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If bedtime feels like a battle, your child is waking during the night, or mornings are starting way too early, the issue may not be how much sleep your child is getting. It may be when they are going to sleep.

In this episode, Allison explains one of the most important and overlooked concepts in children’s sleep: sleep timing. Once a baby develops a mature sleep rhythm, sleep becomes less about wake windows and more about anchor start times that align with their natural biological clock.

Every child has a natural “sleep wave,” a time when their body is primed to fall asleep easily and stay asleep through the night. When bedtime lines up with that window, sleep becomes smoother. When it doesn’t, families often see bedtime resistance, night wakings, and early morning wakings, even if their child is technically getting enough sleep.

Allison shares how to recognize your child’s sleep wave, what happens when you miss it, and why an earlier bedtime often leads to better sleep and later mornings, not earlier ones. She also addresses common concerns from working parents who worry about losing precious evening time with their child.

Listen in if you have ever wondered:
— What time should my child go to bed?
— Is bedtime too late?
— Why is my child waking early?
— Why does bedtime suddenly feel so hard?

This episode will give you practical tools to find the bedtime that works with your child’s biology instead of against it.

Looking for expert guidance on your child’s sleep? Allison offers two free age-specific guides to help you discover how much sleep kids need to thrive—at any age. Get your free copy now: 0-2 Years Old or 3 to 10 years old

From baby sleep to toddler sleep, daycare naps to sleep training—How Long ’Til Bedtime? is the podcast for parents who want practical, guilt-free sleep tips they can actually use. Hosted by pediatric sleep coach Allison Egidi, each episode delivers real solutions for every stage—from navigating newborn sleep struggles and weaning night feedings to helping your 3-year-old fall asleep independently (and stay asleep!). Whether you’re trying to make sense of daycare sleep patterns, craving your evenings back, or simply need a working mom podcast to keep you grounded, you’re in the right place.

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Scroll down for a full transcript of this episode.

235. What Time Should My Child Go to Bed? How to Find Their Ideal Bedtime
Before we dive in today, can I just take a minute to share the joy that I am getting from coaching my daughter’s middle school soccer team. It’s a somewhat unique team situation in that I have seven girls who play travel soccer. So they’re very good. I think I have four who play for some form of recreational soccer. And then seven who have either never played or haven’t played since they were teeny tiny. And middle school girls can be tough with social dynamics and their confidence or lack thereof.

Well, I came out of the gates hard with my expectations on how I want them to treat each other and I want them to try to invest in each other and invest in having a team that works together on improving. And I decided to make a goal that we try to get every girl on the team to score before the end of the season. And if you know anything about soccer, you know that that’s kind of an insane, ridiculous goal. But I knew my seven travel kids are very strong players and with intention, I could use them to help the other girls rise up.

Well, we are halfway through our season and as I’m recording this, our team is 4-0 and 13 of our 18 girls have scored. The joy that I get each time I can check one more girl off my list for scoring is kind of humorously next level. My whoop registers that I am doing a workout during these games because I get so into it. So I have no idea if choosing this as our team goal was a good idea or not, but it has certainly given me an avenue to challenge each of the girls in a unique way.

And without realizing it, my 13 year old gave me the very best compliment she has given me in so long, you guys because I asked her how she’s feeling about having me as a coach and how she thinks it’s going. And she said, I like it. You coach like every kid matters. You guys, it’s not easy to get a compliment from your 13 year old. And this one really made this whole commitment to coaching worthwhile because it has been a little bit of a stressful commitment. So, that’s what I’m up to behind the scenes.

Okay. On to today’s episode. Today we’re talking about bedtimes, more specifically how to find your child’s ideal bedtime.

Hey there, Allison here. Welcome back to How Long ‘Til Bedtime. If you’re tuning into this episode, it may be because you’re not confident about your child’s bedtime or you’re just curious if it’s the best bedtime for your child. You may not even remember how you landed on the current bedtime. For a lot of families, bedtime is something that just kind of happened.

Maybe it evolved from the newborn days. Maybe it’s based on when your child woke from their last nap. Maybe it’s built around your work schedule. Maybe it’s when things finally calmed down in the evening and your toddler is chill enough to even attempt it. Many parents have never really sat down and asked, what time does my child’s body actually want to go to sleep? And that question, that one question can completely change your child’s sleep.

