8 years old as per his previous post
Anyway, while it might be anxiety or fear related, I don't know. A LOT of children, especially the smart ones with lots of imagination, have similar issues - my 6yo niece has a one hour minimum before she ever touches her bed; a friend of mine has an 8yo with similar issues.
I'm obviously armchair parenting here (I'm now babysitting 2 or 3 times a week on children or babies of friends - as long as I'm unemployed I might as well save them some babysitting/creche/daycare fees - but that's most definitely not at all the same thing ;-) ), but according to experts (ymmv), it really is most often a matter of too much, not too little. Yes, children crave and need attention, even negative attention. And they need lots of stimulation. For sleep, though, much like with adults, you really need to train the brain to
stop. We've all read articles about no screens in the bedroom, no blue lights an hour before sleep, no energetic foods, etc for adults - all of that applies to children as well, if not more so.
Of course, this is difficult for many reasons. For PatrThom, for example, there's a good chance that he only *has* an hour or so a day with his son - even if that's the hour before he goes to bed, you still want it to be a meaningful hour where you can do (fun) stuff together. For another, these days almost all ways of entertaining children are stimulus-rich - if it isn't a tablet, tv, or smartphone, it's a multicolored, loud, responsive toy or something wild and unpredictable.
In many cases, the evening ritual can pretty much "start" with "ok, time for bed, go brush your teeth and get in your pyjama's". This, still according to some experts (again, ymmv), is far too late. Children *can* be trained to react well to "one hour to bed, let's put away all screens and change into pyjama's", then giving them plenty of time to adjust to having to wind down. This may still be an hour completely "lost" for the parent(s) as this is the time to tell about what happened today, to get the last energy out of the system, to ask for a last game together, etc etc. Done properly, though, the child will usually be more ready for bed and more willing to go. All of this, of course, not necessarily in the bed room (better not, in fact) but in a fairly "poor" area - asking your kid to calm down while the TV's blaring in the background and a friend or brother or parent is playing a console right next to it is a losing game.
The combination of a fairly stimulus-poor environment (aka, boring) coupled with positive things to look forward to the next day and wind-down time, may make a child more "willing" to go to sleep. "This evening's fun and I want it to go on forever!" is a bad mindset - "oh boy, I can't wait for tomorrow to get here, it'll be fun" can be a good one (or bad if it's a child who gets too excited looking ahead).
But, you know, all children are different. Some may just need to feel safe, in which case Dei's "sit in his room 'till he sleeps" might work far better.
