Sleep Anxiety In Kids Is Real. Here’s What’s Working In My House To Combat It.

My 9-year-old daughter looks at me most nights like I’ve just asked her to climb Mt. Everest barefoot.

Her eyes fill. Her voice cracks.

“I can’t do it,” she says. “I just can’t go to sleep.”

She says it again. And again. Like maybe the third time will make it truer. Or easier. Or less terrifying. And I get it. I really do. Because sleep, for reasons science can explain and anxiety cannot, has recently become the hardest thing she does all day.

Here’s the part where parenting gets nuanced and weird and emotionally layered: Her dad gives her a super low dose of melatonin at his house. He’s said he’s weaning her off. It’s been months. I’m not anti-melatonin. I’m not anti-anything that helps kids rest. I’m firmly in the “sleep is best” camp, much like “fed is best” when your infant survives on crumbs and chaos.

I believe there are reasons melatonin can be helpful. I also believe my daughter can fall asleep without it, mostly because I have seen her do it. I’ve seen her enter into the kind of sleep you want bottled and sold at the drugstore.

But getting there? Oh, it’s a process. It usually involves a pep talk. Sometimes two or three. It involves her looking straight into my eyes, tears pooled and earnest, saying, “But what if I can’t?” like she’s standing on the edge of something enormous and dark. So I don’t rush her. I don’t minimize it.

I tell her the truth. That not being able to fall asleep is really hard. That it’s frustrating. That it feels unfair to struggle with something your body is supposed to know how to do. I tell her I love sleep too, which feels cruel in the moment, like loving something that keeps rejecting you.

Because here is what I know about my daughter: she doesn’t like not being good at things. When a new math concept like fractions doesn’t click right away, I can see it: a tightness in her jaw, tears beginning to form and the quick spiral from “I don’t get this yet” to “What if I never get this?” Sleep has become another thing she wants to master. When it doesn’t come easy, it feels like failure.

I understand how your brain can turn on itself when something doesn’t go your way. So I frame anxiety in our house as not about being weak, but about intensity.

It’s about caring too deeply and wanting certainty in places where certainty doesn’t live. So when she looks at me and says, “But what if I can’t?” I don’t just hear a fear of bedtime. I hear the bigger fear of “What if I’m not good at this? What if I can’t do what everyone else seems to do so naturally?”

So we practice. We put our hands on our bellies and breathe; we talk about love; we talk about safety. Sometimes we rub organic lavender lotion from Whole Foods on her legs and feet because it smells like hope and expensive self-care. Screens are off at least an hour before bed because we are nothing if not committed to the rituals.

There is tension, of course, because at one house she can help usher in sleep in the form of a gummy or pill. There, it’s easy and effortless. When she’s here, with me, sleep is something you learn. Something you practice. Something you trust will come even if it doesn’t show up right away.

And listen, easy is seductive. I crave easy. But I also know that what’s easy isn’t always what builds us.

What I want for my daughter isn’t just sleep. It’s the knowing. The deep, internal knowing that she can survive discomfort. That it’s okay if sleep doesn’t come right away. That nothing bad will happen if she’s awake for an hour. Or two. Or more. Because panic loves a deadline. And I know that the frustration is part of the process of getting there.

So instead of trying to control sleep, I’m trying to teach her how to be with herself when it’s hard.

We are teaching our kids so much. How to regulate. How to trust their bodies. How to name fear without letting it run the show. How to sit in discomfort and discover that it passes.

Some nights she falls asleep quickly. Some nights she doesn’t. And some nights, she does the bravest thing of all. She stays. She breathes. She lets herself try.

And that, I’m realizing, might be the real gift.

Not perfect sleep. But the confidence that she can do hard things.

Meg Raby is a mom, children’s author of the My Brother Otto series, and Autistic residing in Salt Lake City where you can find her playing and working with neurodivergent children as a Speech Language Pathologist and friend, or writing and planning big things in the second booth at her local coffee shop that overlooks the Wasatch Mountains while sipping on her Americano. Meg believes the essence of life is to understand, love and welcome others (aka, to give a damn about humans).