Today, I want to give you the tools to answer it. Let’s start with something that I think is one of the most important and most overlooked concepts in children’s sleep. Once a baby has a mature sleep rhythm, which typically develops in the first four to five months of life, sleep is just not about quantity, it’s about timing. Your child has a natural sleep rhythm, a biological clock that is always running in the background, regulating when their body is primed to fall asleep, to stay asleep, and to wake up. And when the timing of sleep lines up with that rhythm, everything gets easier. They will be able to fall asleep faster. They will sleep more deeply or higher quality sleep. They will wake less often in the night. They will wake at an appropriate time in the morning and they wake up in a genuinely good mood and I’d like to say they’re their best little self throughout most of the day.

But when sleep is happening out of alignment with their rhythm, even if their total hours of sleep looks reasonable, you can kind of have the opposite effect. You can have resistance at bedtime. It can lead to night wakings. You might have a really early riser earlier than what is typical or desired. And a child who never quite seems rested, even when they get a good amount of sleep. I think about this in terms of my own sleep. I wear a whoop, as many of you know, and it tracks my sleep very closely. And I have learned that I am really a sensitive sleeper when it comes to timing. If I get into bed between 9:30 and 10, I fall asleep easily and I will typically sleep pretty soundly through the night. But if I push past 10, I catch my second wind, which suddenly means I can take on a project and stay up way too late doing something.

And then after I go to bed, I don’t always have a hard time falling asleep. Sometimes I will, but sometimes I don’t. But I will almost certainly wake up between three and four a.m. and struggle to fall back to sleep. My wheels get turning. My recovery, which shows me how restorative my sleep actually was, drops significantly. Even if I ended up with seven plus hours of total sleep. It’s just because it’s not an alignment. The timing matters that much.

And I think any of you who have done shift work, you get this. If a nurse works an overnight shift and then let’s say comes home in the morning and sleeps seven hours, she will tell you that those seven hours aren’t as restorative as seven hours in the middle of the night that are aligned with her biological sleep rhythm. And for babies, toddlers, and young children, the timing to their sleep matters even more. And if that timing is off, sleep can feel really hard or challenging. Timing being off is a main driver for challenging bedtimes.

Here’s the concept I want every parent to understand. Your child has a sleep wave. A sleep wave is that natural biological pull towards sleep that happens at about the same time each evening. It is not random. And this is important. It’s not something you create. It’s already there, built into your child’s biology. And your job is simply to find it and work with it. When you catch their sleep wave, bedtime gets easier almost immediately, your child is able to settle faster. They’re going to fall asleep faster. They also fall into a deeper, more restorative, high quality sleep. They’re able to connect sleep cycles more easily and the night tends to just go more smoothly overall. But here’s what happens when you miss the sleep wave.

If bedtime gets pushed past that window, even by 15 or 20 minutes, your child catches what we call the second wind. You’ve probably seen this even if you haven’t registered it. One minute they’re yawning and rubbing their eyes and then suddenly they’re running around the living room like they’ve just had a shot of espresso. That is the second wind. And once it kicks in, bedtime is going to become a battle. They are saying that they’re not tired and they certainly aren’t looking tired. That’s because the wave has passed and now their body has essentially sent a second signal to stay awake and going against that can be really hard.

So how do you find and help your child catch that sleep wave? This is where we can get practical with what to do. Here’s where I suggest you start. For the next week, watch your child carefully between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. You’re looking for the first signs of tiredness and for every kid that is going to look a little bit unique. So for babies, those signs might look like red eyebrows, yawning, fussiness, and not wanting to be put down or not having a lot of tolerance to be out of your arms. For toddlers and preschoolers, those signs might look like getting quieter or just less active. You might see yawning, rubbing their eyes, becoming clingy and wanting to be held, or getting just whiny and emotional over small things. For elementary age children, it might be a little more subtle. You might see yawning or just generally being more sensitive or irritable.

When you see those signs, that is your clue that the sleep wave is coming in. Ideally, you want your child in bed, lights out, not long after you start seeing these signs. And in some cases, you’re going to want them in bed before you even see those signs because those signs are the indicator that the sleep wave is about to pass. So once you’ve observed the timing for a few nights, you’re going to start to know when to expect these signs.

