School-aged children and adolescents have a whole new set of sleep challenges. No more rocking a downy little head to sleep... now you may be struggling to stay awake until your child goes to bed.  
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But even if she doesn't show it, your tween or teen needs your help with sleep structure just as much as ever. 

Did you know that adolescents often need more sleep than school-aged children, despite being older, because their bodies are growing and changing so fast?

Unfortunately, at the same time that their sleep needs increase, their body clocks shift later, so that it's harder for them to go to sleep early. And at the same time, they are often hit with the added challenge of an earlier start time for middle or high school. (This is despite the fact that multiple studies have shown that older children perform better academically, are physically healthier, and are less likely to be in car accidents with later start times for school.) 

All the reasons you should care about your adolescent getting great sleep are listed below, but in case you are short on time, here's how to get your older child better sleep to feel his or her (or their) best. 

1. Maintain authority over their bedtime for as long as you can. Set a time and stick to it. Even if your child says he hates you for it. Your job is to be his parent, not his friend. Sympathize but stay strong. This is an unfortunate part of adolescence but it won't last forever.
   
   
2. If your child struggles to wake up on school mornings, she needs an earlier bedtime. Period.
   
   It will no doubt be an unpopular decision but her body will thank you.
   
   
3. Maintaining consistency in bedtime on weekends as well as weekdays will lead to a happier, more rested child (but it won't happen overnight). Give it at least two weeks, although a month would be even better, and ask your child if they don't feel better.
   
   
4. Wake your child, even on weekends. Especially if she struggles with falling asleep at night.
   
   Sorry. Feel free to hate me as your child will hate you. :)
   
   Sleeping late is delicious, it's true, but sleeping late on the weekends is akin to changing time zones twice in three days. If your child sleeps late on Saturday and Sunday mornings, he will no doubt be unable to go to bed early on Sunday night... and Monday morning will hit him like a Mack truck. Just when he needs to be alert for his classes. Imagine if he was driving while that sleepy!
   
   
5. No napping. Once your child gives up the nap in the preschool years, naps should be reserved for illness, only. If it's just impossible to prevent, set an alarm (on a device across the room from your sleeping adolescent) to limit the nap to 30 minutes or less. Any more than that and the night sleep will be negatively impacted which will set into play a domino effect of difficulty getting up on school days.
   
   And if your older child regularly seeks a nap... this is another sign that bedtime is too late. So is falling asleep in the car at random times. Move that bedtime earlier.
   
   
6. Keep electronics out of the bedroom. She will hate you for this one, too. But the blue light makes it harder for their brains to wind down and fall asleep, even if they feel relaxed while scrolling. Social struggles will only be amplified late at night. And all too many tweens and teens keep their phone alerts on all night, disturbing their sleep all night long. Those sleep disturbances have real academic and physical consequences. Don't allow it.
   
   Electronics should be turned off one hour before bedtime and left outside the bedroom, ideally under parental supervision.
   
   
7. Limit sleepovers to special occasions. Children love them, but the entire family will pay the price for them... often for several days afterwards. If an exception must be made, enforce a bedtime during the sleepover (it can be a bit later than usual, but not too late) or ask the friend's parent to do so. Please do not shrug and head to bed while the children are glued to electronics in the living room.
   
   If possible, have the sleepover on a Friday night, and plan for a low-key weekend afterwards so your child has ample time to recover.
   
   And if your child is sleeping at someone else's house, it should go without saying, but please prioritize safety. Confirm that an adult will be home the entire home, that there won't be any extra adults around, that there are no accessible firearms in the house. Make sure to tell your child -- privately -- that if she feels uncomfortable at any point, she should call you and you will come pick her up, no questions asked. You might even suggest a code word so that she can tell you she's uncomfortable without embarrassment in front of her friends.
   
   
8. Limit late-night team practices, rehearsals, performances and other deviations from the bedtime schedule. Be the unpopular parent who pulls his child out rehearsal early in order to be home for bedtime. Save the exceptions for truly special occasions. Your child is relying on you to be his fearless leader so that he can function in school the next day.
   
   
9. Set time limits on homework. When the clock strikes a certain pre-agreed upon hour, the schoolwork gets put away, no matter what. If necessary, and if your tween or teen agrees, send a message to the teacher explaining that your child wasn't able to finish the homework in your family's allotted time but she can spend more time on it tomorrow.
   
