How to help your kids get better sleep

Getting your little ones to sleep can be a struggle every night when it comes to bed time. Whether they have too much energy in them to sleep, the room is too light or they just don’t have a good daily routine having your kid fight the need for sleep can be stressful and annoying. One of my silver linings of Lockdown is the time to review things as a family. Understanding how much sleep your kids needs is also important, finding out can be a great place to start.

So, to help you get your children down to sleep easier, we’ll be giving you a few easy tips on how you can get your child into a better sleeping routine and hopefully make your day to day life as a parent less stressful.

Tip1: Set up a bedtime routine

This is probably the easiest tip to put into place, this involves making sure that you encourage your child to sleep and wake up at the same time. If your child’s sleep schedule is often changed your child will find it harder to fall asleep and stay asleep through the night.

So set a time for your child’s bed time and wake up time, make sure you stick to those times and have the supporting activities such as putting on pyjamas and brushing teeth to be at the same time each day. This will reinforce a routine for your child and they’ll be mentally prepared for bedtime as they begin their daily bedtime routine.

Tip2: Shut out light pollution

Much like adults, children can find it hard to sleep with too much light in their bedroom and can be woke in the night by light interruptions outside such as passing cars in the morning. So a solution to block out light leaking into the room to help your child fall asleep easier and stay asleep.

So how do you block out that pesky light? For light coming in from outside such as street lights and passing cars a set of blackout roller blinds will do the trick, completely blocking out intruding light. Then for internal light from your home you can either close their bedroom door to stop light coming in or if they need their door open to sleep simply make sure the hall light isn’t on and you close the door of whatever room you are in so that light doesn’t leak from the room you’re in.

Tip3: Eat the right amount at the right time

We’ve all been to bed after a big dinner and struggled to get to sleep due to the discomfort of having an overly full stomach, your child will also experience this if they have too much food too close to their bed time.

So it’s important to make sure that when your child has their evening meal you have plenty of time before bed. It’s good to keep 1-2 hours between dinner time and bed time to allow their stomachs to settle. You’ll also want to make sure that the meal is filling enough that your child doesn’t wake up hungry, but also not too filling, which would leave them with discomfort.