Bedtime Routines That Bring Calm to Your Kids

We build a bedtime routine that helps kids get into bed on time and stay there without turning the evening into a negotiation. We walk through how to pick the right steps, put them in a smart order, and handle common problems like stalling, water requests, and pushback. 

• choosing a bedtime routine that meets our needs and our kids’ needs 
• keeping the routine simple enough to maintain 
• using visual schedules and written plans for consistency 
• setting up our kids for success

If you have questions, reach out on Instagram at BeTheir Parent. 
And if you're finding the content from these episodes helpful, please like, subscribe, and share. Thank you!

Transcript

Tempo: 120.0

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Hi, I'm Sheila. I'm here to help you be their parent. Last time we chatted about the amount of time your kids need to sleep and how to find a workable bedtime. How did it go? Do you feel like you have landed on a good time for both going to sleep and waking up? If not, don't stress. Keep working on it. You will find it. It just might take more than a week to get there. Today we will start working on creating a bedtime routine that hopefully will lead to a calm and peaceful evening. The goal is to get your child into bed by their bedtime and for them to stay in bed. First of all, you need to determine what you need to accomplish that will make you feel like all of your kids' needs are met before they go to sleep. Also keep in mind that your kids have things in their head that they think they need to be able to go to sleep. So you're going to want to make sure you cover that with your list. Our routine for our family was super simple, and my husband turned it into a little chant that we would say to our kids, pajama potty flush brush. We often added on pray, hugs, and kisses to the end. We said it so much that many of our kids' friends knew our little chant as well. Now, our kids did shower before pajamas, but you get the point. It was simple and our kids knew what it meant. We had also done everything else throughout the afternoon into the evening, such as homework, cleaning up after playing, having a snack, you know, reading a book, all those things. So having that just short little one was all we needed. You might want your routine to be relatively simple like ours, or you may set up your routine to include many things that lead up to bed. There is no wrong answer here to how you approach a bedtime routine. As long as it is something you can maintain and your kids can count on. So beyond the basics of going to the bathroom or for little ones, making sure they have a fresh diaper, brushing teeth, pajamas, snack, what else matters to you that they do or that they need to do before bed? Are they going to shower or bathe before bed or is that a morning thing? Do they need a snack? And if you eat a later dinner, you may not need to worry about a snack right before bed. If you do, do some research on snacks that help promote good sleep. Obviously, if you have a school-aged kid, homework needs to be done sometime before bed. Do you have them help with picking out their clothes or making lunch? Is that something you want to be done before bed or in the morning? So you have your list. Now you're going to put it into a logical sequence. We don't want to brush the kids' teeth and then give them a snack. You don't want them doing their homework right up until it's time to climb into bed. So something like this could work. Homework with a snack, going to the bathroom, shower, pajamas, put out some clothes for the next day, brush their teeth, read a book, and please read with them. This is statistically, researchers, all the people say that this is one of the best ways to help kids uh grow their vocabulary as well as their reading skills, even if all they're doing is listening to you read. So please do this with your kids. Send them to the bathroom one last time and then tuck them in. So this is just a sample to get you thinking. Take from it what you need or leave it and make your own. But you have your list. So you need to estimate the amount of time all of these things are going to take. If you bathe your kids, you get to dictate the amount of time it takes. If they're independently bathing, you may have to set timers to keep them on time. Once you have how long you think you will need to do all the things, add on 10 minutes to your total. Because, you know, kids, it always takes longer. Then you're going to work backwards from your target bedtime. So for example, if you think it's going to take 30 minutes to get everything done, add on 10 more. So now we're at 40 minutes, and your kids' bedtime is 8. You're going to start their bedtime routine at 7.20. After a few nights, you may want to adjust your time. You might be able to start it later because everybody is becoming more efficient with their time. They know what to expect, and you can start later. Or there might be some things that have popped up that you didn't realize you needed to do in the bedtime routine and you've added them on. So now you might have to start sooner, but you always have room to wiggle around and change the time as needed. As you start new routines, there are often some challenges. So the first one might be just keeping everyone on task and in the order you want to follow. That might be hard to start with. So you could create a written or visual schedule for your new routine. You can, there are all kinds of digital options out there. You could use Canva, different forms of AI, whatever you use. It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to create a schedule that everybody can use. And then once you get it down, it's not something you have to look at a whole lot to keep going. Now, there might be some exceptions, such as when you have a sitter, having that routine written out or the visual would really help them out to maintain that for you. And also restarting, because we know how it is when we go on vacation. If you've just gotten back from Disneyland, you're going to need a reset on how to do our routine, and you may want to bring that back out to help everybody get there quicker. Another challenge that might come up, and you know, this one might be a little harder to overcome because your kid may have been making this part of the routine without either of you realizing it. And that's getting out of bed after being tucked in. It's usually something they remembered that they needed or sat one last drink of water. But hopefully, when you wrote down your list, you took into account these extra little things and you have them covered sometime during the bedtime routine. So if they get up to get a drink of water, but you gave them a drink while they were wrapping up their homework earlier in our routine, just remind them, you know, you've already had enough to drink already this evening and you just need to get back into bed. Because I'm telling you, if you let them get that drink, that is gonna continue to be a part of your bedtime routine, whether you want it to or not. Okay, just saying. However, if they get up saying they need to go to the bathroom, use your best parental judgment on that. You know your kid best and what they need. But if it's something you let them do and it remains a habit, then you're gonna need to have a conversation with them. If they're old enough or if they're younger, you're just gonna do this for them. You're gonna start limiting their intake of fluids from dinner time on. Because the bottom line is we're the grown-up and we need to help them to be successful with their routine. If you give them a big glass of water right before bed, and then 20 minutes later they're up to use the bathroom, and you get frustrated that they couldn't stay in bed, that's not their fault. That's on you. And so you need to make some adjustments so that you can help them be successful to stay in bed once they're tucked in. The last challenge you might come across is you might have a really independent kid and they may not want to cooperate with the new routine just because you're giving it to them or you're telling it to them. So this is the kind of kid that you're gonna want to come alongside you and help you create the routine together because if they have some ownership in it, they are more likely to work with you and to cooperate with the new routine. So I've mentioned before that with kids, you often need to start small and make little changes as you go. The thing with bedtime routines is even though you might only say, Oh, I'm only gonna change these couple of things, it's kind of like once you get started is a domino effect and it's just gonna kind of roll into the routine. So it should work and everyone should get on board because it's just the next thing that you have to do to get ready for bed. However, you may still get some pushback from your kids. And so one of the things that we've used in the past um when we had foster kiddos and they were kind of struggling with the routine getting there, we gamified it. We gave out stickers and stars. And every time they followed the routine well each night, that's what they got. And then we had a little prize for them once they had done it for, you know, five nights in a row, a whole week, whatever would work for you. And it could be something as simple as a game night as a family or go to the park. You could also do something like stopping for ice cream at Dairy Queen or handing them a couple of bucks and take them to the dollar store. Whatever you think would matter to your kid, and then that would be the path that's going to work best for you and them, take that path because it's worth it in the end to get this routine firmly in place. Okay, I know I've given a lot of ideas in this episode. Hopefully, there are some nuggets that you can use to help your bedtime routine go smoother. If you have questions, reach out on Instagram at BeTheir Parent. And if you're finding the content from these episodes helpful, please like, subscribe, and share. I'd really appreciate it. On our next episode, we will work on creating a morning routine that will help your day start on the right foot. And I'll chat with you then. Have a great day.