How to Get a Toddler to Sleep: What a 3-Step Bedtime Routine Trial Found

The short answer: a routine on its own helped, and it helped quickly

If you read toddler sleep advice for ten minutes, you will be told to get a consistent bedtime routine. It is probably the most repeated advice in the whole topic, and it is usually given with nothing behind it except "toddlers like predictability." This paper is the study that actually put the advice on its own to a test. Families were randomised either to start a specific routine or to carry on as they were. The routine group was not given a sleep-training programme, a settling technique, or instructions about how to respond at night. They were given three steps to do in the same order every night, and that was the whole intervention.

For the toddlers, the change showed up in the part of the night most parents care about. Night wakings fell. The longest stretch of unbroken sleep grew by about an hour. Children called out less and climbed out of bed less, and their mothers rated bedtime as easier. The improvements were already there at the first check, one week into the routine, and they held at the second check a week later. What did not change is just as worth knowing, and it is covered below rather than skipped: the toddlers did not sleep more hours in total.

What did the researchers actually do?

The paper is by Jodi Mindell and colleagues, published in the journal Sleep in 2009. It reports two randomised trials run side by side, one in babies and one in toddlers. This article uses only the toddler trial, because the age group is the one this question is about. The toddler trial enrolled 199 children aged 18 to 36 months, every one of them with a sleep problem their mother rated somewhere from small to severe. About two-thirds of the families were assigned to the routine and the rest to a control group that kept their usual bedtime habits for the full three weeks.

The study ran for three weeks. In the first week everyone simply did what they normally did, and mothers filled in a sleep questionnaire and a daily sleep diary. For the next two weeks the routine group did the three steps described in the chart section below, in the same order each night. One detail matters for everything that follows: parents were told to keep putting their child to bed in whatever way they already did it. If a mother usually stayed until her toddler fell asleep, she kept doing that. The researchers changed the run-up to bedtime and nothing else, because they wanted to know whether a routine by itself does anything.

Two honest notes belong here rather than at the bottom. The outcomes were all reported by mothers, through the questionnaire and the diaries. Nobody measured the children's sleep with a wrist monitor or any other device. And the study was funded by Johnson & Johnson Consumer Companies. Three of the four authors worked for the company, the lead author had consulted for it, and the wash and lotion used in the routine were supplied by it, in plain unmarked containers. The families were not told who funded the study. That funding is a reason to read the results carefully, and this article will point to the places where care is needed. It is not a reason to pretend a randomised trial did not happen.

How to get toddler to sleep through the night: what changed after lights-out

The routine was a bedtime intervention, so the finding the researchers themselves called surprising was that the whole night changed, not just the settling part.

On the sleep questionnaire, toddlers in the routine group went from waking 1.3 times a night at the start to 0.6 times a night by the third week. When they did wake, they were awake for less time: about 15 minutes a night at the start, down to about 8 minutes. Their longest stretch of unbroken sleep grew from 8.1 hours to 9.2 hours. The daily diaries told the same story in slightly different numbers, which is reassuring rather than confusing, because two separate records pointing the same way is what you hope for. In the diaries, night wakings fell from 1.0 to 0.5 a night, and the time toddlers took to fall asleep fell from about 22 minutes to about 16 minutes. In the control group, none of these measures changed in any meaningful way over the same three weeks.

There is one result in this section that cuts against the way this study is usually quoted, so it gets its own paragraph. The toddlers' total night-time sleep did not increase. It was 9.9 hours at the start and 10.0 hours at the end, which the paper reports as no change, and nap time did not change either. What the routine produced was consolidation: the same amount of sleep, in longer and quieter blocks, with less of the night spent awake in the middle. For a parent who is up twice a night, that is the change that matters most in practice. But if your hope was an extra hour of sleep at the ends of the night, this trial does not offer it.

Mothers noticed the difference at the time. By the end of the study, mothers in the routine group rated their toddler's sleep as less of a problem, bedtime as less difficult, and their child's morning mood as better. Their own mood scores improved too, on tension, anger, fatigue and confusion. The paper cannot say whether that was because the children slept in longer blocks or because having a set plan made bedtime feel less chaotic, and it says so.

