How to Get a Child to Sleep Without a Battle: A Bedtime Routine That Works, According to Research

Almost every parent knows this hour. The clock says 7:30, your child has just discovered a fresh burst of energy, the pajamas are still on the chair, and you are already rehearsing the line in your head: "Five more minutes, and after that, no more nonsense." Children's sleep can look like a matter of luck or temperament, but twenty years of research point to something reassuring: a lot of what happens in the evening comes down to the order of things.

Here is what we know today, and what you can do with it tonight.

How Much Sleep Does a Child Really Need?

Before talking about methods, it helps to know the target. In 2016 the American Academy of Sleep Medicine published recommendations drawn up by a panel of 13 experts after reviewing the literature (Paruthi et al., 2016, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine). According to the recommendations:

  1. Ages 1 to 2: 11 to 14 hours in 24 hours, including naps.
  2. Ages 3 to 5: 10 to 13 hours in 24 hours, including naps.
  3. Ages 6 to 12: 9 to 12 hours at night.

These numbers matter because many children fall asleep late and wake up early, and so sleep less than their bodies need. According to the statement, too little sleep is linked to attention difficulties, problems with emotional regulation, poorer learning and a higher risk of obesity. A child who cries in the evening and melts down in the afternoon is often a tired child, not a "difficult" one.

The Most Important Finding: Order Matters More Than the Clock

In 2009, sleep researcher Jodi Mindell of Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia published a controlled study of 405 mothers of babies and toddlers (Mindell, Telofski, Wiegand & Kurtz, 2009, Sleep). After a week of ordinary tracking, about two thirds of the families received a simple instruction: every evening, do the same three steps in the same order (a bath, a massage or lotion, and a quiet activity such as a story or a song) and turn off the lights within half an hour of finishing the bath. The rest carried on as usual.

After two weeks of routine, the children in the routine group fell asleep faster, woke up fewer times in the night, and spent less time awake during the night overall. The mothers' mood improved as well. No medication and no sleep-training method was added, only the order.

In 2018 Mindell and her colleague Ariel Williamson reviewed the research that had built up on the subject (Mindell & Williamson, 2018, Sleep Medicine Reviews). Their conclusion: a consistent bedtime routine is linked not only to better sleep but also to language development, early literacy, better emotional regulation and a stronger parent-child bond.

Why does it work? A small child's brain cannot read a clock yet, but it is excellent at recognizing sequences. When the same steps repeat in the same order, the first step already starts to lower arousal, because the body "knows" what comes next.

The Four Steps in Almost Every Successful Routine

Four components come up again and again across the studies. You do not need all of them, but aim for at least three, always in the same order.

1. Hygiene: a bath or shower, brushing teeth

A bath is a clear signal that things are changing. On top of that, the drop in body temperature after getting out of warm water helps the body fall asleep. If there is no time for a full bath, washing faces and brushing teeth in the same fixed order does the job too.

2. Touch: lotion, a short massage, a cuddle

Massage was part of the routine in Mindell's 2009 study, and although there is no separate study of massage alone, it is the easiest component to add. You do not need a technique. Slowly rubbing lotion onto hands and feet while you talk quietly is enough.

3. Quiet talk: a story, a song, a chat about the day

This is the component that shows up most in developmental research, and we will say more about it below. A longitudinal study that followed 4,274 children in the United States from age three to five (Hale, Berger, LeBourgeois & Brooks-Gunn, 2011, Journal of Family Psychology) found that a bedtime routine that included language, meaning reading a story, singing or talking, was linked to slightly longer sleep (about 12 minutes a night) and to higher vocabulary test scores at age five. The differences are small and the study is observational, but the direction is consistent: the language component is the one linked to development.

4. Closing: lights out with the same sentence

"Good night, I love you, see you in the morning." The same sentence, in the same tone, every evening. Children like to know how the scene ends. The fixed sentence tells the brain: the show is over, now we sleep.

What to Do About Screens

Here the picture is very consistent. In 2015, Lauren Hale of Stony Brook University Medical Center reviewed sixty-seven studies of children and teenagers (Hale & Guan, 2015, Sleep Medicine Reviews). In 90 percent of them, screen time was linked to shorter sleep, later bedtimes or poorer sleep quality. The link was especially strong when the screen was in the bedroom or in the hour before bed.

Three reasons add up: blue light suppresses the release of melatonin, the content is stimulating, and screen time simply pushes back the hour at which children get into bed. The practical solution most experts recommend is to turn the screen off an hour before lights out and keep TVs and tablets out of the bedroom. If that sounds hard, here is a trick: do not just "take" the screen away. Offer the first step of the routine in its place. "Screen time is over, now it's bath time" works far better than "Screen time is over."

