What a nine-year study of 5,000 children in the Netherlands reveals about the surprising link between the dinner table and the bedroom

Introduction: Where Does a Sleepless Child’s Problem Begin?

A child struggles to fall asleep night after night, wakes in the dark, or can barely drag themselves up in the morning. Many parents look for the cause of these sleep troubles in “tonight” — what happened right before bed, whether the room was too bright, whether there was screen time.

But a research team in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, points somewhere entirely different. The reason your child sleeps poorly may lie in your household’s rhythm of life several years ago.

Earlier research had shown that “stressful homes” and “parental inconsistency” relate to children’s sleep. But most of it was cross-sectional — a single snapshot in time. It couldn’t tell the chicken from the egg: did an irregular household create the sleep problem, or did a poorly sleeping child throw the household into disarray? This study confronts that limitation head-on.

The Core Question

The team’s question was this:

“Can the ‘irregularity’ of a household in early childhood (ages 2–4) predict a child’s sleep problems years later?”

The “family irregularity” they mean isn’t grand domestic discord. It’s how erratic the small daily routines are — whether bedtime falls at a consistent hour, whether the family eats together in a set place, whether meals come at regular times.

How They Studied It: Following 5,000 Children for Nine Years

This study’s greatest weapon is its scale and span of time.

Participants

The team tracked 5,443 children enrolled in Generation R, a large birth cohort in Rotterdam. The children, registered from pregnancy onward, were followed across roughly nine years.

What Was Measured, and When

  • Family irregularity: measured at ages 2 and 4
    • Bedtime-routine items (age 2)
    • Where the family eats together, and how regularly meals are served (age 4)
  • Sleep problems: measured repeatedly at ages 3, 6, 10, and 11
    • Mother-reported (the Sleep Problems items of the Child Behavior Checklist, CBCL)
    • At age 10, the child’s own self-report was added
    • At age 11, a subgroup (851 children) wore a wrist accelerometer (GENEActiv) for nine days, objectively measuring sleep duration, onset time, and more

What stands out is a design that confirms findings three ways — not just a parent’s subjective memory, but the child’s own voice and machine measurement.

Results: Early Irregularity Left a Lasting Mark

Mother-Reported Sleep Problems

The higher the family irregularity at ages 2–4, the more sleep problems followed. The link held even after adjusting for many confounders.

  • Age 3: β=0.13 (p<.01)
  • Age 6: β=0.11 (p<.01)
  • Age 10: β=0.06 (p<.01)

The effect shrank as children grew — but it had not vanished by age 10.

Child-Reported Sleep Problems

The association held even when the 10-year-old, not the mother, answered directly (β=0.08, p<.01). In other words, it can’t be explained away as “the mother’s bias.”

Objectively Measured Sleep

The accelerometer results at age 11:

  • Sleep duration: higher early irregularity meant shorter sleep (β=−0.09, p=.02)
  • Sleep onset: they fell asleep later (β=0.10, p<.01)
  • But there were no significant differences in sleep efficiency or wake time

Surprise 1: It Was the Meals, Not the Bedtime

The most unexpected finding lies elsewhere.

When the team removed the bedtime-routine items entirely and recalculated, the effect largely remained. That is, what drove the results wasn’t “bedtime habits” but the regularity of family meals and the structure of the home as a whole.

Eating together, at a set time, in a set place — that everyday rhythm.

Why would this affect sleep? The team invokes the concept of “Zeitgebers” (time cues). Our body clock syncs its 24-hour rhythm not only to light but to regular signals like mealtimes. Eating at roughly the same hour each day steadily tells a child’s body, “It’s daytime now; night is coming soon.”

Surprise 2: “Felt Sleep” and “Actual Sleep” Took Different Paths

There’s another subtle finding.

The team tested a pathway: “early irregularity → behavioral and emotional problems at age 6 → later sleep problems.” The result: a child’s behavior problems explained a substantial share (about 40%) of “mother-reported sleep problems,” but did not explain the machine-measured actual sleep duration or timing.

This suggests the two kinds of “sleep problem” may be different things. The subjectively reported troubles — difficulty falling asleep, nightmares — are entangled with a child’s psychological state, whereas the objective patterns — how many hours they actually sleep, when they actually fall asleep — are determined by a different route.

Practical Takeaways

To Fix Sleep, Look at the Dinner Table First

It’s easy to try to solve sleep problems only at bedtime, but this study widens the lens. Regular breakfast, lunch, and dinner times, and shared family meals — this daytime structure props up the night’s sleep.

The Best Window Is “When They’re Young”

The effect was largest when routines were built at ages 2–4, and the benefit carried through to age 10. The most efficient time to set a child’s rhythm is when they’re little.

This Is a Factor You Can Change

Family irregularity isn’t an inborn temperament — it’s a modifiable risk factor. In fact, other research found that an intervention improving household routines increased children’s sleep duration. You don’t need a sweeping change; adding a single thing — regularity — is a place to start.

Limitations of the Study

The team is candid about the constraints:

  • Family irregularity relied solely on the mother’s report — a variable hard to measure objectively.
  • Irregularity was measured at a single time point, so the study couldn’t see how sleep shifts as routines change.
  • When the mother reported the exposure, mediator, and outcome alike, bias from a single reporter may have crept in.
  • As a general population-based cohort, it doesn’t transfer directly to clinically severe cases.

Even so, a design that follows 5,000 children for nine years while combining subjective, self-reported, and machine measurement is rare and valuable in itself.

Closing Thoughts

The message of this study can be summed up like this:

A child’s sleep is not made at bedtime alone. The “household rhythm” — meals and daily life repeating at steady times — shapes a child’s sleep over the course of years.

You don’t need a perfectly engineered timetable. Sitting down at the table together at roughly the same hour — that small, repeated rhythm reaches all the way from a two-year-old’s day to that same child’s nights at age ten.

Source: Koopman-Verhoeff, M. E., Serdarevic, F., Kocevska, D., Bodrij, F. F., Mileva-Seitz, V. R., Reiss, I., Hillegers, M. H. J., Tiemeier, H., Cecil, C. A. M., Verhulst, F. C., & Luijk, M. P. C. M. (2019). Preschool family irregularity and the development of sleep problems in childhood: a longitudinal study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 60(8), 857–865. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13060