Back to school: getting your child's sleep back on track

The alarm goes at seven and nobody in the house is ready for it. Six weeks of late sunsets and later bedtimes have moved your child's body clock, and term does not care.

It is a timing problem rather than a behaviour one, and timing is something you can shift.

Why an earlier bedtime on its own does not work

The obvious move is to send them up an hour earlier. Try it and you will probably get the same result: the child lies in the dark, wide awake and increasingly cross, and the evening ends worse than it started.

A body clock does not take instructions from bedtime. A child who has been falling asleep at half ten cannot fall asleep at half nine simply because that is when they were sent up. Worse, you have taught them that bed is a place where you lie awake feeling frustrated. That association takes longer to undo than the late bedtime did.

Fix the morning first

Wake time is the lever. It is the part of the day you can actually control, and everything else follows it.

Set the wake time that term requires and hold it every day, weekends included. The tired evening that follows is not a failure, it is the mechanism doing its work. A child who gets up at seven will be genuinely sleepy by nine within a few days. A child who lies in until ten on Saturday has put the clock back where it started, and Monday morning arrives exactly as bad as the last one.

This is the easiest step to let slide, because a lie-in feels like kindness after a hard week. It is also the one that undoes everything else.

Get daylight into them early

Morning light is what actually moves a body clock. Not the lamp on the landing. Daylight, through a window or outdoors, within the first half hour of being up.

In September this costs you nothing. Have breakfast with the curtains open. Walk to school if the walk is walkable, or park five minutes further away than you need to. By late October, when it is still dark at seven, this gets harder and needs more thought. For now the light is free and it is doing more work than anything else on this list.

Move in fifteens

If bedtime has drifted by an hour and a half, do not try to claw it back in one go. Bring wake time forward by fifteen minutes every two or three days, and let bedtime follow on its own.

Fifteen minutes is small enough that a child does not notice. That is the point. An hour is a negotiation. Fifteen minutes is nothing.

What the first week actually looks like

The first few days are the worst of it.

Expect short tempers after school, a child asleep on the sofa at six, and at least one morning that goes badly. None of that means it has stopped working. Give it a fortnight of holding the wake time steady before you judge whether it is working.

Teenagers are a different starting point

If your child is thirteen or older, the same tools apply but the baseline has moved. Adolescent body clocks genuinely run late. This is not defiance and it is not laziness. It happens to nearly everyone at that age and it reverses on its own in their twenties.

Morning light and a fixed wake time still do the work. Expect the whole schedule to sit later than it did when they were nine, and expect it to take longer to settle.

Tonight

Choose tomorrow's wake time and set the alarm. That is the entire job for this evening. Open the curtains the moment they are up, and leave bedtime alone until the mornings stop being a fight.