How can I help my child sleep?

Perhaps bedtime began at seven, and it was long past eight before you could leave their room. What was left of the evening went quickly. Then at 1am there was a voice in the dark, or a small shape at your door, and the only thing that got them back to sleep was lying down beside them again. By morning you’re both worn through, and somewhere in the fog you're wondering whether this is your fault.

If you’re reading this with a child asleep across your pillow, or have come back from getting one to sleep down the hall, tonight doesn’t have to be the night anything changes. The small hours are for getting you both back to sleep. Your help does the most good earlier, at bedtime, and that can wait for another evening.

A child’s night, like ours, is a run of sleep cycles, and in the minutes when one cycle ends and the next begins, sleep is at its lightest. When researchers recorded healthy children asleep in the laboratory, from toddlers to 18-year-olds, brief awakenings turned up at every age³3 Scholle et al., 2011 as an ordinary part of the night. Your child waking at 1am or 3am is doing what every sleeper does, and whether they call for you depends on the moments that follow.

The clearest view of those moments comes from babies. In one American study, eighty families let researchers film their babies at home with infrared cameras over four nights, and the babies who got themselves back to sleep woke just as often as the ones who cried out⁴4 Goodlin-Jones et al., 2001. They woke like everyone else and dozed off again without a sound, so their parents often didn’t know they had woken at all. The cameras caught something about bedtime too: babies who were put down awake were more likely to get themselves back to sleep later in the night, while those who needed a parent to fall asleep at the start of the night tended to need one again in the middle of it⁴.

Those were babies up to a year old, and none of the studies here filmed older children. For an older child, it’s an idea borrowed from the little ones, and it’s the one the approaches that ease night waking in young children⁵5 Mindell et al., 2006 are built on. Seen that way, a child who falls asleep with your hand on their back, or with you lying beside them, comes up out of sleep at 1am into a room where the hand has gone, and it makes sense that they’d call out for it. It’s something they’ve learned in the most ordinary way, from many nights of being comforted, and so it’s something they can learn differently, a little at a time.

When your child seems to get by on less sleep than their friends, or you catch yourself counting their hours at the end of a long day, how their days go tells you more than any single number. Sleep specialists suggest ten to thirteen hours in every twenty-four, naps included, for children aged 3 to 5, and nine to twelve hours for children aged 6 to 12⁶6 Paruthi et al., 2016. The ranges are wide because children’s need differs from one child to the next⁶, shaped by their genes, their health, their habits and their surroundings. A child who sleeps at the short end and has good days may well be getting what they need. The ranges for grown-ups are in How much sleep do I really need?

Too little sleep in a child can catch a tired parent by surprise, because it rarely looks like yawning. Children who regularly sleep less than they need have more trouble with attention, behavior and learning⁶, and one small experiment in Canada showed how quickly that can appear. The researchers asked thirty-four healthy children aged 7 to 11 to go to bed either earlier or later on school nights. Then their teachers, who didn’t know which child was doing which, rated them in class. The children who gained about twenty-seven minutes a night seemed less restless and impulsive to their teachers, and those who lost about fifty-four minutes seemed worse⁷7 Gruber et al., 2012. (Researchers in Israel saw something similar: when they shifted children’s sleep by an hour for three nights, the change showed up on computer tests of thinking and attention⁸8 Sadeh et al., 2003.) So the child who is fidgety, tearful or wild by late afternoon may be running short of sleep, even with no yawn in sight.

Most parents have tried a routine of some kind, and know how one story can turn into three. So it’s worth knowing what happened in one American trial. Researchers asked 405 mothers whose children had a sleep problem to begin the same short routine every evening: a bath, a massage with lotion, then cuddles or a song, with the lights out within half an hour. The mothers changed nothing else about how they put their child down. Within two weeks the children were falling asleep faster and waking less, and their mothers’ mood had lifted too⁹9 Mindell et al., 2009. Those children were all under 3, younger than yours, and the trial was funded by Johnson & Johnson, whose products were used in it.

No one yet knows why routines help¹⁰10 Mindell et al., 2015. They may ease the worries and fears that come at bedtime, or they may simply come along with other steady habits in a home. Which parts of a routine matter hasn’t been studied, so yours doesn’t need a bath, or a set length, or anything bought for it. What seems to count is how often it happens: in a large survey of families with young children, the more nights a week a family kept one, the better the children slept¹⁰. That’s a good reason to choose a routine short enough to manage on a night when you’re tired, or alone, or putting two children down at once.

If bedtime has become a long wait in the dark, one approach with evidence behind it in young children is bedtime fading⁵5 Mindell et al., 2006: setting bedtime close to the time your child falls asleep now, so that sleep comes quickly, then bringing it earlier by small steps once it does. For the bigger shift that comes with the teenage years, there’s Why can’t my teenager fall asleep before midnight?

If you lie beside your child each night until their breathing slows and then creep out, it may last only until the first waking, when they look for you again. Researchers have looked closely at how young children, mostly under about 5, learn to fall asleep without a parent, and the results are encouraging: more than eight in ten of the children treated improved in a way that mattered, with the gains lasting for months⁵5 Mindell et al., 2006. School-age children have had far less attention, with too few good studies to say how well the same approaches work¹²12 Meltzer & Mindell, 2014 at that age. So for an older child, parents borrow the methods from younger ones, along with the idea underneath them: that the way a child learns to fall asleep at bedtime is the way they’ll look for again at 2am.

One approach, leaving protests unanswered altogether, has strong evidence in babies and toddlers, though the studies here didn’t test it in children of school age. If you’d rather move a step at a time, there are gradual ways too, with evidence of their own in young children, and two of them are in the box below. If brothers or sisters share a room, you could settle one before the other, or put them down at different times, and take each step more slowly.