Now I want to make an important distinction here. Finding your child’s sleep wave is not the same as calculating a wake window. Wake windows, the idea that you should put your child to bed a set number of hours after they last woke up are widely used, but they are not evidence-based. And I find that following wake windows rigidly can actually cause parents to miss their child’s natural sleep wave entirely. Your child’s ideal bedtime is biological. It’s built in. It doesn’t shift based on when they happen to wake up from their last nap that day. A rough nap day, a short nap, a late nap, a skipped nap, doesn’t automatically mean bedtime should shift later or earlier by a set number of minutes or hours.

And during this week of observing, you want to watch closely. You’ll also be able to see the second wind kick in. So you’ll see those tired signs I mentioned. And then your child is going to go from tired to maybe we describe it as wired. From quiet to bouncing around, from being emotional and clingy to almost giddy. That’s the signal that the window has passed. So I always talk about how I have one child who would be grumpy and then wired and I have one that would be clingy and then get the giggles. That’s what we experienced with my kids when they were younger and it’s kind of actually how they operate now. For the vast majority of babies, toddlers, preschoolers, and even many early elementary age children, that sleep wave arrives somewhere between 6:30 and 7:30, which is why a 7 p.m bedtime works so well for so many families. It falls right in that window where kids are going to be set up for success. But every child is different. So some babies have a sleep wave that’s going to arrive closer to 6:30, others might be closer to 7:30, and your job is to find your child’s sleep wave window, not to hit just an arbitrary number on the clock and not to calculate it based on wake windows. Watch your child and let their body tell you.

Now I want to pause here and address something I hear from parents a lot. If I put my child to bed earlier to get ahead of this second wind, won’t they just wake up earlier in the morning. And I completely understand why that is a logical question. But in most cases, it is the opposite of what is actually going to happen. An overtired child who goes to bed too late is actually more likely to wake up early because when they miss their sleep wave and they fall asleep overtired, the quality of their sleep suffers and poor quality sleep leads to more fragile sleep in the early morning hours, which is exactly why sometimes our kids going to bed late are also waking up insanely early. When you move bedtime earlier into alignment with that sleep wave and their kind of ideal rhythm, your child will be able to fall into a higher quality, more restorative sleep. And that better sleep is what gets them past those super early morning wakeups. I know that that feels counterintuitive, but I have seen it play out hundreds and hundreds of times with families I’ve worked with. Earlier bedtime can result in a later morning wakeup and better and more sleep all around.

And if you are still feeling resistant to an earlier bedtime, I want to share another personal story because I resisted the early bedtime for almost two years with my oldest daughter. And I want you to understand what that resistance cost me so that maybe you don’t need to suffer for as long as I did. My oldest was not a good sleeper from early on. I’ve talked about this many times on the podcast. So for nearly two years, I kept thinking, we’re going to figure it out. She’s eventually going to start sleeping better or through the night, but she didn’t. And the sleep deprivation accumulated for both her and for me. The breaking point came that first Christmas when I had two babies under the age of two. And we traveled back to the Midwest to be with family, which threw everything off even more. We were in different houses. We were now all in the same room trying to sleep. We had the weight of everyone’s expectations. And I remember feeling like I was constantly on the verge of tears.

All I could think about is how I wanted to take our hot mess express family back home so we could just be a hot mess express by ourselves and not in front of everyone. And then on Christmas day, we had put both of the girls down just as we sat down to dinner. And before we had even gotten up from that meal, my oldest woke up and was hysterically screaming. And of course we’re already tired. It’s the end of Christmas day. Think how tired you are when you have little kids at the end of Christmas. So my husband went to try to rock her back to sleep and I’m guessing I looked completely broken because my dad looked at me and said, we are really worried about you. And he told me how I just did not seem like myself. And I remember just thinking, my gosh, you’re right. I do not feel like myself. And so we talked about how exhausted I was, how I felt like I was running on empty every single day, how I just did not feel like myself anymore. And they encouraged me to figure out what type of help I needed to get things back on track. So they didn’t know what I needed, but they just said, you are someone who is capable of getting help and it’s time to get help. So when we got home from that trip, the first thing I did was move forward with a sleep coach. I also didn’t know what help I needed, but I knew I was tired. One of the first things she brought up was wanting me to put our daughter to bed an hour earlier than we had been doing. And I was very skeptical. She was already waking often to start her day by 5 a.m. at the latest and she wasn’t sleeping soundly through the night. She was going to bed fairly easily at bedtime. So the whole, it all just seemed muddied and overwhelming. And I was thinking about how I wasn’t going to have a lot of time with her in the evening after work, but I was desperate. So eventually I just said, you know what? I’m going to do it. Just tell me what you want me to do and I will follow the plan. And when I decide I’m going to follow something, I’m committed.

