How Do You Get Kids Back on a School Sleep Schedule?

If you’re like so many parents out there, you let your kids’ sleep schedules get a bit looser over summer break. After all, it gets dark later, and it’s hard to persuade a kid to go to sleep by 8 p.m. when the sun is still blazing. Plus, there’s nothing as special as sharing a late summer night with your kids—running after the ice cream truck, catching fireflies, looking at the stars or enjoying impromptu twilight hangouts with neighbors.

It’s all harmless summer fun until you realize the school year is fast approaching and early mornings beckon.

This stress is a near-universal parenting problem. Mornings are rough enough, but they become especially stressful when you’re waking kids from much-needed sleep to rush them out the door.

For some parents, that struggle persists long into the school year, with mornings never getting easier.

We reached out to experts on children and sleep for advice to help transition kids to a more school-friendly sleep schedule—as well as tips for maintaining healthy sleep habits all year long.

If possible, it’s best to start the transition to an earlier schedule several days or even a week before school starts. Dr. Chris Winter, neurologist, sleep specialist, and author of “The Rested Child,” says that kids who are only off by a few hours will need less time to adjust. Kids whose sleep schedules have skewed super-late—such as a teen who is staying up till 2 a.m. every morning—may need more time.

Winter recommends calculating when to start adjusting the schedule by giving yourself two to three days for each hour your kids’ schedules are off. So, kids who are going to sleep one to two hours later will just need a few days to transition. “If they’re going to bed four hours later than they typically do, maybe you want to start that a week or a week-and-a-half before things get going,” Winter advises.

So, how exactly can you transition your kids out of summer mode to a school sleep schedule? And with the least amount of grumbling and stress possible? Here are some tried-and-true back-to-school sleep tips from our experts.

Tip 1: Start the Transition With Morning Wake-Ups

It might seem totally counterintuitive, but it’s best to focus on tweaking your kids’ wake-up times first rather than trying to get them to go to bed earlier. “I always tell people, ‘Don’t worry so much about the bedtime,’” Winter says. “Just start to enforce an earlier and earlier wake-up time, and the bedtime will take care of itself.”

And what about kids who are woken up earlier but then end up crashing in the afternoon for a nap? “Crashing in the afternoon is not something that will likely be productive,” Winter clarifies. “When I say focus on the wake time, what I'm really saying is focus on the wake time and limit the opportunities for sleep during the day.”

Jade Wu, Ph.D., behavioral sleep medicine psychologist, says the shift toward an earlier wake-up might be a multi-step process. “Step one is to get back to a regular wake-up time (i.e., the same time every day), even if that time doesn't match the school year schedule yet,” she says. Once that step is done, step two is to start to shift that wake-up time gradually toward what it will need to be once school starts. You can do this for about 15 minutes a day for a couple of days, Wu offers.

Tip 2: Set the Evening Mood

As your child starts waking up earlier in the morning, they should start getting sleepier earlier and earlier at night. You can facilitate this by making your child’s environment more sleep-inducing and by tweaking their evening routine to be more conducive to sleep. Here are some actionable tips for helping kids prepare for sleep.

Tip 3: Control Blue Light Access

Almost every kid has a screen they look at (or are glued to) throughout the day. The problem is that the blue light from TVs, computers and tablets can interfere with kids’ sleep. Blue light makes it more difficult for the body to naturally produce melatonin, the hormone that makes you sleepy at night—and kids seem to be extra-sensitive to the effects of blue light.

It’s not just blue light—any light exposure in the evening can interfere with your child’s circadian rhythm and make it harder to sleep. “Any light will interfere with sleep, and the brighter it is, the more it will interfere,” Winter explains. “In the summer, when daylight lasts longer, it tends to delay the sleep phase of everyone, kids included and push their sleep-wake schedule later. “But Winter says that once fall approaches, there are ways to minimize light from electronics and other sources.

“You can do a lot of passive things, like controlling the lighting of your home, making sure that things are dimmer after dinner,” he suggests. And what about those electronics? If you have a master switch that cuts off the WiFi in the house, consider using it, Winter suggests. “You might let people know now, ‘Hey, a week before school starts, we’re starting to get stricter about cutting off the WiFi.’” You can also consider making it a routine in your home that electronics aren’t taken into the bedroom at night.

Tip 4: Start To Bring That Bedtime Routine Back

Children thrive on routine, and as you transition them back to a different sleep schedule, you can work on setting some routines around bedtime, Wu suggests. These sorts of routines might have gone by the wayside as you enjoyed your more free-flowing summer, but it’s time to bring them back.

