Everyone knows that sleep is critical for growing children and their mental and physical health. Regular, high-quality sleep habits help children consolidate memory and learn better. A lack of sleep contributes to childhood depression, anxiety and even risk of suicide, along with physical health problems, including risk of injury. The challenge is making sure kids log those valuable zzz’s.
There are three main components of high-quality sleep for children. First, they need enough total hours – sleep duration. Sleep quality is important, too – sleeping soundly during the night with few disruptions or awakenings. And, finally, there’s sleep timing – essentially, a consistent schedule, with bedtime and risetime about the same across the whole week.
Even when you know how important good sleep is, it’s easy for sleep duration, quality and timing to get knocked off track. It can happen for infrequent reasons, such as the pleasant chaos of a holiday, or the disturbances that accompany pandemic life. Healthy sleep habits are hard to maintain for everyday mundane reasons, too, such as parent-child disagreement, busy schedules and older children’s leisurely weekend behavior. But there are ways for families to get sleep back on course.
As a child development researcher and family therapist, I study parenting and family behaviors that create healthy environments for children’s sleep patterns. In particular, I help parents to develop consistent and nurturing routines. Sleep patterns are set early, and parents play an important role in nurturing children’s perspectives and attitudes. Here’s the overarching advice I share with families, no matter the age of their kids.
Grown-ups can’t ignore their own sleep hygiene while expecting kids to stick with the rules.
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1. Set and model family values about sleep
Children are observant learners. They pay very careful attention to both the spoken and unspoken rules of their clan.
To get everyone in the household sleeping well, sleep can’t be something that only children must care about, while adults who have freedom and power joke about their own unhealthy habits. If sleep seems like punishment, rather than the gift for health that it is, children will be likely to resist it.
Adults need to talk the talk and walk the walk that sleep is a priority for everyone in the family. Be a role model. If you’ve fallen into a habit of binge-watching TV into the wee hours, for instance, work on reining that in. Use positive language about your own sleep. Pay attention to what you say, and what you communicate through your own habits, reinforcing that it’s important to the whole family to get sleep and have energy for the next day. Don’t make the mistake of discussing bedtime as a chance for adults to get distance from the kids.
2. Know your child
Remember, every kid is unique, so don’t expect one-size-fits-all…