swinging by the park next to preschool so he can run around like crazy
• He loves going to the grocery store so I’ll plan to do that one evening and his job is to take care of the list — gives the other parent time to get dinner ready or have down time
• After dinner bake something, quick boxed mixes or a simple recipe from scratch. We usually let it bake while taking bath. This one seems to calm him down for some reason? We typically do this when we are doing takeout for dinner so there aren’t so many dishes. We give the baked goods to neighbors, grandparents, and sometime the teachers after he tries them. 
• In the TV room we let him do anything he wants and typically he runs laps. It’s so weird but he loves it and it tires him out. Really gets him tired out if we chase him.
• On occasion (and doesn’t happen often) we’ll watch one episode of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. I know screens are frowned upon but there are a few times during a month we literally don’t know what else to do. It makes him settle down and relax making bed time easier. 
   

Hope this gets better soon, I can only imagine how tired you are.

Many pre-schools. Including ours Rockridge Montessori, do work on numbers and letters or allow extra playtime for non-nappers. Our 4 yo dropped nap in April and bed time has been a little easier. Swimming makes our kid exhausted and in bed at 7 if that is an option!

I feel for you! So sorry you’re in this bind. It sounds like your preschool mandates napping for 4-year-olds to make things logistically easier for themselves. It isn’t developmentally appropriate. 

Does she like jigsaw puzzles? Or art projects? Maybe sticker art books, coloring books, or paint with water? I think you’ll probably need a variety of things to rotate, so she doesn’t get bored with any one thing. At that age, my daughter really liked Kiwi Crate projects; you could add those to the mix. A small weaving loom (like for making potholders)?  There are also kits where you decorate an object with stickers (like making “stained glass” with translucent stickers, or decorating a box with stickers). Does she like building things? My daughter really enjoyed making objects using paper, cardboard, found objects, sticker dots (great substitute for glue), and masking tape. I would also sometimes lay out a giant piece of paper (cut off a roll, like the kind you buy at Lakeside Learning) and let her make a “mural.” I also would trace her body on the paper, and she would then draw in the rest of the picture.

I hope some of this is helpful!

We have a high energy kiddo and have loved the Yoto speaker so she can choose her own stories, podcasts, music, etc. We have the hatch for a visual when it’s time for alone time, and also one of those projecting starlights as a nightlight. Our pediatrician also recommended melatonin at times.
I have to add, though, that it’s unacceptable  that the preschool is forcing napping. I assume this is because teachers can have breaks. A preschool should require kiddos to have some rest time for 15-20 minutes and then provide a quiet activity. If it’s possible for you, I would look at other schools and have a followup conversation with your current director on best practices and state licensing recommendations. It’s a red flag when a school is forcing napping when it’s developmentally inappropriate for your child,  and not partnering with parents. Good luck! 

Our daughter (now 30) was much as you describe.  She's still a night owl.

I remember that I quit taking naps at age 3, to the consternation of my grandmother.

As others have observed, the inflexible preschool that requires napping is part of the problem.

But once you have eliminated the daytime nap, there is a risk that the kiddo will behave badly from 5:30 - 7 p.m., just when someone needs to prepare dinner.

Our midwife, Peggy Vincent, called it "the witching hour".

You are already helping your daughter get active exercise during the day.  This is part of the solution.

With the daytime active play place in place, one must just experiment with the individual kid and family dynamic and see what works.

Just don't make the mistake that I did - get the kid down by 10:30 p.m., exhausted, and then stay up til midnight to do the non-kid things that needed doing.  Each morning I was an hysterical, screaming tyrant, so sleep-deprived was I. If I had it to do over again, I would have just konked out when the most nocturnal kid did, at 10:30 p.m,.and let the bill-paying be damned.

You have my sympathy. We went through the same thing and were so happy to start Kindergarten this fall and be done with late bedtimes (ours is fast asleep by 8pm at the latest now). Our kid was allowed to play quietly in his room until he was tired and we got alit of mileage out of legos and Duplos, a small whiteboard and dry erase marker, printed out coloring pages (our kid likes this better than coloring books for some reason), simple puzzles, fiddle toys like Pop-its, anything quiet and engrossing worked well. Good luck - this will end!

What time does she wake up? Maybe having an earlier wake up would even it out. Daylight savings is coming up so her bedtime will end of up being 9:30 but she might start waking up at 5. Good to think about and see what you can adjust. 

