Why Is My Child Suddenly Struggling To Sleep At Night? What I Learned As A Mom And Former Teacher
It’s 11:29 PM, and I’m folding the third load of soccer uniforms this week when I hear the soft scuff of socks on hardwood outside the laundry room door. I don’t even turn around before I say it: “Can’t sleep, huh?” It’s Milo, my 8-year-old third grader, holding his lumpy stuffed fox, one ear hanging off by a thread. Two weeks ago, this would have been shocking. Up until mid-September, he’d trudge up the stairs at 8:30, brush his teeth, let me read one chapter of our book, and be snoring before I even closed the bedroom door. Now, I see him more after 9 PM than I do before dinner some nights.
I tried all the usual fixes first. Cut out the after-dinner fruit snacks he’d been begging for, swapped the iPad time before bed for a walk around the block, bought a new nightlight, checked his mattress for lumps, even let him pick out a new set of space sheets. Nothing stuck. One night I let him crawl into bed with me and by 3 AM I was poked in the ribs by his bony knees, kicked in the stomach, and wide awake while he snored away. I was cranky the next day, he fell asleep during his math worksheet at school, and his teacher sent a quick note asking if everything was okay at home.
As someone who taught third grade for six years before staying home with my kids, I should have seen it sooner. I started going through the parent emails I used to get this time of year: “My son never had sleep issues before, what changed?” “My 7-year-old is up three times a night all of a sudden, is this normal?” I’d always answer the same way, but I forgot it until Milo started going through it. It’s not that their sleep schedule broke, or that they’re acting out to get attention. It’s that their brain just grew a new gear.
Around 7 to 9 years old, kids stop thinking only about the right now. They used to worry if their sock was too tight or if they’d get to be line leader that day. Now, all of a sudden, they can think about what might happen next week, next month, even next year. They hear a news story about a storm on the radio, and they don’t just forget it after dinner – it sits there. They have a fire drill at school, and suddenly they’re thinking about what if it’s a real fire when everyone’s asleep. They overhear us talking about a car repair bill, and they start worrying we’ll lose our house. They don’t know how to talk about these things, mostly, because they don’t even know what the feeling is. During the day, they’re running around with friends, doing math worksheets, eating popsicles – there’s a hundred things to distract them. At night, the lights go off, and all those what-ifs just start bouncing around their empty head.
Two Fridays ago, after he’d gotten up for the fourth time that night, I didn’t walk him back to bed immediately. I sat down on the floor of the hallway with him, and I asked, “What does it feel like when you try to sleep? Not what are you thinking, just what does it feel like?” He thought for a minute, then said, “It’s like there’s a hamster running in circles on my brain. It won’t stop running.” That made total sense. So I asked him what if we got the hamster off the brain before we tried to sleep, what if we put all the running thoughts somewhere else?
The next day, we went to the dollar store and got a cheap spiral notebook with dinosaurs on the cover, and we left it on his nightstand with a pack of crayons. I told him it’s just a brain dump notebook. Every night before we brush teeth, he gets three minutes to write or draw every single thing that the hamster is running on. If it’s something that needs to be done, we write it down on the kitchen calendar for the next day, so he knows it doesn’t get lost. If it’s just a silly worry, it just stays in the notebook. That’s it, no big mandatory talk about feelings unless he wants to. Then, we added 10 minutes of low-key nothing before bed: no reading homework, no screens, just me sitting on his bed while we put together a 24-piece dinosaur puzzle, or he shows me all the new rocks he added to his collection. Nothing exciting, nothing that gets his brain going, just enough time for all the thoughts to come up before he lies down.
If he does wake up anyway, we have a rule now: he can sit in the fuzzy blue chair by his window for five minutes, let the hamster run, and if he still can’t sleep after that, he can call me. I don’t come get him before that, and he doesn’t wander the house. It’s small, but it gives him something to do instead of just lying there panicking that he can’t sleep.
It’s not perfect. Last week, he woke up at 10:45 PM worried that the class hamster would escape over the weekend and get eaten by the school cat, so I had to write a note to his teacher that morning to check on him. The week before that, we forgot the brain dump because we got home late from soccer practice, and he was up until 10:30 bouncing off the walls. But most nights, he scribbles for three minutes, we do our puzzle, he’s asleep by 9. I stopped panicking that I’m messing up his sleep habits, or that something terrible is wrong. I remember now, as a teacher, this is just a phase that comes with growing up. It’s a side effect of his brain figuring out how to do something new, not a problem to fix.
Last night, I walked by his room at 8:50, and the light was still on. I peeked in, and he was leaning against his pillows, scribbling away. He looked up and waved, said “I’m almost done, it’s just the camping trip thing.” I nodded and closed the door, and by 9:05 it was quiet. I still check on him sometimes, and I still worry sometimes that this will turn into something bigger. But for now, the notebook works, the puzzle works, and we’re all getting more sleep than we were two weeks ago. It’s not a perfect fix, but it’s enough for right now.
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