Part III: Family-Oriented Sleep Solutions
In my blog series on Sleep After Children, I first tackled the whys and hows of sleep disruption after kids and then moved onto strategies to reset your sleep once your kids are sleeping through the night. In this final excerpt, I’ll be addressing how to set up healthy sleep habits for the whole family.
When one member of the family isn’t sleeping, it affects the whole family dynamic. Fatigue can lead both children and adults to feeling irritable, anxious, unmotivated, argumentative, impatient, sick…and the list goes on. So modelling good sleep habits and putting them into practice can make all the difference to your nights but also your day to day functioning within the family unit.
Monkey see, monkey do:
There’s been some research connecting parental sleep patterns with their children’s. First, children may learn sleep habits from their parents. For example, if you’re on a screen in your bed during the night, your child will normalize that behaviour. Second, poor family functioning could affect both parents' and children's sleep. For instance, family fights in the evening before bedtime may prevent the whole family from a good night's sleep. Third, it is possible that parents suffering from poor sleep show "selective attention" for their own as well as their children's sleep problems, leading to increased monitoring of sleep. What this means is that it may be more of a matter of a parent projecting their own sleep insecurities onto their children, (when in fact their children’s sleep was initially fine) which highlights the importance of having accurate thoughts and beliefs around what healthy sleep and behaviour actually looks like. Finally, children may share genes with their parents that predispose them to certain sleep patterns. We most likely identify with one of our parents in terms of their sleep patterns and chronotypes (link to previous article).
So knowing all this, there are things that you can work on and implement with the whole family to support a healthy sleep lifestyle.
Light, Schedules and Winding Down:
Our body has no way of knowing what time it is apart from the light cues it receives so getting bright light in the daytime (especially first thing in the AM and being outdoors is ideal) and limiting light exposure in the evening is key.
Children, even teens, get more sleep when parents help structure the child’s sleep schedule so it’s important to keep a regular bed and wake time, even on weekends. A consistent schedule contributes to a more robust circadian rhythm and a stronger sleep drive, two factors that primarily influence our sleep/wake cycle.
I would urge you to keep screens, such as tablets, TVs and phones out of your children’s bedrooms and limit screen time to an hour before their bedtime. When you’re setting your bedtime routine for your children, keep it consistent and relaxing for them - so if it’s getting into their pyjamas, bathtime, reading a story, singing a lullaby - whatever you’re doing, keep the order of events the same so their bodies and brains will learn to associate the actions with bedtime and winding down. And try to avoid talking about stressful things or serious matters with your kids before bed - you don’t want to start worrying them as they’re attempting to fall asleep.
And bedtime doesn’t need to be a big drawn out ordeal - keep your routine to 20-30 minutes and give your kids that curtain call warning. Children will often try to play games and delay their bedtime and toddlers especially are constantly testing boundaries but try to stay firm with your evening routine. Sleepiness in children can actually display as hyperactivity, which seems completely counterintuitive so while you think your child may have lots of energy and isn’t ready for bed, they may in fact be in need of a good sleep.
Relationship-Based Strategies
Beyond ways to make your sleep more consistent and habitual, you may consider these relationship-based strategies to prevent the inevitable conflicts that can arise out of lack of sleep:
Insulate your nights from stress:
Just as you want to avoid discussing stressful or serious matters with your kids before bed, the same should go for you and your partner. Now obviously you can’t control that all the time and there are incidents that just have to be dealt with but as a general rule of thumb, try and keep your nights protected from stress-inducing factors, which have the ability to raise your cortisol levels and leave you tossing and turning in your bed long after the lights have gone out.
Work together for efficiency:
Studies show that dual parental involvement enhances the sleep consolidation of both children and mothers. If each parent prevents the other from becoming overburdened and frustrated, it has a positive impact on the child's well-being and facilitates the maintenance of a safe and secure environment.
So work together to reduce decision fatigue and inefficiency. Have explicit conversations at home about household and childcare duties so that everyone is on the same page. Create a shared grocery list online so that anyone can add items to it. Create and share calendars so that you don’t have to have a big discussion each time one of you is trying to schedule a task. Reducing unnecessary work can help free up time for the things you really need, like sleep.
If you and your partner are on different sleep schedules, make the most out of your different chronotypes. For example, if you’re an early bird and your partner is a night owl, take care of the morning routine and let your partner handle the evenings.
Ask for help:
Buy or borrow time where you can. If you have the means, consider paying a small premium to have your groceries delivered instead of going to the store yourself or share home cleaning responsibilities with your partner or a third party. If you can’t buy time that way, see if grandparents or friends can look after your children for a bit, either to give yourself time to do some of that work OR to give yourself a break for YOU - remember, you need to take care of your own health in order to take care of others. Parenting is relentless but to be a responsible parent, we need to look inwards and be aware if and when we start unravelling and then be able to ask for help whether from a personal connection or another health care professional, such as a therapist or counsellor or some other support group.
In recent years, and especially since the pandemic began, there’s finally a LOT more focus and attention on people’s mental health and how it affects every aspect of their life, including sleep, so we really need to look at our lives, our parenting and our sleep from a holistic perspective and respond accordingly.
