The 10 Best Kid's Alarm Clocks
Special Honors
Dinosaur Digital Clock This cool clock will help ensure any little dinosaur-lover is excited to start their day. It’s made of durable plastic, with a face that illuminates to show the time, date, and temperature. You can select from among eight preprogrammed songs for the alarm, and it offers a snooze button for those days you need just a few more minutes of shut-eye. It runs on three AAA batteries (not included). And, if unicorns are more your thing, there’s a similar model available that’s topped with a sparkly horn, instead. potterybarnkids.com
Editor's Notes
January 03, 2021:
Some children are notoriously hard to wake, so we have included some models specifically designed for those types of kids. For example, both the Peakeep Twin Bell and Nanda Home Clocky are extremely loud, so people definitely won't sleep through the alarm. Also, the former doesn't offer a snooze option, so no procrastinating, and the latter rolls all around the room as it goes off, making the person jump out of bed and chase it around until they can catch it and turn it off. We also added the Hatch Baby Rest+, which offers tons of functionality and can allow parents to forgo the buying of a separate sound machine or baby monitor. It takes the place of the Mirari Teach Me, which we felt was just too similar to the Mirari OK To Wake and LittleHippo Mella.
November 27, 2019:
Kids of all ages could use a reliable alarm clock, whether they’re tiny tots who could use a little sleep training or teenagers who often prefer to be woken up as the last possible minute on school days. Our selection has options for both, and anyone in between.
The LittleHippo Mella was funded on Kickstarter and hit the stores a few years back, and is advertised as a sleep trainer clock that’s more intuitive and user-friendly than others. It has a small footprint, a cute face, and not much that will distract your child when it’s time for bed (unlike others that are modeled after animals and cartoon figures and could be seen as a toy in the middle of the night). It’s easy for a child to understand whether it’s bedtime or wake-up time, based on the color coding. It also has a “play period” function that starts a half hour before the wake-up alarm goes off, during which the light turns yellow and the face gives a playful smirk.
As you can tell from its name, the Big Red Rooster Sleep Training is another clock that will help kids know when it’s bedtime and when is the proper hour to get up for the day. It accomplishes this through simple red and green colors that light up the dog’s ball. It’s great for use during nighttime sleep as well as naptime. This one plugs in via an AC adapter and also has a handy battery backup.
The Lego Kids’ Yoda 9003080 is one of many “Star Wars” characters that have been made into an alarm clock. We picked him for our list, in part, because most kids would probably rather have this good Jedi watching over them every night than someone like Darth Vader. Either way, both versions feature articulating arms just like those on a Lego minifigure, and Yoda stands around 7 inches tall and features an easy-to-read LCD on his torso, with the control buttons on his back. Kids can simply push down on his head to activate either the snooze or the backlight function, which is in green (what else?).
The Peakeep Twin Bell and the Peakeep Cordless are both from the same manufacturer, but the former is an old-fashioned analog pick whereas the latter is a digital model. Both are easy to use and emit loud alarms that are sure to wake up the heaviest of sleepers.
The WamGra Bedside is another new addition that will likely appeal to middle-schoolers on up. It comes with a Bluetooth speaker so you can play your music, and vibrant LED lights which set the mood and also flash along with your songs. For more options like this one, check out our full list of Bluetooth-enabled alarm clocks.
Becoming A Morning Person
The design element makes for an alarm clock that your kid will actually enjoy using.
Waking up from sleep before your body deems it necessary is, by definition, unnatural. We need sleep, and our bodies should be trusted to tell us how much sleep we need and to provide us with just that amount. Unfortunately, that's not how civilization operates, and if you want your children to be functioning members of society, they're going to need to learn that horrible trick of forcing their bodies awake against their natural will.
Even morning people don't like having to wake up early. I consider myself a morning person, albeit one who stays up too late every night. This has been the case since I was a kid. I'd be up all hours under my blankets with a book and a flashlight, or a CD player spinning my favorite music. Then, I'd miserably open my eyes the next morning, wanting nothing more than to go back to bed. But I'd get up, and within just a few minutes, I'd be alert and excited to start the day.
Getting your kids from a state of sleepy grogginess to a place of wakeful readiness is what the alarm clocks on this list are all about. They all operate on preset alarms with snooze options. When you set the clock properly and designate a time for the alarm to go off, it will do just that, rousing your little ones from bed with lights, sounds, or a combination of both.
What makes these units specifically good for kids is a combination of their functionality and design. They are incredibly easy to set up and use, so you can teach your kids how to set their own alarms once you've done it for them once or twice. This means one or two less things for you to worry about at night and during the morning rush.
The design element makes for an alarm clock that your kid will actually enjoy using. So long as the design in question suits his or her style, you can rest assured that he or she will get up just fine. This kind of training will last their whole lives long, making them more productive, more reliable members of our little culture.
Perfect Timing
Children are reactionary creatures. If you pinch a child on the arm, she'll say "ouch". If you pinch an adult on the arm, he'll wonder why you're pinching him, withdraw his arm suspiciously, brood over whether he deserved the pinching, bring the incident to his shrink, talk through the moment of the pinch and trace it back to his relationship with his father, undergo hypnotherapy to relive a pinch he received from a giant Donald Duck mascot as a three-year-old at Disney World, and assess the complicated feelings of abandonment and betrayal that resulted when his father didn't protect him from this duck monster.
If you have a kid that needs one good jolt to get out of bed and that's it, then your life is all peaches and cream and the rest of us wish plagues upon your house.
In other words, if you put an alarm clock in your kid's room, and he or she doesn't like it, they'll let you know it right away, and you'll probably have a harder time waking them up than you did before.
As you evaluate the kid's alarm clocks on our list, I'd encourage you to start by looking for a design that the kid in question would actually want in their room. A child who loves Star Trek, but hates Star Wars, for example, would disdain that BB-8 alarm clock with all of his might. I could see him pitching it violently across the room the moment it tried to wake him.
Keep what you know about your kid and how his or her room is currently decorated in mind before you take the plunge with a given clock. Don't stop there, however, because a knowledge of your kid's waking habits will help you out here just as much as your decorating prowess will.
If you have a kid that needs one good jolt to get out of bed and that's it, then your life is all peaches and cream and the rest of us wish plagues upon your house. Any old noisemaker ought to do the trick for you, but the rest of us need a little help. Should you know your kid to be a visual learner, or someone who's lured by flashing lights and colorful screens, grabbing an alarm that lights up along with its sounds would be significantly helpful.
Counting Hours Through The Years
Mankind's evolution into a beast that needed to wake up before his body wanted him to do so coincides with the development of farming techniques and the care of animals. Cows, for example, need to be milked much earlier than your body needs to wake up. In those times, man relied on animals like the rooster to call out the break of day, and then upon one another to wake up the family.
Mankind's evolution into a beast that needed to wake up before his body wanted him to do so coincides with the development of farming techniques and the care of animals.
As civilization progressed, ancient Greece and China developed their own versions of alarm clocks, operated by water or by tension-bearing mechanisms that could strike gongs.
Fifteenth century Europe saw the development of simpler, more accurate alarm clocks that laymen and servants could easily operate. In the 17th century, alarm mechanisms gained popularity in more and more household clocks, and production maintained a straight, analogue course until well after the second world war, when split-flap flip clocks became increasingly popular. These gave way to the introduction of digital alarm clocks in the 1980s, the technology of which still dominates the market.