August 2024

When you’re a kid, it’s always a treat to be able to stay up later — and sleep in. But while parents and children alike may relish the later wakeup times, this can make the transition to the typical school sleep schedule more challenging.

With a little advanced planning, you can make this transition as seamless as possible while still ensuring your child gets all the sleep they need for a successful school year. Here’s how.

How Much Sleep Does Your Child Need?

In order to determine your child’s school-year bedtime, you need to know both when your child needs to get up (to make it to school on time) and how much sleep they need.

While every child’s individual sleep needs are different, the National Sleep Foundation gives these general guidelines for how much sleep your child needs every night:

• Preschoolers (ages three to five): 10 to 13 hours
• School-age (ages six to 13): 9 to 11 hours
• Teens (ages 14 to 17): 8 to 10 hours

Since these ranges are quite large, what’s important for you to figure out is how much sleep your child needs every day to function best. Here are some ways you can tell:

• When your child isn’t under time pressure to wake up in the morning, how many hours, on average, do they sleep? (The summer is a great time to start collecting this data!)
• When your child does have a fixed morning wake-up time, how early do they have to go to bed so that they don’t need an alarm to wake them up?
• When they get a certain amount of sleep, do they seem awake and alert in the morning, once they get going? Or are they drowsy, yawning, and rubbing their eyes all day?

Keep in mind that your child’s sleep needs will generally decrease as they get older. So, you may want to recalibrate every time they have a lengthy break without a fixed wake-up time (like Christmas break or summer vacation).

Calculating the New Desired Bedtime

When determining a good time for your child to go to bed, it’s important to work backward from the time he or she needs to wake up for school.

For example, let’s say you have a seven-year-old who needs to wake up at 7 a.m. to make it to school by 8 a.m. If your child needs 10.5 hours from lights off until waking up, their bedtime will need to be no later than 8:30 p.m.

• Have a consistent bedtime routine that you use year-round, regardless of breaks, vacations, or what time your kids go to bed. That way, you can nudge the entire routine back slowly as you get ready for back to school.
• Don’t let your kids drink caffeinated drinks after lunchtime. This means no colas, caffeinated iced teas, energy drinks, or anything else that contains caffeine.
• Have a strict no-screens rule for at least one hour before bed. The Sleep Foundation reports that the blue light from screens can make it harder to fall asleep because it disrupts the body’s production of the sleep hormone melatonin.
• Close the blinds about an hour before bedtime, especially if it’s still light outside. Try keeping the house lights dim during this time as well. The more light your child is exposed to before bedtime, the harder it is for their bodies to produce melatonin.
• Try room-darkening shades or curtains and/or an eye mask. This can be important if your child needs to go to bed when it’s still light outside.
• Don’t just move back bedtime but start slowly nudging back wakeup time as well. If you just move bedtime back, your child may just take longer to fall asleep. Waking them up a little earlier every day will help their body clock slowly reset, making it easier for them to fall asleep at night.
• Decide in advance how much you want to change their bedtime and wakeup time every day. Don’t attempt more than one hour per day or your child may feel profoundly jetlagged. Doing it in smaller increments (like 15 minutes to 30 minutes earlier every day) will take longer but will feel more gentle and less jarring.