There are many reasons why your child may sleep great or poorly on any one night. What matters more is how your child sleeps on average. This sleep calculator will help us figure out your child’s sleep averages quickly and accurately. As a first step, use our sleep diary to track your child’s sleep. Once you have about a week’s worth of information, enter that data in the sleep calculator below to learn more about your child’s sleep.
Great question! While many consumer wearables claim to accurately track sleep, some studies show that they aren’t all as good as the advertising suggests. Companies often release a new model every year or two, which means that by the time scientists have been able to study them, a new version is already for sale.
For your child and their sleep, a sleep diary is the preferred tool for most experts because what is important is to understand your family’s experiences with sleep, not what an electronic device says your child’s sleep was like!
First, download & use a sleep diary to track your child’s sleep. A good amount of time to track their sleep is about a week or so. Because your child’s sleep will change from day to day, it is important to learn about the short-term patterns in their sleep, rather than worry about how they slept on one particular night.
Step 1: Once you have ideally a week but at least 1 night of information, you can use this sleep calculator.
Step 2: For each night, look to see what time the down arrow was marked in the sleep diary, and enter that time into the “Time into bed for sleep” box.
Step 3: Estimate how long it took your child to fall asleep by looking to see when they first started to sleep as marked by the shaded boxes. Enter that into the box marked “Time taken to fall asleep.” Don’t worry if your estimate isn’t perfect—it is more important to understand the overall pattern of your child’s sleep and not exactly how much time it takes them to fall asleep.
Step 4: Check if (and if so, for how long) your child was awake in the middle of the night after they fell asleep. If they were up more than once, add up all of the time they were awake. Enter this into the box marked “Total time awake after falling asleep.”
Step 5: See what time your child woke up and did not fall back to sleep. This is where you stopped shading in their sleep in the boxes on the sleep diary. Enter that time into the box marked “Time woke up for the day.”
Step 6: Finally, look to see what time the up arrow was marked in the sleep diary, and enter that time into the box marked “Time out of bed.”
Step 7: Either click “Continue to next night” or “Show total averages” to see the statistics for your child’s sleep.
Sleep calculator
Night 1: Sleep data
Time into bed
for sleep
Time taken to
fall asleep
Total time awake
after falling asleep
Time woke up
for the day
Time out
of bed
Please double check to see
that the data entered is accurate
