And now the end is near, and so we face the usual hurdle. Yes, summer 2024, washout that it was, prepares to bid us adieu, leaving parents everywhere with a sense of impending doom as we consider how we might get our kids’ sleeping habits back on track.
Late to bed, late to rise, and far too few hours spent asleep – it’s a tale parents know too well. But how much does it matter? And how can we turn things around in time for back to school?
“Lack of sleep affects children and teenagers’ biology so they feel lethargic, tired and fatigued. This impacts their psychological state which means they are more irritable, short tempered and weepy. Which affects their relationships, they have more relational fallout and feel less able to socialise,” Dr Colman Noctor, child and adolescent psychotherapist, explains. “Their cognition is also affected by a lack of sleep. Their memory is poorer, their concentration suffers and they can have a more negative outlook on things when they are sleep deprived.”
Primary schoolchildren, on average, need nine to 11 hours’ sleep per night, while teenagers should be getting eight to 10, says Lucy Wolfe, sleep consultant and author. Turning things around as we embark on a new school year is important, Wolfe says.
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But we may not need to implement those changes quite as early as we fear.
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With schools returning soon, Wolfe is conscious that parents may not want to disrupt what’s left of the summer by trying to impose strict sleep routines. “Normally, when we try to get sleep back on track, we attack the wake time. We start the wake time earlier and earlier every day, and then correspondingly bring bedtime forward earlier and earlier. A week is often adequate in order to do that,” she explains. “Any more than a week, I feel, is just eating into what is a lovely time in their lives.”
‘It’s about almost training the body clock one more time... It goes without saying the kids are going to be tired, because no matter how we do it, they’re going to lose out on sleep’
Some parents may even choose, particularly with older children, to wait until they’re back at school before attempting to correct sleep routines, Wolfe says. “Otherwise, you’re trying to get people up, and it goes against the self-directedness that you’re trying to encourage in adolescence.
“Parents have two choices. You could either be a little bit proactive and maybe not bother about things until a week before the kids go back. Or you could suffer it a little bit and just do it from the first day. However, the key thing to do, either way, is not to let it slip the following weekend.
“You’ve got to keep it up over the weekend to gain a little bit of momentum,” Wolfe explains. “Once the academic year starts, I would be ferocious about saying the wake time is deeply governed Monday to Friday. But also control it on the weekend.”
If parents don’t keep it up at the weekend, the efforts will have been “for nothing”, she says. “It’s about almost training the body clock one more time, and it’s going to be super sensitive. It goes without saying the kids are going to be tired, because no matter how we do it, they’re going to lose out on sleep.”
Wolfe says parents shouldn’t be overly concerned, because “it will wrinkle itself out, by its very nature, within the first few weeks”.
Trying to improve the amount of sleep a teenager is getting requires a different approach, Wolfe says. In this instance, it’s more of a “collaboration”.
“With primary schoolchildren you can be more directive. With an adolescent child, a lot of it is to do with you helping them make the right decisions. It’s helping them understand why it’s important so that you’re not battling against the tide – that they are an active agent. That they are a willing collaborator in when they go to sleep, when they switch things off. Otherwise, you’re just pushing and pulling.”
Wolfe suggests encouraging our digital native teens to look up studies on the importance of sleep, or even link it to aspects of their lives. “If you have a budding athlete – assigning the importance of sleep to prowess on the field,” she says, by way of example. “If you have someone who wants to get maximum points, that academic performance and sleep are related. Or someone who’s interested in their appearance. Find something they’re interested in, and align it.”
When it comes to switching off and removing screens at bedtime Wolfe says “of course it makes sense to have a switch-off time. But we can’t just switch off and not replace it with anything. Sometimes, I think we need to go back to old school style of how we do things. Sleep needs to be prepared for an hour or two in advance. Maybe if we all switch off our gadgets and maybe if we all play a board game.”
She acknowledges that this may appear idealistic, but adds, “sometimes if sleep is problematic, we’ve got to make some big changes”.
Wolfe says, in general, there should be no phones in the bedroom.
For those finding sleep to be problematic, Wolfe suggests “leading into sleep an hour or two in advance, where we start closing things down, and using light and dark, using environmental cues. My own kids would study in the bedroom, but I do try to help them have a division between what the bed is for, so the brain isn’t changing. It understands what’s supposed to happen when we go to bed. And always get changed to go to bed – changing our costume – creating good messaging for our brain and our body to take in the context of sleep.”
But parents aren’t off the hook here, either. Adults should be getting between seven and nine hours’ sleep per night. There’s no point telling adolescents one thing, and adults doing another, she explains. “We’ve got to model it [prioritising sleep]”.
She suggests “if we’re going to prioritise sleep – a bit like if we were going to prioritise healthy eating – that we do it as a crew, as a unit, that maybe we’d all start doing things a little bit differently”.
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