For about four months, bedtime in our house started at 7:30 and ended whenever our daughter decided she was done negotiating, usually around 10. My wife and I tried everything people suggested. White noise. Blackout curtains. A different pillow. Nothing stuck, and honestly I started dreading the evenings.

The turning point was embarrassingly simple. A friend asked me what time our daughter’s nap ended. I said around 3:30. She just raised her eyebrows. “She’s not tired at 7:30,” she said. “You’re putting a kid to bed who isn’t sleepy and then acting surprised when she treats it like playtime.”

She was right. We’d been clinging to this 7:30 bedtime because some chart on the internet said so, while ignoring the actual kid in front of us. We moved bedtime to 8:30, capped the nap at 90 minutes, and within a week things changed.

Here’s what our routine looks like now, and I want to be clear that it’s nothing special:

We start around 8:00. Bath or no bath, depending on the day. Then pajamas, two books (she picks), one song, lights out. The whole thing takes about 25 minutes. The key thing, the thing that actually matters, is that it happens in the same order every single night. Toddlers don’t care if your routine is impressive. They care that it’s predictable.

The other thing that helped, and I resisted this for weeks because it felt lazy: we gave her a “bedtime buddy.” It’s a stuffed fox. When she started asking to get up for water for the fourth time, we told her the fox needed her to stay in bed to feel safe. Worked immediately. I don’t fully understand why and I don’t care.

A couple of honest notes. First, it still isn’t perfect. Maybe one night a week she calls out for something and we have to go in. That’s fine. I had to let go of the idea that a good routine means zero wakeups, because that standard was making me miserable.

Second, I messed up the start for a long time by sneaking out of the room while she was drowsy but awake, like the books say. She hated it. She’d pop up the second the door clicked. So now I sit in the chair by her bed until she’s out. It takes ten minutes. The books say this is a crutch. My kid says it helps her sleep. I went with my kid.

If you’re in the trenches right now, my only real advice is this: ignore the chart, watch your kid, and pick a boring routine you can do every night without wanting to cry. Boring is the whole point.