Toddler doesn't want to sleep

Hi anonymous,
I have 2 princesses, almost 6 and 4 years old.
They used to always sleep well from 8 PM until half past 8 the next morning.
But that was when the oldest was 3 and the youngest was 2.
Now the oldest also gets tired later.
At first, I panicked; I really wanted to stick to 8 PM, but she was still active and not sleepy at all. Then I got anxious about it, I started a fight with her, got tired from it, it drained my energy, and I didn’t like forcing her to sleep that way at all.
Then I tried...

Once, I suddenly thought, "Late is fine, I'll just let her stay up a little longer and stop being so strict about the timing."

And that's what I did, trying not to stress. I let her play with her sister a bit more and use her tablet for a bit longer. It was 9:15 PM when she said, "Mom, here's the tablet, I'm going to sleep, I'm tired." I couldn't believe my eyes—she did it all by herself, and it was so nice, no fighting at all. Not at 8 PM, sure, but at least no stressed drama or struggle.

Nowadays she falls asleep right away, but around 9:15 PM, which is later than I'd prefer, but hey, it's fine like that.

I heard something recently from my doctor—we happened to be talking about toddlers and the difficulties with sleep. He told me that every person has a different sleep rhythm, and that applies to toddlers too. So maybe they just go to bed a bit later. But then they do sleep, and you can't force a child to sleep if they're still full of energy. He said it doesn't work for me either; if you can't fall asleep at a certain time, it just doesn't happen. So send them to bed a bit later if needed, so that when their body is ready to sleep, they're a bit more tired.

I should mention that my girls also wake up later now that they're going to bed later. The later they sleep, the later they wake up the next morning.

In the past, we always put them to sleep when they were tired, for example at 6 PM, but then I'd keep them awake until 7 PM so they wouldn't sleep too early and could sleep through the whole night. But luckily, I've always had easy children when it comes to sleep, even as babies.

You might want to stick to their sleep rhythm for now or try changing their sleep times a bit, keeping them awake a bit longer or something like that.

And waking up at his grandma's at night? What time does he go to sleep there? Maybe it's a bit too early, causing him to wake up at night? Sorry for the many messages and the long story. Couldn't send it all at once from my phone, hence the split messages. Greetings, Madelene