Improve Children’s Sleep With These Top Tips

A tired child finds everything harder. Concentration goes, tempers get shorter and ordinary ups and downs feel much bigger. Teenagers are their own battle, partly because their body clock really does run later, so being woken at 7am can feel to them the way 4am feels to you.

Here you'll find practical sleep tips to use at home, or to pass on to families if you work in a school. At the heart of it is a wind-down window: screens off an hour before bed, a warm bath, a milky drink and three good things from the day. There's advice for younger children, including what to do about night terrors, and for teenagers, where negotiation gets further than rules.

None of it works in a single night. Stick with a change for a couple of weeks, and you'll know when it's time to ask the school nurse or GP.