The Story as an Anchor: Why a Book

Of all the components, the story is the one children ask for themselves. There is a reason for that. A book is a quiet, predictable activity with a clear beginning and end, and it happens in physical closeness to a parent. A brain imaging study from Cincinnati Children's Hospital (Hutton et al., 2015, Pediatrics) showed that in children aged 3 to 5 who are read to often at home, the brain areas responsible for language processing and visual imagery were more active while they listened to a story. Put simply, it seems that a child who is read to "sees" the story in their head, and that is a calm state that suits falling asleep.

A few rules that work:

  1. A book, not a screen. The difference is not only the light. Shared reading includes eye contact, pointing, questions, and pausing when the child asks. A review of 29 studies (Bus, van IJzendoorn & Pellegrini, 1995, Review of Educational Research) found that parent-child shared reading is linked to language development and early literacy, with a moderate and consistent effect. That kind of reading includes looking, pointing and talking, not just text.
  2. The same book again and again is good, not boring. Children ask for the same story because they learn something new from it every time, and because the repetition itself is soothing. If your child asks for the same book for the twentieth time, that is a sign the routine is working.
  3. A book the child appears in. Children are drawn to stories in which they are the heroes. In a study by Natalia Kucirkova of the Open University in the UK (Kucirkova, Messer & Sheehy, 2014, First Language), 18 preschoolers were read a book in which some of the passages were personalized with the child's name and some were standard. They knew the new words from the personalized passages better in tests after the reading. It may be that the child's own name in the text draws their attention. If your child loves "being inside the story," a personalized book with them as the hero can become the regular bedtime book. On our site you can see a free sample from one photo.
  4. A fixed length. One book, or two short ones. "One more" is the most familiar negotiation of the evening, and the best way to win it is to decide in advance and say so before you start: "Tonight we read this book and this one, and then good night."

What to Do When the Routine Falls Apart

Every routine falls apart sometimes: a vacation, an illness, guests, the clocks changing. Three things help you get back on track:

  1. Go back to the order, not the hour. If your child has been falling asleep an hour late for a week, do not try to fix the time all at once. Return to the four steps in the same order, and move lights out earlier by a quarter of an hour each evening.
  2. A bad evening is not a failure. According to Mindell and Williamson's review, what counts is consistency over time, not perfection. Do not give up on everything because of one evening.
  3. Involve your child. From around age three you can make a "night chart" together with four pictures: bath, pajamas, book, bed. Your child marks off what is finished. Children like to know what comes next, and a chart like this cuts down on a lot of arguments.

Questions Parents Ask

Is it okay that my child only falls asleep with me in the bed?

It is very common, and it is more of a family preference than a problem. If it works for you, there is no reason to change it. If it feels like a burden, the usual advice is to go gradually: each week you move a little farther away, from lying next to your child to sitting on the bed, from the bed to a chair beside it, from the chair to the door. The story always stays. It is the constant that gives security while everything else changes.

At what age do you start a routine?

Mindell's 2009 study included babies from seven months old. In practice you can begin as soon as there is a regular evening at home, and even at eight or nine it is not too late. At those ages the story often turns into ten minutes of independent reading in bed, and that still works.

What if each parent does bedtime differently?

This is one of the places where differences are most noticeable to a child. You do not need to be identical, but it is worth having the same four steps happen in the same order with both of you, even if the story and the song are different.

In One Line

You do not need a method, an app or a thick guidebook. You need four steps in the same order, a screen that goes off an hour earlier, and one story your child looks forward to. Research says you will feel the difference after two weeks, and your child will feel it even sooner.

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Sources

  1. Paruthi S, Brooks LJ, D'Ambrosio C, et al. (2016). Recommended amount of sleep for pediatric populations: a consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 12(6), 785-786.
  2. Mindell JA, Telofski LS, Wiegand B, Kurtz ES (2009). A nightly bedtime routine: impact on sleep in young children and maternal mood. Sleep, 32(5), 599-606.
  3. Mindell JA, Williamson AA (2018). Benefits of a bedtime routine in young children: sleep, development, and beyond. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 40, 93-108.
  4. Hale L, Berger LM, LeBourgeois MK, Brooks-Gunn J (2011). A longitudinal study of preschoolers' language-based bedtime routines, sleep duration, and well-being. Journal of Family Psychology, 25(3), 423-433.
  5. Hale L, Guan S (2015). Screen time and sleep among school-aged children and adolescents: a systematic literature review. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 21, 50-58.
  6. Hutton JS, Horowitz-Kraus T, Mendelsohn AL, DeWitt T, Holland SK (2015). Home reading environment and brain activation in preschool children listening to stories. Pediatrics, 136(3), 466-478.
  7. Bus AG, van IJzendoorn MH, Pellegrini AD (1995). Joint book reading makes for success in learning to read: a meta-analysis on intergenerational transmission of literacy. Review of Educational Research, 65(1), 1-21.
  8. Kucirkova N, Messer D, Sheehy K (2014). Reading personalized books with preschool children enhances their word acquisition. First Language, 34(3), 227-243.