Sleep: A Practical Handbook

Key takeaways

• Keep a one-week family sleep log on the fridge before changing anything, so you fix the problem you actually have rather than the one you guessed.
• Fix the household wake-up time first, then count backwards by each person's sleep need to set lights-out, asking your child's doctor what fits.
• Start a sixty-minute evening countdown with every phone in the house, including yours, parked on a charging shelf outside the bedrooms.
• Check each bedroom for dark, cool, quiet and screen-free together with your child, and let them choose the first change.
• Review the log for five minutes every Sunday, change one thing a week, and take loud snoring or lasting problems to a doctor.

Inside this bit

1. Start with a one-week family sleep log

   Before changing anything, find out what is really happening. Family sleep is full of guesses: the child who never seems to sleep may be sleeping well but waking early, and the parent who blames the children may be answering emails at midnight.

2. Set the household wake and lights-out times

   Timing is the backbone of the whole system, and the procedure starts in the morning. First, fix one wake-up time for school and work days, based on the earliest thing the household has to do.

3. Running the sixty-minute evening countdown

   The countdown turns bedtime from a negotiation into a sequence everyone knows. Start sixty minutes before the first lights-out.

4. A fifteen-minute bedroom check

   Walk through each bedroom one evening with a four-word checklist: dark, cool, quiet, screen-free. Dark means street lights and standby lights are blocked; a folded towel along the curtain gap or tape over a glowing charger costs nothing.

5. Scripts for the nights that go wrong

   Even a good routine meets bad nights, so decide your responses in daylight, while you are calm. If a child cannot settle, keep the room dim, your voice low and the activity dull: a quiet story or sitting nearby is fine, while screens, snacks and new games wake everyone up.

6. The Sunday review and when to call the doctor

   Once a week, spend five minutes with the fridge sheet and ask three questions: which nights went well, what was different about them, and what is the one change for next week. Change only one thing at a time so you can tell what worked.