By bedtime, there may be very little left in the day. You have managed work, school, dinner and whatever happened in between. Now you need your child to sleep.
They may be tired too. They might even look exhausted. Yet they are still moving, talking, worrying or calling you back into the room.
I think we can put so much attention into this last part of the day that we lose sight of everything the child has brought to it. Bedtime has a history. It includes this morning, the school day, the week of broken nights and the things that are still on the child’s mind. Understanding that history can give us more places to help.
The pattern
Which part of sleep is difficult?
There are several different experiences hidden inside the words “won’t sleep”. A child might resist going to the bedroom, lie awake without feeling sleepy, become frightened when a parent leaves, or fall asleep fairly easily and wake repeatedly later.
Try to notice which part is difficult. What time do they get into bed, and roughly when do they fall asleep? What do you see while they are awake? Are they uncomfortable, chatty, restless or worried? Do they want someone close? Does the pattern change on weekends or holidays?
A few brief notes across several days may be enough. The aim is to see a pattern, not to turn an already exhausting evening into another recording task. Notice the easier nights as well. An easier night does not prove a cause, but it can give us a sensible place to look.
Tired and awake
Being worn out does not always mean feeling sleepy
It is possible to be worn out and still feel very alert. Adults know the experience of lying in bed after a demanding day while the mind continues working through it.
For a child, bedtime may be the first quiet space in which worries become noticeable. Some children are still seeking movement. Others are bothered by the feel of their bedding or by sounds we barely register. A child can also be tired at a time that does not quite match their body’s sleep timing.
Sleep hygiene, the familiar list of good habits around bedtime, is genuinely useful, and it is a bigger topic than one article. But underneath the list there is a simpler question I keep coming back to. What has to happen for a child to fall asleep at all?
Body, heart and mind
Three things have to be able to let go
To fall asleep, the body has to be able to relax, switch off and unwind. So does the mind. And so does the emotional part of the mind, which I think of as the heart. Body, heart and mind all have to be able to let go, and on a hard night one of them usually can’t.
So I would ask which one it is. Does this child need some space to talk about their day before their mind will slow down? Some children carry the whole day into bed with them, and a few minutes of ordinary conversation earlier in the evening, when nobody is waiting for sleep to happen, does more than anything at lights-out.
Does the child need a way into their body, as a way of letting go of what is going on in their mind? Most children can’t meditate, and I wouldn’t ask them to. But they can do things that are embodied: movement, play, a bath, a massage if they enjoy touch. One thing I often suggest is tumble play, not rough and tumble but the gentler, rolling, wrestling kind, and not just before bed. Mid-afternoon, after school, is a good time for it. It gives the nervous system somewhere to put the day, well before the evening asks it to wind down.
What matters is the child’s response. A bath that winds them up or touch they find unpleasant is not calming just because it appears on a list. Offer choices and pay attention to what actually leaves them more comfortable.
Screens and light
Blue light tells the brain it is still daytime
Screens emit blue light, and blue light wakes the brain up. It tells the brain the day is still going. So screens do have to be switched off a certain number of hours before bed, and that is not a small part of the picture for many of the children I see.
If your child is not falling asleep, bring the screen curfew back by an hour. Then keep bringing it back, an hour at a time, and see whether it helps. I would treat that as an experiment rather than a punishment: the point is to find out where this child’s brain needs the day to end.
Lighting in the house matters in the same way. Be careful with bright overhead light in the evening. Soft, ambient, yellowish light does a surprising amount, and it costs nothing to try.
The day and the rhythm
Sleep is built during the day, and it shifts slowly
Movement and exercise during the day belong to sleep as much as anything that happens at night. Morning light, opportunities to move and reasonably consistent waking times all help. For younger children, naps and their timing are part of the picture. The Raising Children Network’s school-age sleep guidance explains these everyday foundations.
Sometimes what we are looking at is a body clock that has drifted. A circadian rhythm can be moved, but only slowly, in small steps, and it can take months. That is worth knowing at the start, because a family that expects a week of effort to fix it will feel they have failed when it hasn’t.
Be careful with a habit once it has formed, too. A good rhythm can be broken quickly if screens and devices creep back into the evening. We see this a lot in teenagers now, and a great deal of teenage sleep deprivation comes down to exactly that.
The house
Everyone slows down at the same time
One more thing I have to put here. If you are expecting a child to go to sleep while there is a lot of activity in the house, you are asking them to make quite a jump. The parents are finishing off work, the devices are on, minds are busy, and there is a kind of energy in the house that the child can feel even from their bedroom.
So think about how the house itself could be calmer at sleep time, especially in the hour or two before it. Everyone slowing down at the same time, adults included, is often the change that makes the others work.
Each of these things can take a while to work with, and each can be very rewarding. Even if they don’t fix the sleep straight away, they are all good things to do, and they all calm the nervous system down. That helps whatever else is going on.
A different place to begin
When all the effort goes into bedtime
When the whole evening has become organised around getting a child to sleep, everyone may begin anticipating another difficult night. A late night makes the next day harder. The harder day brings more exhaustion into bedtime. We try harder, and the moment becomes increasingly tense.
That does not make the parent responsible for the sleep problem. It describes a situation people can get caught in when they have been short of sleep for a long time.
Choose one part of the day that feels doable, whether that is the afternoon tumble, the screen curfew, the lighting or the hour when the house slows down. Give that one change your attention, then see what happens before adding the next thing. Watch for changes beyond an earlier bedtime: less distressed settling, fewer arguments, a child who seems more rested in the morning.
Getting help
Some sleep problems need medical attention
Speak with your GP if sleep difficulty persists, is affecting your child’s daytime functioning or is leaving the family unable to manage. Pain, marked restlessness or a possible medication effect also deserve discussion. Do not change prescribed medication or start a sleep product without advice from the treating clinician.
Regular loud snoring, gasping or observed pauses in breathing need medical review. The Royal Children’s Hospital’s information on obstructive sleep apnoea explains why these signs matter. For severe breathing difficulty, call triple zero (000). Healthdirect’s guidance on serious illness in children explains when to seek emergency help.
There may be something specific that needs treatment. There may also be ordinary changes that make the evening gentler. Both can be part of helping a child sleep, without asking an exhausted family to put every ounce of effort into the moment the lights go out.