Everyone has different bedtime routines, and that’s OK. What works for one family may not work for another, and that’s why it takes a village. If we all compile our tips, tricks, advice, habits, and routines, then surely, we can all find something to help our kids (and us!) catch some zzzs.
Sleep effects happiness, alertness, cognitive performance, mood, resiliency, learning, and memory among other things, according to the Sleep Foundation. The organization recommends instilling a regular bedtime routine with your kids, which could include limiting screens, brushing teeth, taking a bath, reading a book, singing a lullaby, sleeping with a stuffed animal, and/or going to bed when your child is sleepy but not yet asleep.
Celebrities are also looking for that elusive 8+ hours of sleep a night, and many of them have shared their kids’ bedtime habits and routines that have worked.
Hoda Kotb, for example, goes to bed at the same time as her kids at 7:30 p.m. Many celebrities enjoy reading books before bedtime with their little ones, like Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard. Others have talked about the challenges of sleep training — like Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake, who had an easier time sleep training their second-born child than their first. Zoe Saldana, on the other hand, does not think sleep training was for her.
If you are looking for tips to get your baby or older kids to sleep — or you just want to know which celebrity parents can relate to the no-sleep struggle! — then check out this list of celebrity parents who’ve opened up about their kids’ bedtime habits and routines. You’ll definitely feel seen.
Prince William & Catherine, Princess of Wales
Prince William previously gave ultra-rare details about his and Catherine, Princess of Wales’ youngest child, Prince Louis’ bedtime routine. Per Us, when given Rowan Aderyn’s book Homewards, he said, “This is great, so inspirational. I’ll read this to Louis tonight at bedtime.”
Hoda Kotb
As a co-anchor for the TODAY show, Hoda Kotb has to get up early — so she goes to bed at the same time as her kids Haley Joy, and Hope Catherine, whom she welcomed via adoption ex-fiance Joel Schiffman.
She described her whole day, including evening and bedtime routine, in an Aug. 16 interview with PEOPLE. “Every morning I leave them a note and a map to find the note. I draw cartoons, and then I hide it so they see it before they go to school,” she said. “Then a lot of the time I’m done with work and can pick them up in the afternoon. We’re eating dinner at 5, in the bath by 6, drying off at 6:30, in the room singing all their songs. It’s over, lights out, click, at 7, and I’m usually out by 7:30 because I have to get up at 3 a.m. I don’t know what I’m going to do when they’re teenagers, but I’ve been digging this weird time for us. I’m on a child’s schedule!”
She added that she “delights” in her family. “It delights me to know that I have Haley and Hope. They fell asleep on me yesterday after having meltdowns, and I sang to them, and in that moment I was just thinking to myself, ‘I get to feel these things. We get to have this together.’ It blows my mind that I get to have this adorable little family that’s just right for me.”
Kristen Bell & Dax Shepard
Like most parents, Kristen Bell and husband Dax Shepard approach parenting their daughters Lincoln and Delta through trial and error.
In an interview with SELF in March 2020, Bell said, “Dax and I always try to put our kids to bed together. We need that man power because they are very strong-willed children and have both of our stubbornness combined. They go to bed at 7:30, so we will go into the bedroom at 7:00 and have a Supreme Court debate about whether or not they should brush their teeth.” We’ve all been there!
She also opened up about the “magical” bonding time that happens before bed.
“I think in an effort to get my kids down, I’ve sometimes missed really beautiful moments where they were trying to share something with me or I was just watching them be silly,” she said. “I’ve learned to take a step back and really take in the half hour I have with them at night and not try to rush them as much. Those are very magical times, and bearing witness to it as opposed to trying to rush it is what I’m erring on the side of, and I’ve been a lot happier since I’ve started doing that.”
“Kids don’t want to get advice day in and day out. Nobody does. I change my tactics often,” she continued. “Sometimes I have success by going in the bedroom with them and not saying anything, just sitting down on the bed, and they will reroute themselves. Sometimes, if I’ve had a really exhausting day, I’ll look at the clock at 6:30 and tell them that it’s 7:30. They can’t read the clock, and that is just fine with me.” Wait, this is actually genius? Definitely going to try that.
She added, “When they were babies, like jelly roll babies, I would sit in the bathtub with them every night because my doula had recommended I let their brains start to connect that ‘After the dip in the warm water is when I sleep the longest.’ They have to connect patterns—life is about connecting patterns, right? So, as they got older, it became, ‘We brush our teeth, we wash our hands, we put on our jammies, and we read two books.’”
Now that they are older, they enjoy listening to audio books. “Lately we’ve been listening to audio books to put them to bed, which is pretty cool,” she said. “We’re on book four of the Harry Potter series, and they love it. If we’re not listening to an audio book, we read books. And there’s usually some sort of Daddy wrestling match that happens to get out all the energy right before bed.”
Kim Kardashian
With four kids, a solid bedtime routine is even more important. Kim Kardashian, mom of North, Saint, Chicago, and Psalm, with ex Kanye West, shared a sweet look at her bedtime routine when North was little.
