Bedtime routine, age by age 🌙

A bedtime routine is a sequence of the same steps in the same order every night: your child's body learns that after the bath comes the pyjamas, after the pyjamas the story, after the story the dark. They fall asleep faster because they know what's coming. That's true at 1 and at 10.

What changes is the content. At 2, the problem is the nap that gets skipped. At 4, it's the monsters under the bed. At 8, it's the tablet and the "five more minutes". The same tips for everyone help no one: that's why each age has its own page.

Every page follows the same plan, so you find your bearings from one year to the next: how many hours of sleep, the three most common struggles and what to do, a timed 20-minute routine, what to read and how, then the questions parents ask most often.