Toddler bedtime routine chart: the exact 3 steps the trial used

This is the routine as the paper describes it, in the order the families were asked to do it:

• Step 1 — Bath. A bath using a provided wash product. Families who already bathed their child before bed four or more times a week were not included in the study, so for most families in the trial this step was new.
• Step 2 — Lotion. Straight after the bath, parents applied lotion, using a provided product. In the baby version of the trial this step was a massage. For toddlers it was simply putting lotion on.
• Step 3 — Quiet activities. Cuddling, singing a lullaby, and similar calm activities. Then lights out within 30 minutes of the end of the bath. That 30-minute window is part of the tested routine, not a detail added later.

Same steps, same order, every night for two weeks. The study did not include a story as a named step, a drink, a snack, teeth-brushing steps, a nightlight, or a clock. Families reading this will notice their own routine already contains some of these steps and not others. That is fine as ordinary parenting, but it is worth being clear about which parts are the tested ones: the three steps above, in that order, ending with lights out inside half an hour of the bath.

How to get toddler to sleep in their own bed: what this trial can and can't say

This is one of the most searched versions of the question, so it deserves a straight answer. The trial did not teach any child to sleep in their own bed. Where a child slept and how they fell asleep were deliberately left alone. Some toddlers in the study slept in a crib and some in a bed, and the researchers made no attempt to move anyone.

What the trial did measure around the edges of that question moved in the direction parents want. Toddlers in the routine group called out to their parents fewer times, from 1.8 times a night at the start to 1.1 by the third week on the questionnaire, and the number of times they got out of their crib or bed fell from 1.2 to 0.7. The diaries showed a similar pattern. So a calmer run-up to sleep went together with a child who disturbed the evening less once they were in bed. That is a real and useful finding. It is not the same thing as evidence that a routine will move a toddler out of your bed and into theirs, and any article that uses this study to promise that is going past what was tested. If your child currently sleeps in your bed and you want to change that, this paper does not cover the change itself. It covers what happened to nights once a routine was in place, wherever the child was sleeping.

What this research can't tell you

It only studied mild to moderate sleep problems. Every child in the trial had a sleep problem their mother had noticed, but children were left out of the study if they woke more than three times a night, stayed awake for more than an hour a night, or slept less than nine hours across the whole day. Children who were ill were also left out. If your toddler's nights are much worse than that description, or you suspect snoring, breathing problems, pain or anything medical, this study is not about your situation and a doctor is the right next call, not a routine chart.

Everything was reported by mothers. Sleep questionnaires and diaries are standard tools in this field, and the questionnaire used here has been checked against other measures in earlier work. But there was no objective sleep recording in this study, and the researchers themselves raise the possibility that expecting an improvement helped produce one, at least in part. Mothers in the routine group knew they had been given something new to try.

Nobody followed the families afterwards. The intervention lasted two weeks and the study ended there. Whether the toddlers were still sleeping in longer stretches a month or a year later is simply not in this paper. The honest claim is about the two weeks that were measured.

Only this one routine was tested. The study cannot tell you whether a different routine would work as well, whether all three steps are needed, or whether the bath is doing most of the work. The researchers list exactly that as a limitation. It also cannot tell you anything about sleep regressions, dropping naps, screens before bed, or what to do when a child is frightened at night. Those are different questions with different evidence, and some of them have their own pages on this site.

The families were a narrow group. The reports came from mothers, not fathers or other caregivers. Families were recruited in the United States through a market research firm, most of the mothers were married, all the questionnaires were in English, and families were paid to take part. Sleep customs differ a lot between households and cultures, and this study describes the group it studied.

Frequently Asked Questions

The takeaway

A bedtime routine is the rare piece of toddler sleep advice that has been put through a randomised trial on its own, and in that trial it held up in a specific and limited way. Two weeks of the same three calm steps, in the same order, ending with lights out inside half an hour, and toddlers with ordinary sleep problems woke less, settled back faster, and slept in a longer unbroken stretch, while their mothers found bedtime easier. The trial was funded by the company that supplied the bath and lotion products, every result came from mothers' reports, and the toddlers did not gain extra sleep in total. Read with those limits attached, it is still a useful result, because the thing it asks of a family is small and repeatable. Pick the run-up to bedtime, make it the same every night, and give it a fortnight. That much, at least, has been tested.