Back to School Bedtime Reset, Week by Week

Somewhere around the middle of July, my kids stopped having a bedtime. It was not a decision. It just eroded. One night it was 9:30 because of fireflies, and then it was 10:00 because of a movie, and by August first they were going to bed at 10:15 and sleeping until nine.

Then school starts and suddenly they need to be asleep by 8 and up at 6:55, and I am asking their bodies to move by three full hours in a single night. That never once worked for us. What works is starting early and moving in small increments, and here is the exact week by week plan I use now.

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Start three weeks out, not three days

The rule I go by is fifteen minutes every two or three days. Bodies can absorb fifteen minutes. They cannot absorb an hour.

The other half that everybody forgets is the wake up time. You have to move that too, and honestly it is the more powerful lever. Letting them sleep until nine while trying to push bedtime earlier is working against yourself. Morning light and an earlier wake up will drag bedtime along behind it.

Count backwards from your school start. We need to leave at 7:30, so wake up is 6:55, so asleep by 8:00, so in bed by 7:40, so the routine starts at 7:15. Whatever your version is, write it down, because at 7:15 on a hot August night nobody is doing math.

Week one, the light and the mornings

The first week I do not touch bedtime at all. I only move the wake up, and I do it by twenty minutes every couple of days.

I open the blinds the second I wake them. Light is the strongest signal a body gets. We eat breakfast at the table with the windows open, and if I can get them outside for ten minutes before nine in the morning, that does more than anything else I do all day.

The other week one job is the room itself. If your kid room gets evening sun, it is nearly impossible to fall asleep at 8 when it is bright outside. Blackout curtains made a bigger difference for us than any routine change. My son room faces west and in August it is basically daylight in there until almost nine.

Also, if the house is loud after the kids go down, which mine is because dinner cleanup and a dishwasher and adults talking, a white noise machine takes about four dollars of effort and buys you an hour. We run ours all night at a low steady level.

Week two, move bedtime and build the routine

Now the earlier wake ups have started making them genuinely tired around 8:30, so bedtime moves easily. Fifteen minutes every two days, and I do not announce it. If I announce it, we negotiate it.

This is also the week to rebuild the actual routine, because ours falls apart every summer. The order matters more than the content, and it should be the same order every night so their body starts anticipating it.

• 7:15. Bath or shower. This is the starting gun. The drop in body temperature after a warm bath genuinely helps them get sleepy, which I did not know for years.
• 7:30. Pajamas, teeth, one trip to the bathroom. Anything they might request later happens now, on purpose.
• 7:40. In bed, lights low. We switched to a warm dimmable night light instead of the overhead, and the whole mood of the room changed.
• 7:40 to 7:55. Reading. This is the part I protect hardest. We are working through read aloud chapter books and it is my favorite fifteen minutes of the entire day.
• 7:55. Two songs or two minutes of talking, lights out.

Screens off by 6:45, which is an hour before bed. I am not militant about much but this one is real and I can see the difference on the nights we let it slide.

Week three, the dress rehearsal

By week three we are within about fifteen minutes of the school schedule. So we just run it. Full school morning, full school bedtime, for four or five days.

This is where you find the problems while they are still cheap to fix. One year we discovered on the rehearsal Tuesday that our shower plus two kids plus one bathroom simply did not fit in the window. Better to learn that in August than on the actual first day.

We also do one real school day breakfast during the rehearsal so I can time it. It always takes longer than I think.

The one more thing problem

My daughter is a champion staller. Water. Bathroom. A question about death. A sudden need to tell me about a dream from three weeks ago.

Two things helped. First, the bedtime pass. She gets one pass per night, a laminated card, and she can use it for one request after lights out. When it is gone it is gone. She almost never uses it now, and I think just having the option removed the panic.

Second, front loading the questions. I ask, before we turn out the light, is there anything you are worried about. That way the big question comes at 7:50 instead of 8:20, and I actually have patience for it.

An ok to wake clock is worth it if you have a kid on the younger end who comes to find you at 5:40. Ours turns green at 6:30 and that clock has saved me more sleep than anything else we own.

What I would skip

Melatonin as a first move. I am not going to tell you what to do here and it can be the right call with your pediatrician. But we tried it as a shortcut before fixing the light and the schedule, and it did not do much. Once we did the curtains and the earlier wake ups, we did not need it.

The elaborate sticker chart for staying in bed. Lasted five nights. Bedtime problems are usually not motivation problems.

Bedtime yoga videos. Screen at bedtime to help with bedtime. I do not know what I was thinking.

Starting the reset the week before school. This is the mistake I made three years in a row, and it is why we now start three weeks out.

If you are already out of time

If school starts Monday and you are reading this on a Friday, do not try the three week version. Do this instead. Move the wake up first, aggressively, even if it means a rough tired Saturday. Get them outside in the morning light. Blackout the room. Accept that the first week of school will be hard and that they will sleep it off by the second weekend.

That is a real plan too, it just costs more in the moment.

Come talk to me

How far off the rails did your bedtime go this summer? Mine went completely. And if you have a stalling script that works, please leave it, because I have a feeling I am going to need every tool available once there is a newborn in this house.

xo, Pam