“Establish a bedtime routine first, even if it happens at a later hour than it should,” Wu says. And what should that bedtime routine include? “It should be low stimulation,” she describes. It can include reading a story, brushing teeth and changing into PJs. The idea, above all, is to make it relaxing and enjoyable for your kids.

Tip 5: Set a Signal for Sleep Time

Wu is all about external sleep cues—established signals that tell your kids that it’s time for bed. This can be a special light or a chime sound that’s programmed to be activated at a certain time each night. “Tell your kids that it's bedtime, so they learn to associate the cue with the start of the bedtime routine as a matter of course,” Wu suggests. Besides setting up a sleep-inducing routine, Wu adds that this reduces the chance that you will be thought of as the “bad guy” when it comes to enforcing bedtime.

Tip 6: If All Else Fails

If you’ve found yourself at the start of school with overtired kids, do not panic. Prep what you can to let your kids get the eight to 12 hours of sleep they need—this depends on the kids and their ages—to go into those morning classes attentive and rested. As a parent, you can help get their meals ready, their clothes picked out and their backpacks packed to give them a bit of extra time. If you know your kid isn’t a morning person, try to adjust their school schedules to move important classes later in the day when they’re more focused.

Having a solid, relaxing bedtime routine can go a long way in setting the stage for a good night’s sleep. But it’s not just what you do in the evening hours that can make or break your kid’s sleep. Daytime habits can have a strong impact on nighttime snoozing, too.

Sleep initiation relies on several factors, many of which occur during daytime hours, says Dr. Jeremy Toffle, a pediatrician at Children’s Nebraska in Omaha, Nebraska. “Sun exposure during the day, physical activity, appropriate diet—all of this plays a role,” he says.

Toffle suggests letting kids get plenty of outside time during the peak sun moments of the day (usually between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.). Doing so sends the message to your brain that these daylight hours are when you are supposed to be awake, compared to evening, when there should be less light exposure.

Dr. Megan Campbell, a psychiatrist at Children's Hospital New Orleans, strongly agrees with this recommendation. “It's important to expose ourselves to natural light during the day—so going outside is important, whether that's to walk, garden, sit on a porch, go for a swim or even open the windows in the house to let in natural light,” she says.

Campbell also recommends against any daytime napping if your goal is a good night’s sleep. After kids age out of napping, some can get away with short naps—Campbell recommends limiting them to 20 minutes—but if your elementary-aged or older kid is a chronic napper and is having trouble falling asleep at night, you should help them end that habit, Campbell advises.

Our dietary habits can’t be overlooked, as what we eat and drink during the day can impact our sleep. “Keep your child's meals nutritious and balanced, keep them hydrated throughout the day and get plenty of physical activity throughout the day,” Dr. Laura Criscenzo, a pediatrician at Atlantic Health System, recommends. She and Toffle both emphasize that older kids and teens who’ve started consuming caffeine should be sure to avoid it altogether, starting at least six hours before bedtime.

Tweens and teens tend to stay up late whether it’s summertime or not, so getting them back on a school schedule can be super challenging. You can blame the teenage internal clock for some of these issues.

“Teens often go through a phase in which their physiological sleep needs go by a different ‘clock’—which we sometimes called delayed phase sleep cycles—meaning that their bodies tend to naturally stay up later and sleep in longer as a result,” Campbell says. “This does not mean they need more sleep overall, but their hours are a little different.”

When we can accommodate our teen’s funky schedule, that’s fine, Campbell says. However, the schedules at most schools mean that we can’t accommodate it during the school year, and transitioning a tween or teenager to a back-to-school schedule often requires different tactics than it does for younger kids.

Experts agree that limiting screen time before bed is crucial, especially in teens. “Screens, phones, video games—these should not be easily accessible after a set time at night,” Toffle says. “If your child is using these at night, these are the main reasons kids cannot go to sleep.”

Tweens and teens might also need a different kind of psychological coaxing to get themselves on a more school-friendly schedule. “With younger kids, it is easier to just tell them to go to bed, but the older kids typically need some inspiration,” Toffle says. In the days leading up to school, as you’re trying to reset the schedule, Toffle suggests trying to schedule some enticing morning activities for your older kids, helping them to get out of bed earlier.

“This could be back-to-school shopping, a bike ride or things to do around the house to prepare for the school year,” Toffle suggests. “Have a reason to wake them up early, and then encourage an earlier bedtime similar to their school bedtime.”

