For some families, getting a Cubby Bed feels like a major victory. They have navigated medical appointments, insurance approvals, paperwork, delivery, and assembly, all in the hope of creating a safer sleeping environment for their child.

And then bedtime arrives…

When a family tells us their child is struggling with sleep, most of the conversation naturally gravitates toward nighttime. What happens at bedtime? How long does it take them to fall asleep? How many times do they wake? Do they leave the bedroom? Are caregivers staying with them until they fall asleep?

A caregiver tells you bedtime is a disaster.

Their child refuses to go upstairs, negotiates for another snack, runs out of the bedroom, asks for one more show, starts jumping on the bed, calls for a parent 14 times, and somehow develops an urgent need to go for a car ride.

To a behavior analyst, there is a lot to work with here…

When a caregiver tells us their child “won’t go to sleep,” our behavior-analytic brains can get very busy very quickly.

What is the function? What happened before bedtime? What consequence is maintaining the behavior? Do we need a visual schedule? Reinforcement? Fading? A bedtime pass?

All reasonable questions…

One of the most common sleep concerns we hear from families might sound something like this: “They fall asleep fine. They just don’t stay asleep.”

A learner may go to bed without much difficulty, sleep for a few hours, and then begin waking repeatedly. They leave their room looking for a parent, climb into someone else’s bed, ask for a tablet, or need the same support that helped them fall asleep earlier in the evening…

Screen-free ABA clinics have a lot going for them. Removing phones and tablets can reduce distractions, create more opportunities for social interaction, and encourage treatment teams to build a broader menu of activities and reinforcers…

A family can faithfully complete a sleep log for two weeks and still leave their BCBA without the information needed to understand what is happening.

That is a frustrating possibility for a measurement-driven field, but it occurs more often than it should. The problem is not always poor caregiver follow-through or incomplete records. Sometimes the tracker itself begins with the wrong question, captures the wrong part of the sleep story, or asks families to document details that create more burden than clinical clarity.

When families are struggling with sleep, it is very easy for the conversation to drift into speculation.

Maybe the room is too humid. Maybe the blackout curtains are wrong. Maybe the mattress is uncomfortable. Maybe it is a growth spurt. Maybe it is this one tiny environmental detail that nobody has considered yet.

For years, discussions about healthy sleep have included a familiar recommendation: eliminate screens before bedtime. Parents have heard it from pediatricians, teachers, social media, and well-meaning friends. As BCBAs, many of us have incorporated similar recommendations into conversations with families because the prevailing research suggested that blue light delayed melatonin production and interfered with the body's ability to fall asleep.

When families begin experiencing bedtime struggles, they often focus their attention on what is happening in the evening. Bedtime routines are adjusted, lights are dimmed earlier, screen time is reduced, and parents work hard to create a calm transition into sleep. While those strategies certainly have value, they do not always address the factor that is quietly influencing bedtime long before the evening routine ever begins.

One of the most overlooked contributors to bedtime resistance is daytime sleep.

As awareness of pediatric sleep continues to grow, families have more options than ever before when seeking support. A quick online search for  "sleep coach" or "sleep consultant" will produce countless professionals offering to help children sleep better. While that increased access to support is a positive development, it also leads to an important question that I hear from both families and fellow BCBAs on a regular basis: What makes a Certified Behavioral Sleep Practitioner different?

One of the most common questions included in an ABA intake process is deceptively simple: "How is your child sleeping?"

Nearly every organization asks some version of this question. Families provide information about bedtime struggles, night waking, early rising, or difficulties falling asleep. The information is documented during intake, included in reports, and sometimes discussed during initial meetings. Yet despite the fact that sleep is routinely screened, many organizations have no clear process for what happens next.

As the field of behavioral sleep support continues to grow, I find myself having more conversations with BCBAs who have completed their training in sleep and are asking an important question: What comes next?

Summer has a way of exposing weaknesses in sleep systems that seemed perfectly manageable during the school year. A learner who was falling asleep predictably in May may suddenly begin resisting bedtime in June. A routine that felt solid becomes less effective. Sleep onset gets later, morning wake times drift, and families who thought they had finally “figured sleep out” find themselves back in a pattern of negotiation, frustration, and inconsistency.

One of the most common barriers to sleep progress is not a lack of effort.

It is inconsistency.

Not because caregivers do not care. Not because someone is “doing it wrong.” But because sleep is one of the few parts of parenting that often involves multiple adults with different schedules, different experiences, different tolerance levels, and different ideas about what bedtime should look like.

For many BCBAs, sleep enters the conversation almost by accident.

A family mentions that their child is awake multiple times a night. A learner arrives at sessions exhausted and dysregulated. Progress slows down. Daytime behavior becomes harder to support. Teachers report reduced attention. Parents are overwhelmed. Suddenly, sleep is no longer a side conversation, it is shaping nearly everything happening during the day.

And yet most behavior analysts were never formally trained to assess or support sleep.

One of the most common mistakes we make around sleep is assuming bedtime is simply a parenting preference.

Seven-thirty feels like a “good bedtime.” Eight o’clock seems reasonable. Maybe another family’s child goes to sleep at seven, so that becomes the goal. Bedtime starts to feel like a socially selected time rather than a biological one.

But biologically, sleep does not work that way.

We do not simply choose bedtimes. We calculate them.

When families are struggling with sleep, it is very easy for the conversation to drift into speculation.

Maybe the room is too humid. Maybe the blackout curtains are wrong. Maybe the mattress is uncomfortable. Maybe it is a growth spurt. Maybe it is this one tiny environmental detail that nobody has considered yet.

And while those things can matter in isolated cases, they are usually not the first place a BCBA should start.

As more BCBAs move into school-based service models, one of the biggest missed opportunities is also one of the most basic: sleep.

Not because schools should become sleep clinics. They should not. But because sleep disruption often arrives at school wearing a different label. A student looks inattentive. A teacher reports low frustration tolerance. A behavior plan feels less effective than expected. A learner who seemed capable yesterday looks unavailable today. In many cases, the team is trying to solve a daytime expression of a nighttime problem.

As more BCBAs work in schools, we need to consider a more practical conversation about sleep.

Not a conversation about running bedtime programs in classrooms. Not a conversation that assumes daily caregiver coaching is available. And not a conversation that treats every school problem as though it began and ended at school.