I spend part of my clinical life working with adults with insomnia and other sleep problems, and another part working with sleep much earlier in life—with babies, children, teenagers and their parents.
Those two parts of my work overlap more than you might think.
After years of treating adults with insomnia, you start to hear some of the same beliefs about sleep over and over again.
“I need something to help me sleep.”
“If I don't fall asleep soon, tomorrow is going to be terrible.”
“I've always been a bad sleeper.”
“I need everything to be exactly right or I won't sleep.”
“I have to make myself fall asleep.”
“I only got six hours last night. Today is going to be awful.”
A surprising amount of insomnia treatment involves helping people loosen their grip on beliefs like these.
So when I'm working with children and families, I often find myself thinking several years ahead:
What do I wish this adult had learned about sleep when they were eight? Or thirteen?
We obviously can't prevent every child from ever struggling with sleep.
But I really think we can help kids grow up with a healthier and more flexible understanding of what sleep is—and what it isn't.
Sleep is something your body knows how to do
Sleep is a biological process. We can create conditions that make sleep more likely, but we cannot make ourselves sleep on command. If we could - I would be out of a job.
Adults with insomnia often become incredibly good at trying to sleep.
They carefully control bedtime. They monitor how sleepy they feel. They calculate how many hours are left in the night. They add supplements, elaborate routines, special pillows, sleep trackers and rules.
And eventually sleep can start to feel like something that requires an enormous amount of work.
I'd love for kids to grow up with a different understanding:
Your body knows how to sleep.
We can help it along. We can give it enough time. We can have routines that help us wind down.
But you don't have to make sleep happen.
A bad night of sleep isn't an emergency
This is another lesson I wish more adults had learned much earlier.
Sometimes you won't sleep well.
You'll stay up too late at a sleepover. You'll be excited before the first day of school. You'll wake up during a thunderstorm. You'll sleep terribly in a hotel. You'll be nervous about a test.
And you'll probably be a bit tired the next day.
That's okay.
One of the most powerful things we can teach kids about sleep is that being tired is uncomfortable, but it isn't catastrophic.
You can be tired and go to school.
You can be tired and laugh with your friends.
You can be tired and play soccer.
You can be tired and still have a pretty good day.
Your body will build more sleep pressure and sleep will usually come more easily the next night.
The more frightening we make the consequences of a bad night, the more pressure we inadvertently put on sleep.
Listen to how you talk about sleep in front of your kids
We've become much more thoughtful about how we talk about food and bodies around children.
We understand why constantly saying:
“I was so bad today—I ate dessert.”
“I need to work this off.”
“I can't have carbs.”
might shape the way a child eventually thinks about food and their body.
I think sleep deserves some of that same thoughtfulness.
Kids hear us say:
“I only got five hours. I'm going to be useless today.”
“If I don't get eight hours, I can't function.”
“I've always been a terrible sleeper.”
“I need my melatonin to sleep.”
“I can't sleep anywhere except my own bed.”
None of these comments individually is going to give your child insomnia.
And I certainly don't want parents monitoring every sentence they say about sleep.
But over years, children are learning what sleep means partly by watching us.
Is sleep something their body generally handles?
Or is it fragile?
Does a bad night happen occasionally and then life continues?
Or does it become the explanation for everything that goes wrong the next day?
Do we support sleep?
Or do we constantly try to control it?
Those are very different messages.
Sleep doesn't have to be perfect to be healthy
We have so much access to sleep information now.
Sometimes that's helpful.
Sometimes I think we've accidentally created the impression that healthy sleep requires doing everything exactly right.
The perfect bedtime. The perfect number of hours. The perfect room temperature. No screens within exactly X minutes of bed. The right amount of deep sleep. The right amount of REM. A perfect wearable score waiting for you in the morning.
But healthy sleep has always had variability.
Bedtimes move. Kids wake up. Teenagers stay up late. Vacations happen. Babies have weird nights. People get sick.
Life occasionally (actually more than occasionally) interferes with sleep.
What matters much more is what sleep looks like over time.
I'd much rather a child understand the habits that generally support good sleep than become afraid of occasionally breaking one of the “rules.”
We don't always need to fix being awake
If a child isn't falling asleep, our instinct as parents is understandably to do something.
Read another story. Go check-in (again). A different sound machine. A new supplement. A later bedtime. An earlier bedtime. A new sleep product.
Sometimes something really does need to change.
But sometimes a child is simply awake.
Adults with insomnia often develop a tremendous urgency around wakefulness at night. Being awake becomes a problem that needs to be solved immediately.
I'd love for children to learn that wakefulness isn't dangerous.
Sometimes your brain takes a little longer to settle.
Sometimes you wake up during the night.
Sometimes you don't fall asleep the second your head hits the pillow.
You can be awake without immediately needing to fix it.
Be careful about the identity we build around sleep
“He's always been my bad sleeper.”
“She just doesn't need much sleep.”
“He's an amazing sleeper.”
“She'll never sleep anywhere but home.”
We say these things casually. I've probably said versions of them about my own kids.
But kids listen.
And identities have a funny way of becoming sticky.
I hear adults tell me all the time:
“I've always been a bad sleeper.”
Often it's one of the first things they want me to know.
I don't want kids growing up believing that sleep ability is a fixed trait they either inherited or didn't.
Sleep changes. Sleep responds to biology, development, schedules, stress, environment and behavior.
A difficult period of sleep doesn't need to become part of a child's identity.
We don't need to take something every time sleep is difficult
This is one of the reasons I'm cautious about casual melatonin use in children.
There are situations where medication or supplements can absolutely have an appropriate role.
But I don't love teaching children from a young age:
“When I can't sleep, I need to take something.”
Because I meet the adult version of that belief all the time.
Sometimes it's a prescription medication. Sometimes melatonin. Sometimes magnesium. Sometimes cannabis or alcohol.
Sometimes it's not a substance at all. It's an elaborate bedtime routine that has slowly become something the person believes they cannot sleep without.
The particular thing matters less than the belief underneath it:
I can't sleep unless I have this.
I'd rather start by helping kids understand what their sleep difficulty is and addressing that.
We should take sleep seriously without making kids anxious about it
This is probably the balance I'm thinking about most.
Sleep matters. Children need adequate opportunities to sleep. Their schedules matter. Circadian rhythms matter. Sleep disorders deserve to be identified and treated. Chronic insufficient sleep isn't something we should shrug off.
But taking sleep seriously doesn't require making sleep feel fragile.
We can teach children:
Sleep is important.
Your body needs it.
There are things we do that help our bodies sleep well.
And:
Your sleep will not be perfect every night.
Those ideas can coexist.
The relationship with sleep we're building now
When I work with an adult who is scared of being awake at 2 a.m., convinced they can't function after a short night or dependent on an increasingly complicated set of conditions to sleep, I sometimes wish I could go backward.
Not to find the moment somebody “caused” their insomnia. That's rarely how insomnia works.
I just wish I could introduce a few ideas earlier.
Your body knows how to sleep.
You don't have to force it.
Being tired sometimes is part of being human.
One bad night doesn't require a rescue mission.
You can support sleep without controlling every part of it.
And you don't need perfect sleep to be healthy.
Maybe that's one of the advantages of working at both ends of this.
I get to hear what adults wish felt easier about sleep.
And then I get to think about what we can teach our kids now.
