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We’ve recently taken a family bedtime challenge. If you see your family in this story, I hope I can inspire you to do the same.
Here’s how it happened. This year I started to worry my son wasn’t sleeping enough, because of two signs:
He often needed to be woken up for school. And he slept in at least 30 minutes on the weekends (sometimes up to an hour and a half).
These are good indicators of a kid’s need for more sleep. Others include falling asleep in the car or stroller outside of normal nap times, hyperactivity or moodiness in the evenings, or changing sleep/nap schedules.
I guessed that my son needed 15-30 minutes more slumber at night, and if that sounds like a negligible amount, it’s not. Research has shown that moving the bedtimes of children by even 30 minutes impacts their cognitive and emotional skills. Each child has a personal sleep need — the optimal amount of sleep their body wants on a nightly basis. When a little one misses the mark by 15 minutes every night, after a week he’s accumulated almost two hours of sleep debt. Recently, the National Sleep Foundation released its updated sleep recommendations for people of all ages. The range for each age group is wide, and while it’s tempting to check off the minimum number, that’s not the way it works. A child’s behavior and sleep patterns truly tell you if he’s meeting his sleep needs every night.
The snag in my son’s sleep schedule was school. In Kindergarten he would go to bed at 7:45pm and wake up naturally 7:15 a.m. for an 8:25am start time. He switched schools for first grade and we found ourselves working with a 7:55 a.m. start time, a short drive, and a wake up time of 6:45 a.m. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that middle and high schools do not start until 8:30 a.m. or later, but many elementary schools — and still, many junior and high schools — start earlier.
All this meant that I had to wake him each morning, which felt terrible. It was barely light and he was clearly in a deep sleep — asking him to wrench himself out of his cozy bed, I could tell he was suffering. I’d try to let him sleep just five more minutes but end up scrambling to get him ready. No six-year-old should start the day feeling groggy and stressed.
So I conducted an experiment. What would it take to have my kids (three and six years old) in bed, with the lights out between 7:00 and 7:15 p.m. for seven nights in a row? This would add back in the 30 minutes of sleep he’d lost since his schedule change and give him over 11 nightly hours. If I did this, would my son start to wake up naturally? How would he feel if he soaked in the extra half hour of sleep I believed his brain and body needed?
Here are the results:
Night 1: Bedtime 7:22 p.m.
Clearing the Schedule. On the first night of our family sleep challenge, I quickly realized our biggest obstacle is afternoon and evening activities. As much as I tell myself that we can have an early dinner out or make it home from a playdate in time for bed, these events inevitably push bedtime later. It’s very hard for my kids to come home and move through their whole routines without feeling rushed. Night one we made the mistake of going to a friend’s house after school and lingering too long. The next morning, I still needed to wake my son up for school. We love to eat out and see friends and we’ll do this plenty — we’re just minimize a bit while we make sure the kids are sleeping well.
Night 2 — 7:15 p.m.
I Need Another Bunny! As you know, children are masters of bedtime stalling. They catch on to the fact that tricky questions and requests will delay lights-out. As soon as my daughter hits the sheets, she decides she needs the baby bunny from the stuffed animal bin, and as soon as she has it, she realizes she absolutely must have a mama bunny for the baby bunny.
My solution is the “last call” (described in great detail in our book about childhood sleep, because I find it a lifesaver). Last call is the period before getting into bed when my kids can ask me to blow their noses or fill their water cups to their desired level. After the lights go out, they know last call is over. On night two, last call happened at 7:00 p.m. and 15 minutes later I was out of the room.
Miraculously, the next morning my son woke up on naturally! I couldn’t believe it.
Night 3 through 5 — 7:20 p.m.
Working Parents Dilemma. By far the trickiest spot is that while my work ends when I pick up my kids from school, the end of my husband’s workday is coupled with the kids’ bedtime. Some evenings he’s home at 6:30 p.m., but others it’s not until after 7:00 p.m., and understandably he wants to wrestle and smooch the kids at this point. When we set out for an early bedtime, he had to come in with quiet bedtime energy and fold neatly into our already-up-and-running routine. If he couldn’t be home before bedtime, he’d go to the gym before coming home so they didn’t hear him after they’d crawled into bed.
Night 6 — 7:15 p.m.
Beware of the “Drift.” At the end of the week, I noticed that after dinner my son drifts subtly into playing a game or building a spaceship. Technically we “have time” for this, but it’s hard for him to put away once he’s started. We had to move from dinner at 5:30 p.m., into bath, and keep going in a slow and gradual march towards bed — not rushed, but always moving. After dinner I turned on music and kept everyone on track. An aid for making that happen is a visual schedule or chart that shows all the steps; we’ve had one off and on (a poster board I simply drew on with pictures and words to symbolize the steps), and it helps the kids stay on track without feeling rushed.
As much as I love when my kids sleep in, I recognize it as a sign they have sleep debt. Over the weekend, my kids woke up naturally around 7:00 a.m. — a good sign that they were well rested. My son seemed peppier and less groggy in the morning — the transition from sleep to starting the day was much smoother.
Night 7 — 7:10 p.m.
The Final Success. Last night the kids and I moved easily from dinner, through their routine and into bed with the lights out at 7:10 p.m. I checked on them one time, five minutes later and didn’t hear from them again until I crept in this morning at 6:50 a.m. My son was asleep, but with my quiet footsteps and a gentle touch on the shoulder, he opened his eyes and smoothly climbed out of bed. A much more pleasant way to start the day — and a good feeling to know he’s getting the “sleep nutrition” he needs.
Heather Turgeon is a psychotherapist and co-author of the new book The Happy Sleeper: The Science Backed Guide to Helping Your Baby Get a Good Night’s Sleep—Newborn to School Age (Penguin Random House).