And 11 days later, my daughter was sleeping through the night and waking at 6 a.m., which I always joke. Only a parent would think 6 a.m. is a win, but she’s a naturally early riser and 6 a.m. felt like a dream compared to 4:30 and five. So two years of sleep deprivation over in 11 days. And one of the most central pieces of that plan was an earlier bedtime. It wasn’t magic. It was just finally working with my daughter’s body instead of working against it. And I know what some of you are thinking right now that that really sounds great in theory, but you don’t get home until 6 PM or your partner doesn’t get home until even later, early bedtime, let’s say 7 p.m., might feel impossible. And I get it. That’s what I was struggling with. And I want you to know it is doable. Until my oldest was five and a half, I did not get home from picking my girls up at daycare until 6 p.m. And even on nights when my husband was traveling, I could bring these two little kiddos home. I could get them fed, bathed and into bed by 7pm. Was it leisurely? No. I had a routine that I followed from the moment we walked in the door and it did take some practice to get it dialed in. But the payoff was enormous.

My girls slept through the night. They woke up happy. They napped better at daycare. And our mornings, which used to feel tiring from the get go and kind of chaotic became genuinely pleasant because everyone was well rested. Now I do want to be really honest about something that I think comes up and that’s the quantity of our weekday evening time together was obviously shorter. And that was a bummer. And I’m not going to lie, it did totally spike my mom guilt. So that was a big piece of my personal puzzle. But I will say this time and time again, and I see it so often, the quality of our time together went up significantly because bedtime was calm and I wasn’t up multiple times during the night trying to get my toddler to go back to sleep. And we weren’t starting our day exhausted at 4:30 or five. And my husband and I had our evenings back. So we were able to decompress, to connect, to get things ready for the next day, to actually go to bed at a reasonable hour ourselves. And all of this allowed each of us to show up as a better version of ourselves each day. And so that is what I mean when I say the quality of our time improves significantly.

And I cannot tell you how many parents come back to me after committing to the earlier bedtime and improving their child’s sleep. And they tell me that it has positively impacted their connection to their child and their overall well being because the quality in the mornings and in the evenings, even though it’s a short amount of time and on your weekends is going to improve significantly when that early bedtime improves your child’s sleep.

Before I wrap up, I want to share one more story that I think some of you will relate to. Not long ago, I was on a consultation call with a mom who had a 12 month old who had always struggled with sleep. We talked through a whole plan, working on independent sleep, getting more consistent with the nap schedule and how to address night wakings. And the call was going really well. We were just humming along until I told her that we needed to shift bedtime to no later than seven. And she immediately burst into tears and I felt so much compassion for her because her angst was exactly what I was just talking about that I felt when I was told that my daughter needed to go to bed really early. And it’s what I hear about from so many working parents. She was just genuinely devastated by the idea of not getting enough time with her baby in the evening, or I should say like getting less than she already got, because it didn’t feel like a ton to her already. And in her example, her husband got home even later than she did. So she was also very worried that he would barely see their son during the work week. I shared with her what I just shared with you today, and I’m happy to report that within just a few days, her son was sleeping 12 hours straight through the night. And yes, the time with her baby in the evening was a little bit shorter. But she immediately came back within a handful of days and said the quality of their time together in the morning and on the weekends was noticeably better because her baby was happy and they knew when he was going to nap, they knew how long he was going to nap, so they could plan their weekend days to even take their quality time up to the next level. And she and her husband weren’t exhausted, so they felt better about their parenting journey.

So to wrap up, your child already has an ideal bedtime. It is not linked to a wake window, and it’s not something you invent. It’s something you find. Look for those first signs of tiredness in the early evening. Watch for the second wind to kick in. Aim to have your child in bed before that second wind. And for most babies and young children, that window is going to fall somewhere between 6:30 and 7:30 PM. So if you’ve been dealing with bedtime resistance, night wakings or early morning wakeups, an earlier, better timed bedtime is almost always the first place I look. It was the thing that changed everything for my family and I’ve watched it change everything for hundreds and hundreds of families since.

If this episode resonated with you, share it with a fellow parent who is in the bedtime or middle of the night sleep trenches. And as always, thanks so much for listening. I will see you back here next week. Bye for now.