Helping your kids sleep better: back-to-school tips

We don’t want to give our children junk food. So why let them have ‘junk sleep’?

School started only three weeks ago, but our school-age children already have a load of after-school activities or part-time jobs and tons of homework to do each night. And yet, kids do have to wake up early for another day at school.

And then there are the television, computer, and electronic games that keep them up late at night. Recent studies found that school kids get only an average of 5-6 hours of sleep each night. And in a separate survey of 1000 teenagers, 20 per cent of the kids sleep with an electronic media – TV or computer – on all night. This results to what experts call “junk sleep” -

Sleep that is of neither the length nor quality that it should be in order to feed the brain with the rest it needs to perform properly at school.

With each passing day of school, kids get less and less healthy sleep. After this cycle has gone on for a few months, it’s no wonder our children become unfocused, groggy and sleepy in school. No doubt, these affect their performance and grades.

How do you establish healthy sleep habits in your children?

Discovery Health has great tips for parents of school-aged kids:

• Establish a bedtime and make it a habit.
• Promote a healthy lifestyle, which includes forgoing caffeine, a midnight snack and turning off electronics.
• Help your children with time-management skills.
• Consider limiting the number of activities they do, such as setting the number of hours or types of after-school work.
• Make the bedroom dark at night and bright in the morning.
• An short afternoon nap after school might help.
• Sleep in on the weekend, but not too late.
• Try books on tape.
• Taking a warm shower early in the evening also works.

Now getting children to change habits ingrained for years may take a long time, but if they understand how sleep affects the rest of their performance during the day, then maybe you’ll get more cooperation. Certainly, getting the whole family (including Mom and Dad) into the habit of healthy sleep will benefit everyone for life.

Tags: school, children, health, back-to-school, sleep, performance, junk sleep