“Reading books before bedtime!” she wrote on Twitter on March 9, 2015, alongside a grainy selfie of her and North in bed. She also shared a picture with the caption: “Kisses and cuddles.”
Now that she has four kids, her routine has stayed similar. In an interview with Poosh, a lifestyle site founded by Kourtney Kardashian, Kim shared more details on her kids’ bedtime routine.
“In a perfect world, I love to go to bed early, but because I’ve been studying for law school, I spend my nights reading,” she said. “The day usually consists of me going into the law office a few times a week, and then I film our show. Most nights I’m done after dinner, and I get the kids ready for bed and read books and put them to sleep. Then it’s back to studying for me until about 11 p.m.”
Pink
When it comes to bedtime for Pink’s kids, Willow Sage, and Jameson Moon, whom she shares with husband Carey Hart, there are two things that she does.
First, “Many warnings,” she said in an interview with Parents in Feb. 2022. This looks like her saying, “It’s coming! It’s almost here! Okay, people, for real now…” So relatable!
The second thing? “Calm sleep stories on the Calm app.” She told Parents, “It helps them sleep, helps them to not be as afraid of the dark, or to be alone. Right now we are stuck on Minions. I’m really hoping we can choose another one soon.”
She added the thing that “sabotages” bedtime: “Calling it out of the blue, or letting them get too tired. Then it’s just tears. But they get that from me.”
Kirsten Dunst
Kirsten Dunst is mom to Ennis and James with husband Jesse Plemons, and she opened up about the struggles of sleep training her youngest when he was a baby.
“I’ve been sleep training a seven-month-old so I had a crying baby all night last night so I’m hanging on by a thread,” Dunst said during a Nov. 2021 interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live. “He was so good and then last night it was like the sh*t hit the fan. I was sleeping a half hour in between shoving a pacifier in his mouth.” Ah, the joys of babies!
Jessica Biel & Justin Timberlake
When it came time to sleep train her son Silas. with husband Justin Timberlake, Jessica Biel followed the advice of Dr. Harvey Karp, author of The Happiest Baby Guide to Great Sleep. At an event with Dr. Karp in June 2018, Biel shared that she followed his tips for sleeping, including the “Five Ss,” swaddling, side, shushing, swinging, and sucking.
“I would go through the list of the five Ss, and just check,” she said at the event, per Brit + Co. “Tried that. Okay, not that one. Not that one. Oh, that one. Today. In an hour, it’s different, or maybe you start to see a pattern.”
She also loves using white noise for Silas and herself, saying, “I couldn’t sleep without it. I don’t know what I’d do.”
“If you can master the swaddle, you are set,” she said about another tip she uses.
When it came time to sleep train Phineas, now 2, Biel told Ellen DeGeneres that things were easier.
“We never really followed through with Silas in a big way with the sleep training,” she said in an April 2021 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “I think it was also first child. We were nervous. We couldn’t bear the thought [of letting him cry it out]. Now we’re just like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re going to be fine. You’re going to make it. You’ll be OK.’”
Zoe Saldana
Zoe Saldana is mom to twins Bowie and Cy and Zen with husband Marco Perego, and she has been candid about how exhausting motherhood can be.
“For the first time, I’m saying I don’t know how I’m doing it,” she told E! News in Jan. 2017. “I’ve never met this kind of fatigue, this kind of exhaustion. We’re still happy, though. Life will always have to be good… There’s just a lot to worry about.”
She explained that her kids are in bed by 7 p.m. — and she follows soon after. “There’s no sexy time past 7 p.m.,” Saldana said. “Whenever sexy time is going to happen it has to be before the evening. As soon as those suckers are in bed and you hear that the last one is finally sleeping, you’re like, ‘Do you want to watch a movie?’ You’re like, ‘Sure’ and you pass out.”
When her twins were babies, Saldana told Jimmy Kimmel how challenging it was to sleep train. “Sleep training twins is no joke because you put one to sleep and you lay him down, and the other one has been asleep, but then that one wakes up and the other one wakes up so then everybody’s crying, then my husband and I are crying…You’re like, ‘Oh, my God!'” she said, per E! News.
She explained they tried to sleep train using a cry it out method, but they couldn’t do it. “So then we go and we just finally abort. We abort mission,” she continues. “We take our kids. I take one, he takes the other, and we’re both crying. The boys’ bodies are, like, their bodies are weeping…and you go, ‘Oh, my God, he’s never going to forgive me for this.’ And then, Marco and I are talking in the room going, ‘It’s not for us. It’s too archaic. There has to be a more gentle method. They did it because they’re insensitive. They don’t care about their children.’ My sister’s outside with the monitor at full volume—and our best friend! They were just like, ‘We get it.'”
Cameron Diaz & Benji Madden
Coming up with a system is key, and Cameron Diaz and Benji Madden seem to have worked it out perfectly with their daughter Raddix, 2.
In an Instagram Live in April 2020, Diaz detailed their bedtime routine. “After we do bath time with our baby and we put her to sleep, Benji puts her to bed, he’s so good. He’s such an amazing father. I’m so lucky he’s my baby’s father. He’s incredible,” she said, per E! News. “He puts her down and I go into the kitchen and I pour myself a nice glass of red wine. I start my cooking, I put on my show, whatever it is.”
