After a long day of parenting and working around the house, all you really want is a good night’s sleep, but often our little one’s don’t want to play along with our plans to sleep. Whether they keep waking up at stupid-o-clock every night or simply just won’t fall asleep your sleep schedule can be wrecked by an overactive child or two.
Because of the struggle to get our kids down and get some good quality sleep ourselves, we need solutions to get our children to go to sleep and stay asleep. So to help everyone out we’ve got a few easy tips to help get your kiddies to sleep and make it easier for you to get some quality sleep!
Tip 1: Make Sure Your Schedule Is Conducive To Sleep
First things first, we need to make sure our schedule throughout the day is conducive to good sleeping behavior. While it may not seem like an important thing, your daytime schedule plays a lot into sleeping habits.
Things like when you have your dinner play a big part in sleeping, so make sure that you have dinner at least 2 hours before bed time, make sure your kids have some form of exercise in the afternoon to help wear out some excess energy and make sure nap times are short and spaced out through the day to prevent your child from reverse cycling or oversleeping.
Tip 2: Blackout The Bedroom
One thing that disrupts the sleep of parents and children alike is light leakage from outdoors, whether it’s from streetlights or passing cars, light from the outside world can make it harder to fall asleep and more likely to wake up in the middle of the night due to light pollution.
The simple solution for this would be to buy some blackout Roman blinds for your bedroom as well as your child’s. With these blackout blinds installed, it’ll be all around easier to get your children to sleep and easier for you to get much-needed sleep. Blackout blinds are also great for day naps as they can make a room dark enough to sleep in at any time of day!
Tip 3: Build A Solid Bedtime Routine
Building a bedtime routine is very important to ensure you can consistently get your little ones to sleep on time, after a while of getting used to their bedtime routine, you’ll notice your child will be a lot easier to get into bed, as their mind recognizes their bedtime routine.
A good routine is to get your child to wash around an hour or so before bedtime, get their pyjamas on and move them to their bedroom for a while before settling them in for the night. All of these things will get your child prepared for sleep and they will adapt to this routine if you can keep it consistent.
Tip 4: Don’t Sabotage Yourself
Our final tip is to avoid things that can spoil all of your hard work in getting your little one to sleep. In the hour before bedtime, there are a few things you should avoid to keep your kiddies from being up all night long.
The first of these is to avoid electronic devices before bed, the blue light from screens on TVs, phones and tablets mess around with our minds and delay the bodies natural sleep cycle, so letting your child play on the iPad before bed can end up with bedtime stretching out an extra 30 minutes. Another thing to avoid is food before bed, which can also keep you and your children up later as your body needs to digest the food.