We had the same problem too until I told the preschool my son should only nap for 30 mins then wake him to go to the older kids room.  With no nap, he fell asleep in the car on the way  home so that was a disaster trying to wake him up.  It was driving us insane until he could finally drop the nap.  Sorry you are going through this!  I would switch preschools, too. 

I am surprised that a preschool would require a four-year-old to nap during the day when they clearly don’t need it. I’m sorry this might not be the advice you want, but I would look for a different preschool… not exactly easy but probably the only solution that will really get you back on track. 

Hi Frustrated & Tired- If nothing else, I can be a sympathetic ear. I'm in a very similar boat with my kid; she's three and we are similarly facing an increasingly late bedtime (now approaching 1030/11). She wakes up on her own between 630-7. 

We have gotten her to the point where she reads/ plays by herself after we put her to bed, but she's started to dread bedtime b/c she lies awake for 1-2 hours before she falls asleep (I don't blame her!) Audiobooks haven't helped us much, either (we use the Goodnight World bedtime stories).We have talked with preschool and they're amenable to only letting her nap for a short period; will your pre-school consider this compromise (yes, nap - but short)? When she's with us (holidays/ weekends), we put her down ~ 8/830 and she's asleep in minutes. It's so frustrating! 

Hope you find an answer soon!

Agree with the other commenter - time to move on to a new preschool that doesn’t force a nap. It is not uncommon to no longer nap at 4. 

Unfortunately the only way this is going to get fixed is dropping the nap. The good news is that it will be easy once the nap is gone, but I know some preschools require napping for staffing reasons (it gives teachers a break). Our 4 year old is the same, 1, 1-2hr nap on Saturdays and that's it, otherwise they're up way too late.

We are in the same situation with our 4 year old daughter. We are progressing to shorter naps to try and resolve this situation. We go to bed at 9pm, yet she talks and stays awake until 10:30pm at times. Then, she is tired in the morning.

For my almost-four year who was struggling with sleeping at bedtime - there were two things that helped so much in resetting an awful bedtime pattern.

1. She can leave the light on, and “read” or play quietly in her bed for as long as she wants. It ends up being a half hour at most and often she turns the light off herself when she realizes she is ready for sleep.  I realize the room sharing situation might mean this strategy doesn’t work for you.  Maybe it could be possible with a reading light and/or a tent over the bunk bed?

2. Small dose of melatonin. The kids tablets came in 1 mg dose, which was incredibly effective but it led to some night terrors.  So we cut that to 1/4 tablet every night about 30-60 mins before bed.  I was worried we would become reliant on this, but after about a month the whole bedtime process was so much lower stress that we were able to stop. 

Many sympathies. Wishing you luck! 

Hi. Looks like you've gotten some good advice here but I will add our story. My 4.5 year old napping daughter has always been a night owl and now falls asleep around 10:30 pm. In order to plan for this I put my son to bed first while she watches tv with dad for about 30-45 minutes until 9:30. If you don't want to do screens you can do a different activity like some of the ones suggested. Then she plays in her room until 10 pm, into bed at 10 and asleep between 10:30 and 11. If your kids are room sharing, she can play quietly until it's time for her to get into bed. Asking my daughter to get into bed before she's sleepy is counterproductive for us. Also, my husband and I take turns putting my daughter to bed so that one of us is done before 10:30 at night. Yes, we have no evening time to ourselves. But, as other posters say, this will end when they go to kindergarten. 

You've rec'd a lot of replies but just wanted to add - many parents came up against this issue at our previous (beloved!) preschool, and did independent research on the law, etc. and the basic crux of the issue is that it's the licensing board for the preschool who dictates what must happen re: sleep, and the language is something along the lines of "the child must be offered quiet/rest time and the school/staff may not prevent a child from falling asleep if they naturally do so," or something to that effect. The school's hands were more-or-less tied, but it's also crazy to think a reasonably tired 4 year old won't fall asleep after lunch, while laying down under a blanket in a dark room w/ soothing music playing, surrounded by other sleeping children. The compromise they ended up striking with many tired families of subsequently night-owl children is that they could bring a "quiet activity pack" that the child can work through, and if it's enough to keep them awake, fine. Maybe see if your preschool would be amenable to an activity pack? A Water Wow, or a sticker book, etc?  Good luck. It was tricky for us to navigate, but I wouldn't have changed schools over it. 

My understanding is that preschools cannot prevent a kid from napping and must offer a nap. 

Are you me? We have the same situation. Big sibling can’t fall asleep due to lil one’s high energy antics. My 3 year old is alarmingly similar. We are planning on working with preschool to have them significantly shorten his nap.