The Hour Before Bed

By bedtime you’ve got nothing left. You made pasta and she refused it. She’s had her bath, and her teeth are mostly brushed. Ten minutes ago she was running round the house with a sock on her head. Now she’s sitting on the edge of her bed with very big eyes, saying she doesn’t feel well, there’s a knot in her tummy, could you stay just a bit longer, what was that noise outside, why does the radiator make that sound, is the door closed properly, what if she has a bad dream.

All you want is to go downstairs and eat something standing up at the counter. Instead you’re sitting on the edge of her bed, wondering how this has happened for the third time this week.

Almost every parent we work with who has a child between the ages of three and ten has some version of this hour. It looks different in different houses. In some it’s the long unravelling above. In others the child is fine, fine, fine, and then suddenly incandescent with fury about a sock. In others an older child turns at the bedroom door and asks a question that takes forty minutes to answer. What they have in common is that the hour before bed has stopped being about sleep.

What is actually happening

A child who has kept herself together at school all day is running on the last of her reserves by early evening. She has dealt with playground politics, sat still when she didn’t want to, and somehow managed not to cry when the friend she wanted to sit next to sat next to somebody else. She has kept all of that in, and kept it in well, because the social cost of letting it out at school is too high. By the time she gets home she’s worn out, and by the time the bath is over she can’t keep it in any longer.

The clinical term for what happens next is off-loading. In practice, every small worry she has had since breakfast comes out more or less at once, and she hands them all to the only person safe enough to take them. It makes no difference to her nervous system that you’re also the most exhausted person in the house. She brings her worries to you because you are safe, whether or not you have anything left to give.

It helps to tell apart two things children say at bedtime: “I can’t sleep” and “I don’t want you to leave.” They sound similar, and they ask for the same thing, which is for you to stay. But they tell you different things about what is going on inside her. “I can’t sleep” is usually a sensory or arousal problem: her body is too awake, the room is too hot, there has been screen time too close to bedtime, and she’s slightly wound up in a way she doesn’t have the words for. “I don’t want you to leave” is something else. It’s a small child’s entirely reasonable observation that the world is large, that she is small in it, and that the adult who has kept her day together is about to walk out of the room. The first needs a slower routine. The second needs you.

What to do, and what not to do

The bedtime industry tells exhausted parents to add structure: another step in the routine, a new wind-down plan, a different light bulb. But a parent reading articles about bedtime late at night usually has a perfectly good routine already, and the routine isn’t the problem. In our experience, the thing to change is your own pace.

A child who is off-loading needs a slower bedtime. What changes things is the state of your own nervous system while you’re in the room. If you’re sitting on the edge of the bed thinking about the washing-up, she can feel that you aren’t really there, and she’ll keep talking until you are. Once you’re properly with her, she stops calling you back.

In most houses, the practical version is mechanical. Put your phone in a drawer in the hall, not in your pocket. Sit on the edge of the bed, not at the foot, so that she can feel you there but can’t see your eyes flicking about. Decide before you go in that these twenty minutes are the bedtime itself; you’ll be downstairs sooner if you stop pretending you already are. The single most useful sentence, parents tell us, is some version of “I’m here, you don’t need to keep asking.” Say it in a low voice at minute three, not minute fifteen, before the tactical questions start. All this asks is that you stop being half there, which is the most expensive way to be in the room.

Parents will recognise the small body that won’t stay still. Suddenly she’s extremely interested in standing on the bed, fetching one more cuddly toy, going to the loo for the third time, finding the other water cup. This is sensory-seeking, not naughtiness. At the end of an over-stimulated day her body is getting rid of the extra energy by moving, because it doesn’t yet know how to get rid of it by falling asleep. Give her body what it’s asking for before you ask it to be still. Five minutes of jumping on the bed before the lights go down helps her settle; the same five minutes afterwards means bedtime is falling apart. Wear her out, then turn the lights down, then sit on the edge of the bed.

The other pattern you’ll recognise is the tactical question. You’ve said goodnight, and she asks about the radiator, then the dream, then what happens if the door blows open, then whether you love her more than the cat. Each question is real while she’s asking it, but its purpose is to keep you in the room. Answer the first briefly and the second briefly, then, before the third, kindly say what you think is going on: “I think you’re asking me questions because you want me to stay, and that’s allowed. I’m going to sit here for five more minutes and not answer any more, and then I’m going to go.” Then sit there in silence for five minutes. She usually falls asleep before the five minutes are up.

For a bedtime that has become a nightly battle, the programme Rachel Hiller and Michael Gradisar set out for parents is the most usable material we know of. It is built on the same therapy used in sleep clinics, it offers gradual steps a parent can choose between, from staying in the room to slowly moving out of it, and most families can follow it on a school night.

A second change, less popular but probably more important, is the conversation parents don’t have with each other about whose bedtime it is. In two-parent households, bedtime almost always falls to one parent, often by accident at first and then by habit. Predictably, the parent who does it every night is also the one most worn out by it. Bedtime is domestic work that should be shared, because a parent who does it every night with no relief will eventually run out, and when that happens, it happens in the room with the child. In many households, two nights on and two nights off is the most useful change a couple can make to their evenings. The child adapts inside a week.

A related pattern causes a great deal of low-level damage on weeknights. A partner gets home in the middle of a bedtime that has been winding down for forty minutes and, with the best of intentions, opens the bedroom door to say hello and give her a tickle. She was three minutes from sleep, and now she’s wide awake. The fix, in many houses we know, is a short conversation between the adults: “If I’m not downstairs by quarter to eight, don’t come up.” The hello can wait until breakfast, and bedtime gets to finish.