   Support your child in setting up an afternoon homework routine that includes a brief snack, plus a mental and physical break after school -- getting some exercise really helps to reset the brain to focus on homework -- and then help her focus on homework before dinner, before she is exhausted. Homework will go much faster than if she waits for later in the evening. 
   
   

Having an older child or adolescent is hard and often thankless work. Rest assured -- no pun intended -- your older child or adolescent needs you more than ever, even if he doesn't show it. 

If you aren't convinced that sleep is that important to older kids, here are some great statistics, all cited by pediatrician and sleep researcher Dr. Marc Weissbluth in Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child:

• Short sleep duration in 7- and 8-year old children predicts hyperactivity.
  
  
• A single night of restricted sleep in 10- to 14-year olds impairs verbal creativity and abstract thinking.
  
  
• Comparing groups of children with high IQ's to children with average IQs, the high IQ children slept more at every age than the average IQ children.
  
  
• A study of 5,500 Japanese children found that children with higher grades slept longer than children with lower grades.
  
  
• In a study of identical twins with sleep differences, the twin who slept longer had better reading, vocabulary, and reading comprehension scores than the less rested twin. 
  
  
• In a study on children with ADHD, improving sleep duration radically improved peer relations and academic performance. 
  
  
• In an experiment on sleep restriction on 11- and 12-year olds, one group of children was restricted to 6.5 hours of sleep for 6 nights while the other group slept 10 hours at night. The sleep-restricted group had measurable inattentiveness, irritability, non-compliance and academic struggles compared to the well-rested group. 
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• And finally, here's a list from the American Academy of Pediatrics of health consequences of sleep deprivation in adolescents:
  • increased risk of obesity
  • increased risk of diabetes
  • increased risk of high blood pressure and stroke
  • increased rate of car accidents
  • increased risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide
  • increased risk-taking behaviors
  • emotional dysregulation and decreased positive affect ("good mood")
  • more stressed
  • less motivated 
  • academic struggles including: decreased executive function, attention, abstract thinking abilities, academic performance, attendance and increased rates of school drop out. 
    
    

We should all lobby for middle and high schools to open later so that older children can sleep later. But even if they do, older children still need our help with setting and maintaining reasonable bedtimes and wake times.​

Do you need some help setting up new sleep routines for your older child or adolescent? It's never too late to make changes. Set up a free consult and let's get your not-so-big-little-one the sleep they deserve to be their gender-inclusive best. 

Check out this week's Facebook Live on how to fall back with ease, when and how to give up the dream feed, and what to do when you lie down with your child at night and are feeling resentful... but guilty at the idea of giving it up. 

Mexico (and much of the rest of the world) reverts to standard time Sunday, October 25th. This Sunday.
The United States switches back Sunday, November 1st. Next Sunday. The day after Halloween -- an easy night to stay up too late. 

The good news is that "falling back" to standard time isn't nearly as hard as "springing forward" to daylight savings time. Phew. 

But just like in spring, the transition will be easier if you spread it out over a few days. Start 4 days before the time change and each day, move bedtime, naps, and all meal times 15 minutes later. 

If you have an especially sensitive infant or toddler, you may even want to start 6 days earlier, and shift just 10 minutes each day.

Moving mealtimes later is important because without this part, the body will just feel like it stayed up late and may still wake up at the normal time. But overtired. Switching the mealtimes too feels like you are gradually changing time zones. 

This is especially important for infants and toddlers but will make the transition easier for everyone, even school age children and adults. 

You can expect some extra crankiness or hyperactivity in the late afternoon for a few days. Just try to grit your teeth and stay calm -- easier said than done! -- through those tantrums! Remember that big feelings aren't a problem -- tantrums are fine. It's the fastest way to get to the calm after the storm. You can't coax a child out of it just by changing the rules, or not for long, anyway. Just sit and wait. It will pass, I promise.

And try to get outside in the mornings, especially those first few days, because we will be missing the sunlight in the late afternoons. Exposure to early morning light also helps the body recalibrate to the new time. 

Does your family need help with a sleep transition? Set up a free consult and get your family back on track so you can feel your best and enjoy your time together. 

