What does sleep look like for your child? Whether your child is sleeping well, having some challenges, or sleeping poorly, learning your child’s unique sleep patterns will establish a baseline to monitor their sleep or work on sleep improvement.
Sleep experts use a tool called a “sleep diary” to track sleep. While wearable devices (like an Apple Watch or a FitBit) can track this information, sleep is a highly subjective experience: What one child feels is good sleep is often very different than another. The sleep diary is very simple to complete, taking no more than 1 minute per day.
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!
On the back of your fridge magnet is a sleep diary. Or you can download a sleep diary. Below are the steps to use it, or watch a video that explains the same steps.
Step 1: Learn the layout. If you look left to right across each row, you will see that there are 24 squares. Each square represents 1 hour of the day. This means that it is midnight (12AM) starting on the left-hand side of the sheet. If you go along the row to the far right-hand side, you have reached 11:59PM on the same day. The next day starts on the row below, back on the left-hand side.
Step 2: Using arrows. When your child goes to sleep for the night, mark the approximate time with a down arrow (↓). When your child wakes up to start their day (their final wake-up), mark the approximate time with an up arrow (↑).
Step 3: Marking their sleep. In between the arrow showing when your child goes to bed and when they get up to start their day, color in the boxes for when they were sleeping. If they are awake in the middle of the night for 15 or more minutes, leave that blank in the diary. Don’t worry about using arrows for when they wake up in the middle of the night.
Step 4: Daytime naps. If your child takes any naps during the day that last longer than 15 minutes, simply color it in on the diary. Again, don’t worry about using any arrows.
Step 5: Working together. Some families aren’t in the habit of talking about sleep. We encourage parents to ask their child about sleep so that the diary is as accurate as possible in reflecting what they think their sleep experience was.
Because sleep often varies from day-to-day, and often differs between weekdays and weekends, we suggest that you track your child’s sleep for at least 1 full week so that you get a good sense of what their average sleep is like. Once you have some sleep diary information, use this sleep calculator to learn more about your child’s sleep.