If you want practical advice on primary-age sleep that doesn’t read like marketing, we send parents to Place2Be’s Parenting Smart articles on bedtime and winding down. They’re written by school-based counsellors, and they treat you as the expert on your own child. If you want NHS material to show a sceptical relative or the school nurse, the NHS Every Mind Matters pages on children’s sleep are the place to go. For an older child, the NHS short course on sleep is that rare thing, a piece of self-help material we’ve seen a thirteen-year-old actually finish.

At different ages

Bedtime depends on age more than any other subject in this book. A five-year-old and an eleven-year-old need different things from the same hour, and if you treat them the same, one of them will end up shouting. The bands below are broad descriptions: some children reach an older band a year or two early, and some are still in the one before.

If your child is between four and seven. Most of this chapter has been about this age. The off-loading is at its loudest, the tactical questions are at their most inventive, and her body can’t yet do what you’re asking of it, which is to lie down and wait for sleep to come. What helps is being there and being predictable. Keep to the same wind-down routine, in the same order, on most nights. Read the same one or two books. Say the same thing at the door, in the same voice: “I’m going to go now, and I’ll see you at breakfast.” The repetition is what settles her. At this age the bedtime story is a sensory routine for her nervous system, so a four-year-old doesn’t need a new author this week.

If your child is between seven and nine. The worries that come out at bedtime are now about specific things. She can tell you, if only vaguely, that she’s thinking about the maths test, or the swimming gala, or what Mrs G said in PE. Take the worry seriously without turning the bedroom into a place for solving problems. Say “That sounds hard. We can think about it at breakfast,” then put a hand on her back, breathe out slowly and turn the lamp off. What settles her is that the worry has been named and put off until the morning. Bedtime is for putting the worry down for the night; solving it can wait.

If your child is between nine and eleven. She reads in bed now. The off-loading still happens, but it has moved from the edge of the bed to the doorframe, and from lights-out to the point when you’ve already said goodnight and are halfway down the stairs. When she’s had the kind of day that calls for it, stay near the top of the stairs for a few extra minutes, and know that the conversation you most need to have with her this term is happening between her teeth being brushed and her bedroom light going off. If she opens her bedroom door, sit on the floor of the corridor for five minutes. At this age, that’s the right place to talk.

If your child is in early secondary, eleven to thirteen. The hour before bed is now the hour she spends in her room with the door closed and a phone in her hand. Your job has changed from running a bedtime to making sure the conditions for sleep are in place. That means the boring practical things you didn’t need to bother with before: every phone in the house, yours included, charging overnight on the kitchen counter and not on the bedside table; a properly dark room, blacked out if you can; and a wake-up time at weekends that is consistent enough to give her body clock a chance. If there’s a bedtime conversation at all, it happens when she wanders down for a glass of water later in the evening. Be the parent who happens to be making a cup of tea.

If your child is mid to late secondary, thirteen and beyond. At this age you are, in practical terms, no longer part of bedtime. You go to bed before your teenager does, and the bathroom light wakes you when she finally turns in. Most of this chapter is no longer about you. What’s left is the practical set-up: a rule, for the whole house, that phones don’t go on bedside tables; a morning routine that isn’t so brutal that the week’s sleep debt becomes a separate problem; and having your conversations at supper, not late at night. If a teenager’s sleep has come apart over weeks, sustained insomnia and a flat mood together, that is no longer a bedtime problem; that is a conversation with the GP.

When you have already lost your temper

At some point in this hour you will lose your patience. You’ll say something sharp, or shut the door harder than you meant to, and then stand outside her room feeling like the worst version of yourself.

There are two things to say about this. The first is that the hour before bed is the hardest hour of a parent’s day. It comes when your reserves are at their lowest, with a child whose reserves are at their lowest too, and it asks you to be the calm adult anyway. It could have been designed to defeat you. If it sometimes does, that shows only that you’re a person doing a hard thing at the end of a long day.

The second is that, in attachment terms, repair after a rupture restores what the rupture took. If you go back into her room ten minutes later, sit on the edge of the bed and say something like “I was sharp with you and I’m sorry, I was very tired and that isn’t your fault,” you’re teaching her something no calm bedtime ever could. What you’re aiming for is a bedtime where, when things go wrong, you notice and put them right.

The longer arc

Like every stage of development, the hour before bed will change. The clingy four-year-old becomes the seven-year-old who reads in bed, and then the eleven-year-old who would rather you didn’t come in. The off-loading goes on, but it moves. In a few years it will come out on the way home from football, or late in the evening when a teenager comes down for a glass of water and stays for forty minutes. It works the same way each time: her worries are looking for somewhere safe to be put down, and your job is to be that place.

For tonight, that means sitting on the edge of the bed and not going anywhere for a few more minutes while she puts down the last of her day. The washing-up will keep.

NOTES

1. Siegel, Daniel J. & Bryson, Tina Payne. The Whole-Brain Child. Bantam, 2011. The “name it to tame it” move and the upstairs/downstairs brain model both originate here.
2. Ockwell-Smith, Sarah. The Gentle Sleep Book. Piatkus, 2015. Ockwell-Smith’s developmental sleep framework: biologically-normal sleep, not sleep-training problems.

Where to go further

Rachel Hiller and Michael Gradisar, Helping Your Child with Sleep Problems Two sleep researchers’ step-by-step programme for school-age children who resist bedtime, wake in the night or lie awake worrying, with gradual methods a parent can choose between.

Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, The Whole-Brain Child The clearest single introduction to what is happening in a child’s brain at the end of an over-stimulated day, and to why a calm parent in the room does what no instruction can.