We'd been told about this for years. Every parenting article, every paediatrician visit: no screens in the hour before bed. Blue light suppresses melatonin. It disrupts the sleep cycle. Your children will sleep better without it.
We nodded along and did almost nothing about it. The tablet was part of the wind-down routine. The kids were calm, they weren't bouncing off the walls, it felt fine. And honestly, the hour before bed is the most exhausting part of the day as a parent — the last thing you want to do is pick a fight about the tablet.
But after my son started having real trouble settling — lying awake past ten o'clock, which for an eight-year-old is late — we decided to actually try it. Properly. Three weeks, screen-free for the full hour before bed.
The first few nights were rough. There was resistance. There were complaints. We replaced the tablet with audiobooks (a small portable speaker on his shelf, which he thinks is brilliant) and some quiet drawing time. My daughter got a puzzle obsession out of nowhere, which I did not predict.
By the end of the first week, my son was asleep by 8:45 most nights. Previously it had been closer to 9:30 or 10. By the end of week two, he was waking up before his alarm and in a noticeably better mood in the mornings. Week three, he stopped asking for the tablet at bedtime. It was just the new normal.
The science behind this is well established. Blue light — the type emitted by screens — signals to the brain that it is daytime. It suppresses the production of melatonin, the hormone that makes us feel sleepy. In children, whose circadian rhythms are still developing, this effect is more pronounced than in adults. A study from the University of Colorado found that even a single hour of evening screen exposure reduced melatonin levels in children by up to 37%, with effects persisting for up to an hour after the screen was switched off.
"Children need between nine and eleven hours of sleep," the American Academy of Sleep Medicine notes in its guidelines, "and the quality of that sleep matters as much as the duration." Screen use in the lead-up to bed compromises both.
I'm not going to pretend this change was seamless. We had to be intentional about the alternatives — the audiobooks, the puzzles, the drawing. And there are nights where the rules slip, particularly on weekends. But the baseline has shifted.
The other thing we started doing — for evenings when screens are unavoidable — is using the blue light glasses. They don't replace limiting screen time, but on the nights where something runs long or there's a film on, they take the edge off.
The hour before bed is worth protecting. I wish we'd been more serious about it sooner.