Move bedtime later to fix it.

It's the opposite, and it's the approach with the best support. A child put to bed before their body is ready lies awake fighting sleep, and that's what teaches an association between the bed and frustration — which is the biggest single driver of bedtime battles. Move lights out temporarily to close to when they genuinely fall asleep so they drop off quickly, then bring it earlier by fifteen minutes every few nights once they're settling within about twenty.

Because the body clock is set mainly by wake time and morning light, not by bedtime. A long weekend lie-in shifts the clock later in much the same way a short trip across time zones does, which is exactly why Sunday night is predictably the worst night of the week. Keeping weekend wake time within about an hour of weekdays is the workable compromise, and it makes every other change readable.

Less than you'd think — the predictability is the active ingredient, and the content matters far less than people assume. Four or five steps, twenty to forty minutes, in the same order every night, moving physically toward the bed and ending in the room where they sleep. Longer routines drift into negotiation and give more places to stall, and going back downstairs for anything resets the whole thing.

Work out which of three things it's getting: attention, a delay, or reassurance, because each needs a different response. For stalling, the bedtime pass works well from around age three — one token exchangeable for one trip out, and then no more, which gives a limit and a measure of control at once. For an anxious child, firmer limits don't help: predictable check-ins at lengthening intervals do.

If they snore most nights, breathe through their mouth while asleep, or have pauses in their breathing, that needs a GP rather than a routine — sleep-disordered breathing in children commonly shows up as hyperactivity and difficult behaviour rather than sleepiness, so it gets treated as a behaviour problem for years. An urge to move the legs at night is also worth raising, as is persistent difficulty despite genuinely consistent timing.