When Bedtime Becomes a Series of Demands – Laura the Neurodivergent Nurse Consulting

19 August 2026• byLaura Hellfeld

Sleep itself is involuntary. We can create the conditions that make sleep more likely, support someone to feel safe and comfortable, develop routines, reduce sensory distractions and make space for rest, but we cannot actually command someone into sleep.

What we can do, however, is make the process surrounding sleep incredibly demand-heavy.

Imagine hearing, “It’s bedtime,” followed by “Put your phone away,” “You need to sleep now,” “Come upstairs,” “Lie down,” and “Close your eyes.” None of these requests are particularly unusual. In fact, most of us have probably said some version of them many times. But when they come one after another, a biological need can quickly become a series of external demands.

For someone with a strong need for autonomy, that can make bedtime feel very different from noticing that they are tired and deciding to rest or even go to bed.

There is a meaningful difference between “You need to go to bed” and “I’m tired, and I’m going to bed.”

The first contains an external expectation. Someone else has decided what you should be doing and when you should be doing it. The second contains agency: I can notice what is happening in my body and decide what to do about it.

From the outside, these may appear to lead to exactly the same place. Both people might eventually end up in bed. But the experience of getting there can be very different.

Image from Canva by Диана Дунаева from Pexels

You may also be interested in some of my other sleep blogs ‘Monotropism After Dark: Why Your Brain May Need Time to Settle Before Sleep’, ‘Protecting Relationships When Sleep is Hard for PDAers’ and ‘Why Waking Up in the Morning Is Hard (It’s Hormones, Not Behaviour) and ’Webinar Recording and Write Up: What can we do about sleep difficulties when home doesn’t feel safe?

When bedtime becomes a chain of demands

Going to bed is rarely one simple action. For many young people, particularly those who find transitions difficult, it involves a whole sequence of changes: stopping something they are deeply interested in, putting something away, leaving one room, moving to another, changing clothes, using the toilet, brushing their teeth, getting into bed, putting their phone somewhere else and then trying to settle.

Each step might seem small when we look at it individually, but the cumulative experience can be quite different. When every step is accompanied by an instruction, a reminder or an expectation that it needs to happen now, bedtime can begin to feel less like moving towards rest and more like being managed through a sequence of demands.

And if demands are already difficult for a young person, this can create a particularly frustrating situation. The more important it becomes to everyone around them that they sleep, the more pressure can gather around bedtime. Parents and carers may understandably become increasingly persistent because they are thinking about tomorrow morning, the school day ahead, or what happens when their young person has had another night of very little sleep.

The difficulty is that our worry does not necessarily make sleep easier.

“But they need sleep”

Of course they do. Sleep matters, and when a young person is consistently getting too little sleep, the consequences can affect their mood, regulation, attention, learning, physical health and ability to manage everything else that the day brings.

This is part of what makes sleep difficulties so hard for families. You may be watching the clock, calculating how many hours are left before they need to get up, knowing that tomorrow will probably be harder if they do not sleep tonight. You may already have tried routines, rewards, consequences, visual schedules, earlier bedtimes, later bedtimes and every suggestion that someone has offered you.

So when your young person is still downstairs at 11.30pm, or has difficulty in putting their phone down, or tells you they are not tired when you know they have barely slept for days, it can be incredibly difficult not to increase the pressure.

Please just get into bed.

You have school tomorrow.

You need to sleep.

You are going to be exhausted tomorrow.

The concern behind these words is completely understandable. You are not saying them because you do not care about your young person’s experience. You are saying them because you care deeply about their wellbeing and may be feeling increasingly desperate to help.

But sometimes, the more pressure we put around sleep, the more difficult the whole process becomes.

Sleep is not something we can negotiate into existence

One of the particularly frustrating things about sleep is that we can negotiate many parts of bedtime, but we cannot negotiate someone into actually being asleep.

We can negotiate when someone gets into bed, whether they wear pyjamas, whether they brush their teeth, whether they have a story, whether they charge their phone downstairs or upstairs, and whether the bedroom door is open or closed. But none of those things guarantee sleep.

A young person can lie in bed with their eyes closed and still not be asleep. They can be completely exhausted and unable to settle. They can desperately want to sleep and find that their body simply is not cooperating.

This is why I find it useful to separate sleep from the things we do around sleep.

We can make changes to the environment. We can explore sensory needs, comfort, temperature, lighting and noise. We can look at what happened during the day and whether there were demands, transitions or experiences that have left the nervous system struggling to settle. We can develop routines, offer choices and make the move towards bed more predictable.

What we cannot do is make sleep happen on command.

That distinction can be particularly important when supporting a young person who experiences demands intensely. The aim is not to find the magic words that will make them comply with bedtime. It is to consider whether there are ways of making the journey towards sleep feel less like something that is constantly being imposed upon them.

What happens when we make more room for agency?

Reducing demands does not mean removing every boundary. It does not mean that a young person has to decide whether they will sleep, or that parents and carers have to abandon routines that are helpful.

Instead, it can mean looking carefully at where there is room for choice within the things that are happening.

Rather than “Come upstairs,” perhaps it is, “I’m heading upstairs. Do you want to come with me?”

Instead of “Put your phone away,” perhaps there is a choice about where it will charge.

Instead of “You need to go to bed,” perhaps you can acknowledge what you are noticing: “You seem to be getting tired. What would help you start winding down?”

The difference might seem very small, and sometimes it will make very little difference. There is no particular phrase that will magically resolve sleep difficulties. But for some young people, having some sense of ownership over what happens next can change the experience considerably.

The choice does not have to be about whether bedtime happens. It can be about how bedtime happens.

Do you want the blue pyjamas or the green ones or your clothes for tomorrow? Would you like to brush your teeth before or after your story? Do you want music or quiet? Would you like me to sit with you or give you some space? Do you want to start getting ready now, or in five minutes or after you get to a save point in your game?

These choices are not about tricking someone into doing what we want. They are about recognising that even when something needs to happen, there may still be ways for a young person to have some ownership over the process.

Perhaps we need to ask a different question

When sleep is difficult, it is very understandable to focus on the outcome: How do we get them to sleep?

But perhaps another question is worth asking:

How can we make the process of moving towards sleep feel less demanding?

That question opens up a different way of thinking. Instead of trying to control an involuntary biological process, we can look at the environment, the transitions, the sensory experiences, the expectations and the relationships surrounding it.

Sometimes the answer will be practical. Sometimes it will be sensory. Sometimes it will involve changing the routine or looking more closely at what happened during the day. Sometimes it may simply mean noticing how many times we are saying “you need to” and considering whether every one of those instructions is necessary.

And sometimes, despite everything we change, sleep will still be difficult. That matters too. Reducing demands is not a guarantee of sleep, and it should not become another thing parents feel they have to get right.

Recognising the difference gives us another place to look: not at how to make someone sleep, but at how we might support them towards rest while leaving as much room as possible for safety, connection and autonomy along the way.