Your kids will inevitably adjust to their new sleep routines once the school year starts, whether you’ve managed to do it in a more measured manner or have just gone cold turkey (which experts do not recommend). But even once kids adjust to those early morning wakeups and earlier bedtimes, parents’ new goal should be maintaining healthy sleep habits throughout the school year.

This includes not letting kids stay up later on weekends. Instead, encourage them to maintain the same wake-up times on weekends so that they’re not impacted by social jetlag, which is the fatigue we feel when our social calendars get in the way of our ideal sleep-wake cycle.

Once kids are on an ideal schedule, stay committed to the routines and practices that help them lessen screen time and know their bedtime cues. Kids appreciate structure and their sleep benefits from it.

According to The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, elementary school-aged kids need nine to 12 hours of sleep each day, and teens need about eight to 10 hours. But research shows that about a third of all kids aren’t getting enough sleep. Winter says that the biggest hurdles preventing kids from getting their recommended Zzz’s are three main things: extracurriculars (i.e., a jam-packed schedule), heavy use of electronics before bed and the stressors of school and life.

So, how do you tackle these issues? Winter says that you don’t have to eliminate all your kids’ after-school activities. As long as they aren’t interfering with sleep, activities can and should continue. Your children should go ahead and sign up for extracurriculars they are passionate about, but start with just one or two. “After that, it becomes a privilege: You can do it if you can manage everything else properly,” he suggests. “If you can’t, maybe you need to drop that other thing.”

As mentioned above, electronics can become an issue for many kids, but it’s not like we can wish them away. They are here to stay, and most of our kids even use their electronic devices for homework and reading books, Winter notes. The key is decreasing their use right before bedtime and putting electronics “to sleep” for the night before getting into bed.

Regarding stress, Winter says it’s not just academic and social stresses that are interfering with our kids’ sleep, though those are certainly issues. Many kids get stressed about sleep itself, so taking a relaxed approach to bedtime is important. “You want to try to prevent them from entering that sort of ‘performance anxiety’ mind of ‘I’ve been in bed for 15 minutes, and I haven’t fallen asleep,’” says Winter.

If your kids experience stress around sleep, be realistic with them. Tell them to expect it to take some time to fall asleep sometimes and acknowledge that it might be tough. Give them the tools that will help them fall asleep: dim lights, fewer electronics and set wake-up times. But never force a stressed kid to sleep, Winter advises. “You never want to create that sense of ‘I’m failing in bed’ mentality in a child because they will absolutely bring that with them into adulthood,” he says.

Okay, let’s say you’ve done all the things the experts recommend, and your kids’ sleep just isn’t much closer to a school time schedule. Or maybe life just presented you with some curveballs, and getting sleep back on track just wasn’t in the cards for your family at the end of summer. Don’t worry: Although there might be a few uncomfortable days or weeks ahead, there are things you can do in those first few days of the school year to nudge your kids into better sleep habits.

“Sleep is strictly a habit of the brain and body, and it can take time to get back on schedule,” Toffle says. Here are his tips for easing the transition back to a school schedule if you haven’t done so at the end of summer:

• Don’t let your child stay up late simply to stay up late. 

• Absolutely no screens after a predetermined time every night. 

• Make sure any homework or other work is done prior to the evening hours to avoid late-night brain stimulation. 

• Limit caffeine and energy drink intake. 

• Stick to sleep hygiene routines, understanding that it can take several weeks to get back on track. 

Finally, as tempting as it may be to let your kid nap when they are dealing with sleep deprivation, Criscenzo recommends against it during this transition. “As hard as it may be, I discourage my patients from napping when they get home from school if they are tired, especially in the first few weeks of adjusting to their new schedule, so as to not continue the cycle of then staying up later due to lack of sleep pressure at an acceptable bedtime,” she says.

When you are an exhausted parent, it can be hard to see the big picture here, but establishing healthy sleep habits isn’t just about getting through each school year intact. It’s about instilling the kinds of lifelong sleep habits your kids will carry into adulthood. And it doesn’t take much: Just establishing some commonsense routines for your kids and making an effort to help your kids get the sleep that they need can go a long way.

As for successfully transitioning to the upcoming school year, making some small tweaks—like adjusting wake-up times gradually over a few days and reestablishing bedtime routines—can work wonders. Regardless of how it goes for you, remember you are not alone. There are millions of parents who will be making this transition right along with you.