How long should a bedtime routine take?

A bedtime routine, also called an evening ritual or sleep routine, isn't about coziness. It's a signal.

Your baby can't read the clock and doesn't know it's evening. What your baby can do is recognize a series of actions that goes the same way every time and ends the same way every time. That's the whole function: letting your baby's body know the night is starting.

And it's something to hold on to for you. On the evenings when things don't go well, and they will come, you have something to fall back on that doesn't depend on how the day went.

Twenty minutes, thirty at most

Not too long, not too short. Count from the moment you go upstairs or walk into the room, including the feed and all the steps.

If it takes longer, it becomes a program and your baby gets stimulated instead of calm. The calmer it goes, the better it works.

Three to four steps, no more

There's plenty to choose from: a bath, a massage, washing the face, brushing teeth, a book, a calm game like peekaboo, pajamas on, a song or some music, the feed, cuddling.

Choose three or four. More makes it too long and too messy.

The same order every evening

This is where it usually goes wrong. The steps don't do the work, the predictability does. If the order changes, there's no pattern to recognize and the routine gives you nothing.

Include the bath

Kyra recommends this explicitly, for a reason that makes sense right away: getting into the bath is like nothing else that happens during the day. That's exactly why it's such a clear signal, especially for a young baby. It's the dividing line between day and night.

It doesn't need to take half an hour. A few seconds in the water is already enough to give the signal.

Awake in bed: this is the core

The routine ends with your baby awake in bed. Not asleep in your arms and then carefully put down.

That's the hardest part, and the most important. If your baby falls asleep on you, that's the way they know, and they look for it again at every transition between sleep cycles. See why a 30-minute nap has to do with that.

So your baby needs to be awake going into bed, but tired enough. That's precision work you build up step by step in the first months, not something that's done tonight.

And why a fixed bedtime doesn't work

Half past seven isn't a bedtime. Half past seven is a point on the clock.

What decides whether your baby can sleep is how much sleep pressure has built up, and that depends on how the day went: how long your baby was awake, how long the naps were, how much stimulation there was. Two days are rarely the same.

So look at the wake window since the last nap and at your baby's tired cues, and let those decide when the routine starts. If the last nap was short, the evening starts earlier. If it was long, later.

If evenings often go stiffly, look at the afternoon too: an overstimulated baby already enters the routine tense, and then no order helps.

The routine works best when it ends in a room that's a signal in itself. And if putting your baby down awake doesn't work yet, start with varying the way your baby falls asleep.

When that predictability roughly appears, you'll read in when a baby gets a rhythm.

If your baby wakes up cranky from the last nap, bedtime is probably too late: how to move bedtime earlier.