Helping Him Fall Asleep Faster

I agree with Deb. Make sure he has used up his energy. Boys especially need to be more physical. I can sympathize with you about the nap thing. My son took naps up until he was in Kindergarten, but my daughter, now 3, quit as soon as her big brother started school (just this year). If I am out running errands though, she will most likely fall asleep in the car. I am still a car napper, so maybe that just runs in the family. Back to what I was saying...I remember when my son was about 3 or 4, I used to take him out into the backyard and play race games with him. I would count how fast it took him to run from one fence to the other. He loved to see if he could beat his previous time, and it wore him out enough to get to sleep easy at night. My kids don't drink any soda, but I know some parents allow that for their children, so I will just add, if your kid does drink sodas with caffine, limit him and make sure he doesn't have any at least 5 hours before bedtime. Hang in there, you will figure out how to get a handle on it.

This is definitely a "too much energy" thing. I don't know if you participate in play groups or if there is a park nearby that you can take your son to, but something like that would be a great help.

Letting him run and play will help and so will getting him up a little earlier. You know when you get up early how you want to go to bed early? Same thing.

If he does nap, then I would also suggest keeping the nap down to 30 minutes and then letting him have the chance to run and play some more. Kids do outgrow the need for a nap, but if they've been running and playing a lot, he will probably need a short one to cut down on the crankiness.

Make sure you have a routine at bedtime so he knows what's going to happen every night. Do something special, like reading a book, every night. Have a few books that he can pick out of so he doesn't pick long ones but let him choose what he wants to hear each evening. My daughter is 14 and we STILL have 'our routine' that we do every evening for her. Hope that helps.

Make sure he has burnt off steam during the day, lot's of running around. My son falls right to sleep but my daughter takes a good 15 minutes, she basically lays there talking to herself, hee hee.
I say put him to bed at 7:30 and do a behavior chart for every night he goes to sleep well and nicely. Try blackout shades as the is the biggest issue with this time of year for kids.

I can say firsthand, if a child is worn out but not overly tired they will fall asleep better. If he is overly tired then it backfires.

I wouldn't let him sleep until 9am, that is too late for a 3 year old, continue to get him up at the same time as he typically did before, get him up and outside in the sunshine mid afternoon, a good healthy snack, yummy dinner, bath and bedtime.

My kids are so amazingly different if they have played outside and run around, they are calmer early evenings, a lot easier to manage and so ready for bedtime. My 3 1/2 year old is asleep by 7:30!!

When my kids were ages 1 and 3 my hubby went to school to get his masters in addition to working full time. The only time of the day my kids would be able to see their daddy was in the early morning hours so we started waking them up an extra half an hour earlier. We actually loved it. It corrected all night time problems. My girls got sleepier earlier so I put them to bed an hour earlier and the actually got MORE sleep, fell asleep quickly and were more pleasant during bedtime if I put them to bed earlier. So that is what I'd recommend: wake him up a half hour earlier and put him to bed an hour earlier. Try it for a week or two. My kids were the same with naps so we did not add naps back in or anything like that.