What time should my child go to bed? Bedtimes by age, 5 to 12

In this guide (11 sections)

1. The short answer
2. How much sleep children need
3. School-night bedtimes by age: work it out in three steps
4. Is your child getting enough?
5. Why a regular bedtime is worth protecting
6. What time should they wake up?
7. A bedtime routine
8. Screens: off an hour before, and out of the bedroom
9. Sleep and learning, in proportion
10. When it isn’t working
11. When to talk to a doctor

Children aged 6 to 12 need 9 to 12 hours of sleep in 24 hours, and 5-year-olds 10 to 13 (naps included). For a 7-year-old who has to be up at 7 am on a school day, our suggested 10½ hours puts that at asleep by about 8:30 pm and lights out around 8:10. None of the health bodies we checked (the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC, Australia’s Raising Children Network and KidsHealth) publishes a bedtime for each age, and the charts that circulate online don’t come from them. They publish hours, and the bedtime follows from the alarm.

Below is the table for ages 5 to 12, how to adjust it for a different alarm, how to tell whether your child is getting enough, and the three habits the research links with better sleep and behaviour.

The short answer

How much sleep children need

The figures the AAP and the CDC use come from a 2016 consensus of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, whose panel reviewed the evidence on sleep and children’s health, behaviour and learning: 9 to 12 hours per 24 hours for ages 6 to 12, and 10 to 13 hours for ages 3 to 5 (that band includes naps). Australia’s Raising Children Network gives 9 to 11 hours for ages 5 to 11, inside the AASM range for 6 to 11; at age 5 its lower figure, 9 hours, is below the AASM’s 10.

Two things are worth knowing about these numbers. First, they are ranges because children differ: some do well at the lower end, others need the top. Second, the bottom of the range is the part to watch. The AASM panel found compelling evidence for at least 9 hours at school age, and noted that regularly sleeping less than recommended “is associated with attention, behavior, and learning problems.”

Many children sit close to that floor. A review that pulled together 34 studies of how much children actually sleep (published between 1990 and 2010, and based on parents’ reports) found an average of 9.4 hours at age 7, 9.1 at age 10 and 8.9 at age 12. Averages vary between countries, but they suggest the typical child of 10 to 12 sleeps right around the minimum.

School-night bedtimes by age: work it out in three steps

1. Start from the wake-up time. Usually the school-day alarm. This is the fixed point; everything else moves around it.
2. Count back the hours of sleep your child needs. Use the table below as a starting point, then adjust for your child.
3. Take off another 15 to 20 minutes so lights out comes before the time you want them asleep. The research on how long children take to drop off is thin, but the few studies of young children put the average at about 17 minutes, so this is a sensible starting allowance.

The Raising Children Network gives a similar worked example: a child who wakes at 7 am and needs about 10 hours should be in bed before 9 pm.

School-night bedtimes for a 7:00 am wake-up:

If your child wakes at 6:30, move every time 30 minutes earlier. At 7:30, 30 minutes later.

The “Sleep” column is a suggestion inside the official ranges, not an official chart. Younger children sit nearer the top because at 5 they are still in the 10-to-13-hour band, and children’s sleep naturally shortens as they grow. The firm rule is the floor: whatever the age, a child who regularly falls asleep less than 9 hours before they have to get up (10 at age 5) is short of the recommendation.

The bedtime comes from their alarm, not their friends’.

Is your child getting enough?

Children short of sleep don’t always look sleepy. The signs the AAP and KidsHealth list are:

• irritability, moodiness or crankiness;
• being “hyper”, or having behaviour problems;
• difficulty concentrating, or trouble learning and paying attention at school.

None of these proves a sleep problem on its own; plenty of things make a child cranky.

A small study gives some reason to try it. Thirty-four children aged 7 to 11 were assigned to sleep about an hour longer or an hour shorter than usual on school nights. An activity monitor showed the longer-sleep group actually got about 27 minutes more a night, and the other group about 54 minutes less. Teachers, who did not know which group each child was in, rated the children with more sleep as less emotionally volatile and less restless, and the children with less sleep got worse. The authors called their results preliminary, and it was a short study, but half an hour a night was enough for teachers to notice.

Why a regular bedtime is worth protecting

A large UK study followed 10,230 children in the Millennium Cohort Study, recording their bedtimes at ages 3, 5 and 7. At 7, children without regular bedtimes had more behavioural difficulties, as rated by mothers and teachers. The longer the irregular bedtimes had gone on, the bigger the difference. And the hopeful part: children who switched from irregular to regular bedtimes showed clear improvements in their behaviour scores.

