Sleep For School-aged kids

For school aged children it is really important that they are getting enough exercise (cardiovascular - ie they need to get out of breath!), preferably outdoors, to facilitate sleep.

Recesses- usually fairly limited periods of time (15 minutes) - is not enough!

It is much easier to get a child to sleep it they are physically tired. Having access to screens in their bedroom, or before bed is counterproductive.

Try to keep power struggles to a minimum. Try, perhaps at a family meeting, to encourage cooperation. As children learn to read independently they can perhaps read if they are not tired - hopefully allowing them to ‘become’ tired as they read - a good strategy to facilitate self-soothing for sleep.

Quiet calm music, a deep breathing practice, relaxation strategies like progressive muscular relaxation, visualization, or white noise may help. Try to keep these strategies varied and as part of a path to self-soothing using only your child’s imagination.

Falling asleep with your child in their bed, or allowing them to sleep in your bed is, of course, a choice parents need to make - but if you want to help your child to develop a range of self-soothing strategies for sleep - the strategy of ‘falling asleep with a parent right next to me’ - is best used occasionally.

Really make sure to talk about anxiety provoking topics earlier in the day. Check in at pick-up time, or around the dinner table about issues that might be more stressful. If your child is needing to read aloud to you, plan time earlier in the day for that - let bedtime reading be a time where they can relax into the experience of you reading to them.

As kids get older actual ‘bedtime’ can be a topic discussed at a family meeting.

If your child has separation anxiety - needing to call you back multiple times for water or hugs, feeling very worried about sleep or being on their own - check back in a week or two for a blog post about how to deal with Separation Anxiety at Bedtime - the Positive Discipline way!