It’s 2am. A child won’t sleep. And the adult sitting on the bedroom floor is running on empty too.
In residential childcare, we talk endlessly about the work of the day; the routines, the school runs, the dinner-table conversations, the planned activities. But the hour that tests our practice most is rarely the one we prepare for.
It’s the one in the dark.
Why the night is the hardest place
By night, everything that makes a child feel safe has quietly disappeared. The routines have gone. The predictability has gone. And one by one, the safe faces have got in their cars and driven home to their own families.
For a child carrying trauma, that silence isn’t peaceful. It’s the loudest place of all. The busyness that distracted them all day is gone, and what’s left is the thing they can’t outrun — the memories, the fear, the question they can’t stop asking: when will this be the day I’m sent away too?
So the chaos starts. “I’m not going to bed.” The unkind words. The pushing away. The night terrors. And it’s tempting, at the end of a sixteen-hour shift, to read that as defiance, or attention-seeking, or a child who simply won’t settle.
But underneath nearly all of it is one message: please don’t leave me.
Even the chaos is a kind of safety. If I can keep you here -even by falling apart….then at least I’m not alone.
The truth we don’t say out loud
Here’s the part almost no one trains for: at 2am, the adult is dysregulated too.
We’re brilliant at unpicking what was going on for the child. We do it the next morning with empathy and care. But we’re far less honest about what the night did to the adult -the one who’d been on shift since 8am, who may have had a drink thrown over them, whose own nervous system was flooded with adrenaline, who was trying to bring calm to a frightened child while their own cup was completely empty.
Fatigue doesn’t just make us tired. It takes the reasoning part of our brain offline. So we ask people to co-regulate at the exact moment they have the least capacity to do it — and we rarely give them the tools to regulate themselves first.
That’s where the real damage can happen. Not just to our children, but to the people we ask to hold them.
What actually helps: stop fixing, start staying
When my co-host Chelsea and I talked this through, her message landed hard: at 2am, you are not problem-solving. You are not asking why. That’s for tomorrow.
Right now, the only job is to surrender to the situation and stay.
“My car keys are put down. I’m here for you. And if I have to sit on your bedroom floor until you fall asleep, that’s what I’m going to do.”
It sounds almost too simple. But it’s hard for a child to keep fighting an adult who refuses to fight back — an adult who simply says, I’m not going anywhere.
And here’s the quiet truth in it: when you slow your breathing and regulate the child, you regulate yourself. Co-regulation isn’t only something we give. It’s something we receive. You’ll leave that shift carrying less stress in your own body than if you’d spent the night trying to reason your way out.
Being kind to the child, in that moment, is also being kind to yourself.
This is a leadership responsibility, not just a personal one
If we want our teams to do this work, we can’t leave them to find the tools alone.
That means the before checking in at the start of a shift, a midway breather, fresh air, asking how people are actually arriving to work.
And it means the after, a debrief that isn’t a tick-box. Not “you did great, are you okay?” answered with a reflexive “yeah, fine.” A real pause. Where did you feel that in your body? What do you need before you go home? Even five minutes of offloading before someone drives home stops them carrying the night into the rest of their life.
It means training that goes beyond “look after yourself” and actually teaches people how — what’s happening in the body, what the recovery looks like, how to bring calm in a crisis. Because children borrow our regulation. They can only receive the calm we’re able to give.
The work that matters most
When I say some of our most important work happens at 2am, this is what I mean. Not the dramatic intervention — the quiet, exhausted, unglamorous act of staying when every part of you wants to leave.
It will be late. You will be tired. But it will end. And every time an adult comes back, sits down, and says I’ve got you, a child learns something they may never have been allowed to believe before:
The people around me don’t disappear when I cry out.
That’s the whole job. And it’s why looking after the adults isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the only way the work gets done at all.