How much sleep should a toddler get? Ages 2 to 5, counted back from one wake-up time

Our three-year-old wakes at a quarter to seven whether we like it or not. Nursery starts at eight, so the morning is fixed, and the only number I can move is at the other end. How much sleep a toddler should get is the question under every bedtime argument. The answer most medical bodies use comes from one document. It is the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's 2016 consensus statement (Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 12(6)), "endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics". It says: "Children 1 to 2 years of age should sleep 11 to 14 hours per 24 hours (including naps) on a regular basis to promote optimal health." And: "Children 3 to 5 years of age should sleep 10 to 13 hours per 24 hours (including naps) on a regular basis to promote optimal health." Two age bands, two ranges, and the three words in brackets that most charts leave out.

None of this is medical advice. It is one parent doing the sum for a flat in Dubai with a 6:45 alarm built into a small child.

How much sleep does a toddler need, by age?

The two bands that matter for ages two to five are these.

Three things about this table matter.

The first is that the ranges are wide. Three hours of spread at each age, so a two-year-old at the bottom of the band sleeps less than a four-year-old at the top of theirs. The table is not a target to hit. It is a band to land inside, and a child who sits at one end of it is not broken.

The second is that it is a 24-hour figure, not a night figure. Every chart that says "toddlers need 12 hours" without saying where the nap goes is describing a different child from yours.

The third is the phrase "on a regular basis". The statement attaches its outcomes to the pattern across weeks, not to one night. It says that "Regularly sleeping fewer than the number of recommended hours is associated with attention, behavior, and learning problems." One late Friday is not what it describes. A term of them is closer.

The table does not tell you when bedtime is. It tells you how much is left once the nap has taken its share.

How much sleep does a toddler need at night, once the nap is counted?

The night number decides the evening, and the charts do not give it. Here is the sum on our own constraints. Wake time 6:45, fixed by nursery. Age three, so the band is 10 to 13 hours. She still napped at nursery then, about an hour and a quarter by the staff log.

Start with the 24-hour band and subtract the nap.

• Bottom of the band: 10 hours minus 1.25 hours of nap leaves 8.75 hours of night sleep.
• Top of the band: 13 hours minus 1.25 leaves 11.75 hours of night sleep.

Then count backwards from the wake-up.

• 8.75 hours before 6:45 is 10:00 the night before.
• 11.75 hours before 6:45 is 7:00 the night before.

So on a nursery day the published range says she needs to be asleep, not in bed, somewhere between seven and ten in the evening. A three-hour window sounds useless until you notice what it rules out. An 8:30 sleep time is not a failure. And putting her down at 6:30 will not buy a longer night, because that pushes the total over the top of the band, and in our flat the extra comes back as a four a.m. start or a long stall at lights-out.

Now the weekend, when the nap at home was more like two hours, and sometimes did not happen.

• With a two-hour nap: 8 to 11 hours of night sleep, so asleep between 7:45 and 10:45 for the same 6:45 wake.
• With no nap: the full 10 to 13 hours has to come at night, so asleep between 5:45 and 8:45.

Side by side, the thing we had been fighting about becomes obvious. On a no-nap Saturday an 8:00 sleep time is comfortably inside the band. On a long-nap Sunday the same 8:00 is at the early edge, and the child who "won't settle" is not being difficult. She is not yet due.

The Sleep Foundation describes the shift. For toddlers it notes that "Two naps per day is normal at the start of this period, but many older toddlers only take one nap in the afternoon," and for preschoolers that "naps may get shorter, or a preschooler may stop napping on a regular basis." The allowance does not shrink when the nap goes. It moves to the night, and the evening window moves earlier by the same amount.

Is there a toddler sleep chart I can actually use?

The chart I use is not the table above. It is two weeks of a notebook on the fridge, four columns: asleep by, awake at, nap start, nap end. After a fortnight I add each day up and see where in the band she lands.

Ours showed 11 to 11.5 hours on most days, with the night stretching whenever the nap shrank. Comfortably inside 10 to 13. The evenings I had logged as battles were almost all days with a nap over 90 minutes. That told me more than any chart, because it was her chart.

The NHS tip list for young children is short, and two of its lines are the ones the notebook kept confirming. "Avoid long naps in the afternoon" and "Make sure you have a calming, predictable bedtime routine that happens at the same time and includes the same things every night." The first is about where the hours go. The second is about how the night starts, which for us is the same book at the same point, read slowly enough that the last page is the last thing that happens. For a child who turns lights-out into an argument, the walk-back routine I wrote about last week is the other half of the same idea.

One more thing the charts do not know: "asleep by" and "in bed by" are different numbers. If it takes her 25 minutes to drop off after the book, an asleep-by of 8:00 means a bedtime of 7:35 and a story that starts around 7:20. Counting back from the wake-up gives the sleep time. Counting back from the sleep time gives the evening.

I went into this wanting a number, the way anyone searching "how much sleep should a toddler get" wants a number. What the consensus hands over is a band of 10 to 13 hours with the nap already inside it. The number I needed was never on the chart. It was the nap length from that afternoon, subtracted from the band, counted back from a quarter to seven.

Sources

• Recommended Amount of Sleep for Pediatric Populations: A Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine · American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 2016;12(6):785-786, Paruthi S et al.
• Healthy Sleep Habits: How Many Hours Does Your Child Need? · American Academy of Pediatrics, HealthyChildren.org
• How Much Sleep Do Kids Need? · Sleep Foundation
• Sleep problems in young children · NHS