why is she not sleeping? does she have a fear of something? is she active enough during the day? perhaps therapy.

but here is something i used as a nanny as a reward system. the two of you come up with a really fun activity. disneyland, a day of minigolf, perhaps a musical, whatever she wants. then she has to understand that if she wants to do this, she must go to bed when asked, without getting up all night. and you can keep track of this by getting a jar, and for everynight she sleeps in her room w/o getting up, she gets to put a cotton ball in the jar. once the jar is full you get to go do that really great fun thing together and celebrate! if it is broken (she stays in bed 3 nights then gets up the next) then you start over, taking ALL the cotton balls out. stick to it, dont take out just one cotton ball, ALL of em. and keep the jar somewhere where she cannot have access to it unless its in your hands. avoid cheating...i made that mistake once...good luck!

Is she going to sleep and waking up in the middle of the night, or does she just not go to sleep? The reason I ask is that I have an 8 year old son, who has been waking up around 2 a.m. ever since he was a baby. He learned that this is when he could get time with mom, and he always woke up around 2 a.m. and still does it. Of course, now, it's for different reasons that seem to be legitimate. He will wake up to get water (he sweats a lot in his sleep), or he will wake up hungry, and he will have crackers with bologna, and he goes right back to sleep. Does your daughter even try to go to sleep? I would bet that if you start giving her chores to do at night, before bedtime, that she would start going to sleep quickly. Good luck, and I wish your daughter the best.

Control issue maybe? But then, you'd think it would catch up. My son has a sleep disorder and takes meds to sleep. If she has ADD or any other disorder similar to it, she may have a sleep disorder on top of it. But the smart money's on control issue, I think.

My son was so used to sleeping with another person that we had a lot of trouble getting him to sleep in his own bedroom alone. Finally, I started out with lying next to him for 10 minutes for a week or two, then I would sit next to his bed for 10 minutes, then I dropped it to 5 minutes and so on. It has worked so far. Every once in a while he will have a rough night and I sit with him for a few minutes and he is fine. Good luck, it is rough.

My son had invisible food sensitivities that made him toss and turn at night, take hours to fall asleep, and he also was hungry all the time. He'd get up several times asking for food. I thought it was a ploy.
Now that I have changed his diet, he falls asleep much more easily and does not ask for food at night.