What if the part of the evening you quietly dread could become a beautiful time of connecting with your child at the end of the day?
For a lot of the families I work with, bedtime has slowly turned into something to brace against. You’re already tired after a long day, and then comes the thought of getting your little one to sleep, and your chest tightens before you’ve even started. If you’re raising a small child far from where you grew up, often without much family nearby, that tiredness comes with a quiet loneliness on top of it. So first, the thing that’s easy to lose sight of in the thick of it: your child is not being difficult on purpose. What looks like fighting sleep is usually something much softer underneath.
It’s rarely a deliberate refusal
Most of the time, your child isn’t directly resisting sleep at all. They’re having trouble settling into it. With a baby, that can look like arching the whole body and crying hard. With a toddler, it can be a sudden burst of energy right when you’d expect them to be winding down. Underneath, though, it’s much closer to a “please help me.”
There’s a kind of Unruhe in the body. It’s a German word for a restless, unsettled feeling. Too much energy, and nowhere for it to go. Small children can’t yet calm themselves down reliably, so they call for you. Sometimes loudly. That isn’t defiance, and it isn’t a child who’s been spoiled. It’s a child asking for a hand.
What’s usually underneath it
When I sit with families, the reasons tend to come down to a few.
Timing. This one is sneaky, because a child can fight sleep when they’re overtired and when they’re not quite tired enough, and from across the room those can look almost the same. The quick way to tell them apart: an overtired child is wired, weepy, easily unsettled, and testing you more. An under-tired child is bright, busy, mostly content, and simply not ready yet. When we go strictly by the clock instead of watching the child in front of us, a little one can feel misunderstood, and that adds stress to the very moment we’re trying to calm. (Overtiredness is a whole topic of its own. I made a separate video about it if that’s the piece you’re wrestling with.)
Connection. Sometimes the fight is a message: “I need you to meet me before I can let go.” Your child needs to feel you, to be picked up emotionally, before their system feels safe enough to soften. And here’s the part we tend to forget: your own state deeply affects theirs. Arrive at bedtime impatient, and they feel it. You can’t rush anyone into calm, which is why the calm has to begin with you.
The routine itself. Sometimes a wind-down has simply gone stale, or grown too short or too long for where your child is now. Sometimes the evening begins too abruptly, with no warning, and a child resists the suddenness of it. And sometimes, over time, a little one has built up an association that bedtime is unpleasant, and braces before you’ve even begun.
Autonomy. The older your child gets, the more they need to feel some say in how the evening goes. Not running the whole show, which isn’t really what they want, but real choices inside a frame. They’ve been following directions all day. A little balance restored in the evening, with the people they trust most, goes a long way.
A small story
I once worked with a couple I’ll call Julia and Tom, who came to me exhausted and worried. They’d been told their baby boy, Oscar, should be sleeping more. Out of real care, every evening for weeks they set out to make sleep happen. The harder they tried, the more Oscar resisted, until you could almost see him think “oh no, not this again” the moment they started. Some nights stretched past an hour. Nothing they were doing was wrong, exactly. But the quality of it had derailed, and a timing issue had grown into a full escalation. That’s what going head-to-head at bedtime tends to do.
What you can do tonight
First, the important check: notice whether teething, an ear infection, an upset stomach, or something else might be keeping your child from rest. These can all look like fighting sleep. If it’s new, intense, or just doesn’t add up, check in with your pediatrician.
Once that’s clear, two things.
One: before you start the evening routine, settle yourself. Three slow breaths. Arrive soft rather than braced, with the quiet attitude that it takes as long as it takes. You set the tone of the room.
Two: pick them up right where they are. Meet the child in front of you, not the to-do list waiting impatiently behind them. If there’s too much energy in the body, pause the bed-going for a moment and let them blow off some steam first. And a small but valuable one: try not to introduce new boundaries or teach a new habit when your child is already tired. Save the lessons for daytime, when everyone’s in a better mood.
The other side of it
Picture the version I want for you. The evening you look forward to. Your little one winding down and feeling close to you, and afterward, a quiet hour that’s entirely your own. For many of the families I work with, that isn’t a fantasy. It’s simply what’s on the other side of understanding what’s really going on. And it’s closer than it might seem.
Your child isn’t deliberately fighting you. They’re reaching for you. And that, you can answer.
If any of this resonates, my free guide, A Different Way to Look at Your Baby’s or Toddler’s Sleep, is a good place to begin. And if you’d like to talk it through together, you can book a free call, where we can talk about your own hopes and wishes around sleep. The door is open when you’re ready.
Let’s get you well-rested. 