With the Easter holidays coming to an end here in Cumbria, we’ll soon see sleepy children making their way to school each morning. If you’ve managed to keep a tight hold of routine throughout the holidays, your child may be the most energetic of the bunch come Monday morning.

We’ve been thinking about the best Bedtime for our kids to make sure they get enough good quality sleep before the sun rises and the new day demands them out of bed.

We’ve been doing our research…. New babies, up to the age of 4 months, don’t really have a set bedtime. As they require regular feeding throughout the day and the night, their sleeping pattern only allows them to sleep for a few hours at a time.

From 4 months to around a year old, bedtime is at its earliest. Despite naps throughout the day, a child of this age still requires 12-14 hours of sleep each night, making the Ideal Bedtime between 6pm and 7:30pm.

Once they are a year old, until about the age of 3, this bedtime is still appropriate but the amount of nap time the child has throughout the day is reduced or even removed altogether.

As your child gets older and starts attending nursery and school, a bedtime routine becomes even more crucial to ensure you pull up at the school gates on time. Children aged 3-6 years need 11-13 hours sleep each night to make sure they keep up with playing and learning each day. This means the perfect bedtime is between 6pm and 8pm.

From 7 years of age until they become teenagers, they will still need a lot of sleep to ensure they have the energy to stay active all day. The ideal bedtime is estimated to be between 7:30pm and 9pm. However much they beg and plead for another hour, making your child's bedtime later won’t necessarily just mean they sleep in in the morning. This may make it harder for your child to get to sleep, and once they nod off their quality of sleep may be poor.

What are your opinions on the perfect bedtime and do your children stick to a routine?