She also talked about their alternative sleeping schedules, explaining, “Benj goes to bed — he wants to go to bed late. I go to bed early and wake up early. He wants to go to bed and wake up later,” she explained. “That works so well for us as parents because, you know, I can go to bed a few hours earlier, and he does those later feeds and I can go to bed. And then I can wake up early and then I’m with her early in the morning and he can sleep. Those things are so valuable. We don’t even think about it. There’s a reason opposites attract. It’s because we need each other.”
Hugh Jackman
Hugh Jackman’s kids, Oscar and Ava, with wife Deborra-Lee Furness, are all grown up now, but when they were 8 and 3, he opened up about the importance of tiring out your kids before bedtime.
“First of all, you gotta run them around before the bath. Play a game of hide and seek or wrestle or muck around,” Jackman told PEOPLE in June 2009. “Then they’re exhausted. Then we all fall asleep on the bed!”
He jokingly added, “They go to bed, bath and beyond!” It’s still such good advice.
Gabrielle Union & Dwyane Wade
Gabrielle Union & Dwyane Wade have a lot of kids to put to bed — their daughter, Kaavia, and Wade’s kids Zaire, Zaya, and Xavier, from previous relationships. Wade also raises his nephew Dahveon Morris, 20.
In an interview with SELF in Dec. 2020, Union said, “We call it Operation Shut-It-Down,” about bedtime. “Sometimes, we call it Operation Shut-It-The-Fuck-Down.” Been there!
She explained that Kaavia takes a bath around 6 p.m. “That’s kind of when the noise levels drop; everyone’s moving in to prepare for the end of the day,” Union said. “By 6:30, Kaav is out. We don’t mess with her schedule at all, no matter what happens. I think by the time she’s asleep, everyone is just sort of exhausted, so we all retreat to our little corners. Zaya only gets her electronics until then, and then she has to turn them in. So she’s playing video games or she’s reading or she’s looking at TikTok, and me and my husband retreat to our room.”
She also explains she encourages therapy and meditation every day, as well as no screen time in the evenings. “But just putting our phones away has greatly changed the sleep routine for all of us,” she said. “And then when you wake up, don’t reach right for the phone.” Sounds like great advice for any age!
Elizabeth Banks
Elizabeth Banks told Entertainment Weekly how she talked to experts for her new film, Skincare, on how to give facials, a skill that bled into parenting. Specifically, Banks said in a rare interview that her younger son Magnus now loves getting facials, and she incorporates it into his nighttime routine.
“He’ll come to me and probably, I would say once a month, just be like, ‘Mommy, can I have a facial tonight before bed?’ And it becomes our bedtime routine, and I’m really loving having that experience with him,” she said, then joking that “For sure, giving facials to my kid is the number one thing I’m taking away from the film.”
Linda Phan & Drew Scott
Linda Phan and Drew Scott share two children together: son Parker and daughter Piper, and back when they were a family of three, they talked about Parker’s bedtime routine when he was a newborn. They shared an entire YouTube video on what they do!
Serena Williams & Alexis Ohanian
Alexis Ohanian previously revealed he reads AI-generated bedtime stories to his and his wife Serena Williams’s daughter. On Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace? via People, he said, “She’s more of a jock than a nerd at this point. But I have, thanks to AI, really gotten her into tech through storytelling. And so the way we do bedtime stories is actually by prompting Chat GPT and saying, you know, I’ll ask Chat GPT see give me a bedtime story appropriate for a 6-year-old. That will take 10 minutes to read.”
Jared Padalecki
Jared Padalecki previously revealed that he actually sings to his daughter Odette Elliott before bed.
“[She] always wants a bedtime song or story,” he said to People. “Last night I made up a song about a coyote chasing cats. Your 3-year-old asks for a song about a coyote, you just do it.”
Patrick Mahomes & Brittany Mahomes
With two kids and another on the way, Patrick Mahomes and Brittany Mahomes nailed the bedtime routine.
In an Instagram Story, we can see Patrick sitting in a chair cuddling both of his kids while reading a book, with the caption reading, “Bronze started getting very mad he didn’t get to participate in Sterling and Dad’s routine. So he now has been added and mom gets to watch this sweetness.”
Nicole Ari Parker
In a previous interview with SheKnows, Nicole Ari Parker said for back-to-school season, she keeps them “on a nice bedtime rhythm” well before school starts. ”
We’re all staying up too late watching movies, as a family winding down from summer,” she said. “My son is better at it because he’s a young athlete, so he’s worn out at the end of the day. He eats dinner, showers, and goes to bed.”
Amy Schumer
Amy Schumer revealed that a sleep coach actually helped her son Gene get a consistent nighttime routine.
“We’re finally SLEEPING again. Jessica @awesomelittlesleepers helped us create a bedtime routine for our 4 year old and now he’s going to bed 3 hours earlier than he was. We got our nights back,” Schumer sai via People.
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