I had a really hard time with my two year old child's sleep for her first two years, but now she's sleeping 6 PM - 6AM consistently. Some things that helped:

• no lights or TV or anything on at night or shortly before bed. We read a book and have dinner close to sunset. Completely dark room (except for a planetarium nightlight on the ceiling and windows open to the stars) starting at sundown. Some light music with no beat to fall asleep if she has a hard time settling (Hearts of Space, Mister Rogers, or similar).

• I stay touching her most of that time and don't do anything that may wake her, like eating. I do get up for bathroom and drinks in the middle of the night.

• She has breakfast and learning time on waking around 6 (reading, singing, games), and then we go to play group around 9, and she plays hard with other kids until about 10:30 - 11.

• We try to get her to take a nap around noon by settling down with food and a book, but lately it's not happening. If she's not asleep by afternoon, then we don't encourage it, and let her go back to playing harder when she wants.

• she gets her only TV time in the early morning or afternoon, so it's not right before sleep. She's encouraged to watch something educational that exercises her brain.

• she does more hard playing in the afternoon, such as a trip to the park, or indoor playground equipment, and then winding down with gentler play like making music or Duplo bricks or pretend play or drawing.

• she has a lot of freedom to do what she wants and most of these things are just suggestions and guidelines. We aren't strict about anything except TV and lights off before dark.

• I think the key has been the morning play group that just started recently, because she really wants to get up every morning to go, and she's tired and happy after ~2 hours of playing and learning with other kids. The next biggest help has been no lights or TV at night, which was difficult because she used to have nightmares and wake up wanting TV to take her mind off of it, or she wanted to fall asleep watching TV, but might take hours to wind down like this (my mom, MIL, spouse, and other relatives all suggested to "let her fall asleep to TV" all the time, until I had to insist that it just doesn't work for her like it does for an adult; they all insisted it worked for their babies, and it took a lot of frustration for me to conclude that it doesn't work).

Problems that we had prior to this schedule:

• she tended to be awake most of the night and was impossible to wake in the morning, and would just forgo sleep and be very cranky, wild, and tired if she didn't get to sleep the day away. I was unsuccessful in moving her sleep times and having them stick, because she kept gravitating back to being awake at night, and because of the unpredictability of it, I would be a tired zombie for a lot of that time, unable to play with her as much as she wanted.

• she wouldn't stay asleep and had nightmares, which caused her to get out of bed, demand TV or play for comfort, and then she wouldn't go back to sleep for a long time, making her schedule unpredictable on most days. She also demanded that I do active things to help her sleep, whereas now it's more passive.

• I don't want to ban TV because she has learned a lot from it. I spend a lot of time teaching her and get exhausted doing it, but videos still helped her learn letters and numbers, words, shapes, signs, songs, counting, and now she's starting to read. I learned to read from TV when I was about 3, so I know that it can help. Is it necessary? Probably not, but she gets a lot of joy out of it and is accelerated on her learning, which means less frustration for her, so I don't see the harm. She can recognize a few words and we're working on phonics now. Since she was under 1, she seems to get mad that she can't read, so I'm happy for her to learn early and have that satisfaction.

I can't think of anything else to add, so I'm stopping there.