nap time during the day

hi alexia is now 21months old and has latly decided not to nap at all during the day, yet she still needs it as gets so tired grumpy and wont eat dinner and ends up going to bed at 6pm instead of the normal 7pm, sleeps till normally 8am every day so 13hours a night but she wont stay in her bed to RELAX enough to drift off to sleep, her door is shut so cant get out of her room, she has no toys in there just blankets pillow and curtains, ive tried opening the door and telling her to lay down every time she gets up but takes hours and hours for her to sleep and stresses me out soooooo much its not worth it. i dont no what to do now she needs a nap i have moved her nap time to 1pm which worked for a week but that was all, cant put her to bed to late coz once she goes to sleep has a nap for at least 2 hours ..... help

I went through this for months when my DD was around this age. She seemed to need her day sleep (ie was tired for it) but then just would not go to sleep at night no matter what I tried. So after about 3 months of spending till 10 or 11 pm trying to get her to sleep after her having a daysleep I cut it out and she has been fine ever since.

When I was cutting out her day sleep I felt really mean because I had to actually try hard to keep her awake. She wanted to sleep and would sneak off to lay on her bed and fall asleep if I let her. I planned activities and stuff to do at the times she would normally go to sleep to get her out of the habit of going to sleep and after about a week I didn't need to do that anymore. I found that if she had a sleep during the day she wouldn't need to sleep till much later at night, and the shorter night sleep meant she was tired and needed a sleep during the day...a vicious cycle. So it was really only a week or so of retraining her sleep cycles so she swapped sleep during the day for sleep at night.

For a while after I cut out the sleep I just had to feed her dinner at 5pm and get her in to bed by 6pm or sometimes a bit earlier but I gradually lengthened things out and now she is in bed about 6.30pm and sleeps till 6.30am.

Sorry, that was quite long. Hope it helped.

My DD refused a day sleep at 19 months, except when in a stroller. It lasted 3 weeks and then she decided to go back to day sleeps.I have had a few friends with similiar issues.