Sleep and Your Child
Sleep is such a powerful way to regulate emotions for both parents and kids: Get enough of it, and you’re ready to face challenging situations and difficult feelings. Get too little, and you’re prone to feeling sad, angry, anxious with the smallest trigger.
Understanding Bedtime Challenges for Anxious Children
Bedtime can be a tricky transition for children with anxiety. It is a transition period that involves going from wakefulness to sleep, often alone, and is therefore a separation from their parents. It’s no wonder that so many parents of anxious kids are concerned about bedtime and sleep!
Common Sleep Concerns
Parents often describe these themes:
Kids with difficulty falling asleep
Kids who wake too early
"Frequent Flyers": Children who repeatedly request things after bedtime, wanting parents to stay until they fall asleep or making frequent appearances for a kiss, snack, or question.
The Importance of Routine
Many sleep issues in children stem from inconsistent routines. Consistent sleep and wake times help regulate the body's natural sleep-wake cycle, promoting better sleep. This is a core principle of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), a research-based therapy for sleep issues in adults. If your child is having difficulty falling asleep, consider how the transition from wakefulness to sleep works in your household. Specifically,
Think About Setting Up a Smooth Bedtime Routine:
Develop a wind-down bedtime plan: Bath, book, song, bed – this simple routine signals to your child's body that it's time to wind down. This is particularly important for younger children, who can’t tell time and depends on these cues to regulate their schedules.
Limit screen time before bed: For older children, it can be difficult for them to jump straight from homework and “daytime” activities to night. Consider creating a transition, such as avoiding screen time right before bed, and opting for a low-key activity like reading or listening to music.
Manage expectations: Sometimes, when a child is struggling with falling asleep or waking up too early, it’s because they’re actually getting all the sleep they need. If your child wakes up like a hurricane, and has enough energy to get through the day, it could be that they are going to bed a bit too early. Try moving bedtime back 15 minutes and see if it helps your child go to sleep a bit quicker. Note that sometimes, kids are just early wakers. This is annoying, but if they’re getting enough sleep, you might just need to wait out this period of their lives.
Set Clear Boundaries at Bedtime
Make bedtime about sleep: Children who get attention for nighttime requests may not learn that bedtime means sleep. It’s common for parents to respond to kids showing up in the living room by giving them that one last snack, or one more hug. If this sounds like you, think about tightening your routine.
Respond consistently: Develop a plan for how you'll respond to nighttime visits. The last thing you want to do is give your child an unlimited amount of attention after bedtime, because it encourages that behavior. Make sure you’re heaping the positive attention on the times your child stays in bed, and minimizing your attention to your child’s random, “I just remembered one more thing!” needs when they’re supposed to be sleeping.
Use a “pass” strategy: One strategy that often works is to give a child a set of passes based on how often they leave the room. If they use fewer than the allotted passes, they can earn a small reward or points towards a reward. Gradually decrease the number of passes.
Helping Anxious Children Who Don't Sleep Alone
Given that sleep is a period of separation, and anxious kids often struggle with separation, it’s common in my practice to see parents who have firmly established themselves within their child’s bedtime routine. In these cases, parents often stay in a child’s room until they fall asleep, or end up with a child in their bed even though they had no plans of cosleeping. While setting a routine is often a good way to prevent this problem, if you’re a parent for whom that ship has sailed, my favorite therapy hack for this problem comes from Dr. Eli Lebowitz at the Yale Child Study Center. He sets up “sleep practices” for kids at bedtime to promote independent sleep.
At bedtime, a child gets into their own bed, and pretends to sleep for a prescribed amount of time, after which they can get into their parents bed or do whatever behaviors they did previously. Over a period of time, parents increase the interval of “pretend sleep” - during which children start to fall asleep on their own!
To hear him describe this method, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9bTiuCNzus