Resetting bedtimes before school starts: the 15 minute plan

Over the summer the household clock takes itself apart: late dinners, warm evenings, and at half past eleven somebody is still padding around the hallway. Then school starts, with a seven o'clock alarm nobody agreed to. The first week back is decided now, roughly ten days out, and not on the evening before.

The classic mistake is the jump: sending everyone to bed two hours early on the Sunday before term. Bodies do not move like that. The child lies there awake, and half an hour later wants water. An internal clock shifts in small amounts, day by day, which is exactly where the plan works: 15 minutes a day, applied to bedtime and wake-up time alike, until you land on school hours.

The prompt that builds the table

Build us a sleep plan for the ten days before school starts. Two children, aged 7 and 11. Right now they fall asleep around 10.45pm and get up at 9.15am. The first day of term is [DATE] and they need to be up at 6.45am, so the target is asleep by 8.45pm for the younger one and 9.30pm for the older one. Move bedtime and wake-up time in steps of 15 minutes a day, never more. Give it back as a printable table for the fridge, one row per day per child, with columns for date, wake-up, dinner, start of the evening routine and lights out. Add three sentences at the end on what to do when a day goes off plan.

The table on its own puts nobody to bed. What holds it up is four small things, and they start on day one of the plan, not once term is already running.

• Wake-up time pulls harder than bedtime. Move the morning and the evening follows. The other way round almost never works.
• Light in the morning, dimness at night: curtains open at wake-up, low lights for the last hour.
• Dinner moves by the same 15 minutes every day. If dinner is still at half nine, a nine o'clock bedtime is fiction.
• The last hour is screen free, with the tablet and the phone sleeping outside the bedroom. It is not a punishment: the buzz from a screen does not switch off with the screen.

The last hour decides the rest

Take the screens out and a twenty minute gap opens up in the evening, which fills itself with arguments unless you fill it first. What reliably works is the boring and repeated: shower, pyjamas, reading in bed and one bedtime question, always in the same order. Children do not obey the clock, they obey the sequence. By the first morning of term, the alarm is no longer an ambush.