My DS cut out his daysleep at 18 months

He is now 28 months and goes to bed at 6pm on the dot. Dinner is at 5pm, followed by bath, warm milk, story and bed. He has his own separate mealtime, as he gets older he will be able to stay up later and eat with us. He wakes up at 6am but that works for us as DH has to get up early to go to work.

In the early days he was sometimes in bed by 5.30pm when he was getting used to not having the nap. We cut out the nap rather than DS himself...he wasn't going to bed until 10pm, sometimes later, at night and it was driving us nuts. This way, he actually gets more and better quality sleep. We had also noticed that if he had a nap he was more likely to wake during the night.

I could still get DS to have a nap now if I wanted him to - and occasionally he does need one. But if he does have a nap he is still awake at 11pm which is ridiculous. That is okay once in a while but not every night, no way. At first he would have no nap for maybe 3 days out of 7 (or one day he would have a nap, the next day no nap etc etc), and it gradually increased as we reset his sleep pattern - we didn't force him to stay awake if he was obviously needing to go to sleep - it was more a case of gauging his mood and energy and deciding "okay, no nap for you today".

For a while we were in a pattern where once every two weeks he needed a day nap, like a clock that needed resetting, but now it's maybe once a month he will have a day nap.

Sometimes, especially in the early days, I would give him dinner at 4.30pm so that he would eat better...and I often gave him his main meal at lunchtime rather than dinner time because he was too tired to eat properly in the late afternoon. So he would have toast or sandwiches or even cereal at dinner, something quick and easy. In fact, that would be my top tip - main meal at lunchtime.

We were aware that he got very fragile around 5pm and if he lost it, that was it, he would cry till he went to sleep. So we would be very gentle with him so as not to set him off, nice happy bath etc. Now he's fine, no problem at all, it just took a while to set the new routine and for him to get used to it.