Bedtime can stretch to an hour of encores: a drink of water, the toilet, a question about where people go when they die, a sudden worry about the wardrobe. In one small American trial, researchers gave nineteen children aged 3 to 6 who resisted bedtime a bedtime pass, a card they could trade for one visit or one trip out of the room. Once it was spent, their parents didn’t answer further calls. Compared with families who simply kept a record, the children left the room and called out far less, and stopped protesting sooner each night¹⁵15 Moore et al., 2007. The change was still there three months later, and their parents liked it¹⁵.

With only nineteen children it’s a small beginning, and the trial didn’t set out to say why the pass works. One guess is that it gives a child a little control and the certainty that you’ll come once. It also gives you a way to meet the fifth request for water with a smile and a reminder of the card. The pass is meant for stalling and curtain calls. If your child is truly frightened, that’s a different call, and you’d go to them and reassure them, pass or no pass.

Fear at bedtime is real to a child, even when nothing is there. In a study of 176 Dutch schoolchildren aged 4 to 12, nearly three in four said they had fears at night¹³13 Muris et al., 2001. Wouldn’t you expect those fears to fade as a child grows? In that study they did the opposite. Comparing children of different ages, the researchers found that fears grew more common from 7 to 9 and stayed steady to 12¹³¹⁶16 Lewis et al., 2021, so fears at night were more usual among the eight-year-olds than among the younger children. Their parents greatly underestimated how often it happened¹³, so your child may be frightened at night more often than they tell you.

When the researchers asked where the fears came from, almost four in five children traced them to something frightening they’d heard, seen or been told¹³: a film, a story at school, the news on in the kitchen. Many had their own ways of coping¹³ that they found helpful. So it may help to listen first, to ask what they think about when the light goes out, and to ask what they already do that makes it better.

For fears that really disrupt sleep, therapists use step-by-step practice at being in the dark, brave imagery, coaching a child in what to say to themselves, and rewards¹⁶¹⁷17 Gordon et al., 2007, often within a few sessions, though most of those studies are small. Those programs were for children with significant fears, but their ideas can be borrowed at home: a few minutes more each night with the light a little lower, a story in which your child is the brave one, a sentence of their own to say in the dark, and praise in the morning for the night they managed.

How often a child ends up in a parent’s bed depends a great deal on where you live, from about one schoolchild in twenty regularly sharing in Italy¹⁸18 Cortesi et al., 2004 to more than a third sharing a bed or a room in eight Chinese cities¹⁹19 Li et al., 2008. Many families share by choice.

If sharing works for your family, these studies give no clear reason to stop, though researchers read them in two ways. One reading sees sharing as a possible small cost: in China, children who shared went to bed later and slept a little less, though the differences were too small to matter clinically¹⁹. The other sees it as a family’s answer to trouble already there: in Italy, children who co-slept had more bedtime resistance, worry at night and night waking¹⁸, but sharing often looked like a family’s way of coping with a sleep problem the child already had, or simply a family habit¹⁸. Both studies looked at families at a single moment, so neither can say which came first, and researchers don’t agree yet.

If you’d like your bed back, you could walk them back each time, in the same brief way, so their own bed becomes the place the night begins and ends. All of this is about children past babyhood; babies have their own safe-sleep guidance, in How much should my newborn sleep, and how do I keep them safe?

Perhaps the tablet comes out to fill the last half hour before bed, or an older child’s phone charges on the nightstand all night. When researchers pooled twenty studies of young people, the ones who used a phone or tablet at bedtime had about twice the odds of sleeping too little, and were more likely to sleep poorly and be sleepy in the day²⁰20 Carter et al., 2016. Even a phone nobody touched seemed to matter: a device left in the bedroom and not used went with shorter sleep²⁰. Those were mostly teenagers, and a link like this can’t show the phone is to blame. Where researchers helped children aged 2 to 13 cut screen time by about half an hour a day, the children gained about eleven minutes of sleep a night²¹21 Martin et al., 2021, a small gain and an uncertain one. There’s little research on charging devices outside the bedroom as a step of its own; the reason for it is that unused phone on the nightstand. It still seems a sensible step, especially as your child gets older, and one to take alongside the routine and the bedtime rather than in place of them.

Snoring now and then is part of childhood, and sleep apneasleep apnea A condition in which the throat repeatedly narrows or closes during sleep, briefly stopping or reducing breathing. Loud snoring, gasping and daytime sleepiness are common signs., where breathing is blocked again and again in sleep, is much rarer: only a few children in a hundred are described by their parents as snoring ‘always’, and apnea affects about one to four children in a hundred²²22 Lumeng & Chervin, 2008. It is most common between ages 2 and 8, often because of large tonsils or adenoids²³23 NHLBI, 2025b. When they’re the cause, removing them is the usual first treatment²⁴24 Marcus et al., 2012, and there’s more about it in Do I have sleep apnea?

If you’re reading this the morning after, with a day to get through on a few broken hours, you’re short of sleep too. A child’s broken nights affect the whole family²2 Owens & Mindell, 2011, and in the routine trial, when the children’s sleep improved, their mothers’ mood improved with it⁹9 Mindell et al., 2009. If today is one of the foggy ones, How do I get through the day after a bad night? has a few things that help.

You don’t need a perfect plan, an empty evening or a partner to take turns. A single small change, kept up for a week, is a fair beginning: the same short routine each night, a chair a little further from the bed, one bedtime pass on the pillow. For most young children, steady changes like these ease the nights⁵5 Mindell et al., 2006, until the 2am waking becomes what it is for the rest of us, a moment of coming up out of sleep, finding the room just as it was, and turning over to go back down.