That study observed families rather than assigning bedtimes, so it cannot prove the bedtime alone made the difference. But it fits the official advice. The Raising Children Network says to keep “regular sleep and wake times, even on the weekend”, the CDC says to go to bed and get up at the same time every day, and the AAP specifically lists the same waking time on weekdays and weekends.

What time should they wake up?

The school-day alarm is usually fixed, which is why the method above starts there. The choice you usually have is the weekend. If a later night on Friday or Saturday is part of family life, our suggestion is to protect the wake-up time first, since the AAP’s tip names the waking time: keep the weekend alarm close to the school-day one.

If you can choose the alarm, the same arithmetic runs forwards: a child asleep by 8:30 pm reaches the 9-hour minimum (for ages 6 to 12) at 5:30 am and 10½ hours at 7 am, so pick the wake-up time that gives your child the sleep they need.

A bedtime routine

A bedtime routine is the predictable set of things that happen in the hour or so before lights out. The Raising Children Network says a routine is “very important” at 5 to 11. A review of the research by sleep researchers Jodi Mindell and Ariel Williamson focuses on children under six, but its practical rules are a sensible place to start at any age:

• The same steps every night, on as many nights of the week as you can.
• Two to four steps. The AAP’s version is three: brush, book, bed.
• No longer than 30 to 40 minutes.
• No television or devices as part of it.

In studies of children up to five, having a routine is linked with an earlier bedtime, falling asleep faster, longer sleep and fewer night wakings, and bedtime book sharing is linked with better language and literacy. Those studies are of under-sixes, but we would keep the book going for older children too: reading together is the easiest step to make the one they look forward to.

If bedtime is a nightly argument, a star chart for “in bed by lights-out time” is worth a few weeks. Our guide explains how to set one up so it doesn’t backfire.

Screens: off an hour before, and out of the bedroom

The AAP recommends turning all screens off at least an hour before bedtime and keeping TVs, computers, tablets and phones out of children’s bedrooms, especially at night. The Raising Children Network and KidsHealth give the same hour.

The evidence that screen use and poorer sleep go together is consistent, though mostly observational. A review of 67 studies of children and teenagers, mostly aged 5 to 17, found screen time linked with worse sleep, mainly shorter and later, in 90% of them. A second review, of 20 studies involving 125,198 children and teenagers, found that those who used a device at bedtime had about twice the odds of sleeping too little, and that even having a device in the bedroom without using it was linked with less sleep. Most children in that second review were aged 10 to 18, but the practical point carries: the simplest rule is a charging spot outside the bedroom.

Why screens affect sleep is less settled than it is often made to sound. Bright light suppressing the sleep hormone melatonin is one proposed reason; screen time simply pushing bedtime later is another. You don’t need to know which to act on the advice.

That includes learning apps, ours among them. If your child uses Encyclopedia: Kids Learning, make it an afternoon thing, not part of the wind-down. The book at bedtime should be a paper one.

Sleep and learning, in proportion

For school-age children, a meta-analysis of 86 studies covering 35,936 children aged 5 to 12 found that longer sleep goes with better school performance, better higher-level thinking and fewer behaviour problems. The links are small, though, and in that age group sleep length was not linked with memory or sustained attention. An extra half hour will not transform a report card. It is one of the cheapest things you can get right.

If your child pushes back on bedtime, it can help to give them the reason in their own terms. Our app has a topic on exactly that question, Why Do Kids Need More Sleep Than Adults?, in The Human Body & Mind.

When it isn’t working

These are our suggestions for the common snags, built on the guidance above.

They take ages to fall asleep. Up to 16% of parents of school-age children say their child has difficulty falling asleep, so you are not alone. Check the hour before bed first: screens off, the same short routine, the room dark. If your child is still wide awake after half an hour most nights, try lights out 15 minutes later for a week and see whether they settle faster.

They say their friends stay up later. They may be right. As children grow, bedtimes drift later while wake-up times stay much the same through the school week, which is why sleep shortens with age. Explain the arithmetic: the bedtime comes from their alarm, not their friends’.

Bedtime keeps creeping later. Move it back in steps of 15 minutes every few nights rather than all at once, and start the routine at the new time, not the old one.

When to talk to a doctor

The ranges above are for healthy children.

The AAP says your child’s doctor may ask you to keep a sleep log. Writing down bedtime, wake-up time, night wakings and anything unusual for a week or two before the appointment gives the doctor something to work with.

Sources (13)

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