Send me your questions ahead of time -- former clients get first priority! 

It will just be 15 minutes this time. Looking forward to "seeing" you there!

​Check out my first weekly Facebook Live to hear more about the ideal bedtime for your​ child, how teething can affect sleep, bedtimes for school age children, hear the story of how I came to be a sleep consultant and more. 

I also talk about my peaceful parenting style and how incorporating "special time" can make bedtime separation easier. For those of you with toddlers, preschoolers or older children... fear not, instituting new bedtime routines doesn't have to be a miserable experience for anyone in the family.

Set up a free consult with me to learn more. There's no committment.  

​If you know me, you know I love my friends. I live for friendship. It nourishes me and keeps me alive. The hardest thing about COVID for me is the distance I've had to keep from the people I love.

So when I recently learned that a close friend isn't speaking to me, it was really painful. Especially since she won't even talk to me about it. I can't fix it.

I've decided to try a new strategy: To embrace it. To lean into the pain and discover what I can learn about myself. 

I have a really hard time with people being mad at me. Or not liking me. And the painful truth is that people have every right to be mad at me, for whatever reason they like. It doesn't have to be a good reason by my standards. They don't need my approval. It's not about me, it's about them!

I'm having a hard time really believing this, but I'm working on it. 

Trying to manipulate other people's emotions so that I can feel better is selfish.

Our culture would tell you that "helping" others to feel better is a selfless act of service, but this is a lie. It's only generous if the other person wants to feel better. Imagine if a loved one just died and your supposedly well-intentioned friend tried to "help" by telling you, "Oh, don't feel bad, she lived a really long time. It was her time to go."

You would be furious, right? Because that act of "comfort" is only about the other person's feelings. Not about yours. 

My friend has told me she doesn't want to talk to me right now. She gets to have whatever thoughts she likes, and take whatever action she likes.

My job is not to fix that situation, but to work on my thoughts about what that means about me. Intellectually, I know that her thoughts are her responsibility, but it's hard for me to believe. My parents taught me that it is my job to fix other people's feelings. It turns out that this is really hard to unlearn. 

But I'm working hard on it. And I encourage my clients to work on it, too.

We never want our children to suffer. We all want our children to be happy. All of the time.

What is hard to admit is that we don't just want that for them. We want that for us, too. Because we assume that when our children are suffering, it means something bad about us. And that is unacceptable. Too painful to accept. 

I'm struggling with this, too. As I've previously shared, my five-year-old Amelie had epic tantrums over the spring and summer. The longer she was out of school, the worse they got. 

She started at a new Waldorf school in September. One with small, fully-outdoor classes and masking, one where I feel safe and she does too. I am sure she misses the larger community at her old school, but I could see a visible sigh of relief overtake her small body within a week. She's bursting with pride as she insists on setting the table in her own special way -- "No, Mommy, that's not how you get things done! This is how you do it." She carefully slices tomato and pear for the salad. She joyfully taught us a new grace at dinner. 

And then her teacher's mother caught a cold. The teacher cancelled class for the rest of the week.

And boisterous Amelie was thrown into chaos once again. 

I do my best to provide structure for her but the truth is, I never wanted to be a preschool teacher. What I love is being a sleep coach. And an entrepreneur. I'm learning so much from my clients. I don't want to take a few days off to hang out with Amelie, as much as I love her. I don't want to create things for her to do all day. I try, anyway, but it's not enough.

The tantrums returned. 

And the worst thing about them is that I take them personally. When she screams at me, "you never listen to me," I argue. Because of my thoughts about what her accusations and her anger mean about me. That I'm not a good listener. That I'm not doing enough to keep her happy. That I'm not a good enough mother.

That last one gets us all, right? We all think that if we just did enough, just tried enough, our kids would be happy. All of the time. 

On the surface, we all know that's laughable. But it's still what we want. Our children to be happy all of the time. Just like we want our friends to love us all of the time. That's not too much to ask, right? :)

I took my friendship conflict to my weekly coaching session to get help with learning about myself. She helped me create an unintentional model to help me see how I am currently thinking, and then an intentional model to help me get the result that I actually want. 

Unintentional Model

Circumstance -- "I think I need a break right now. Thank you for understanding." (The words my friend said to me.) 
Thought -- She doesn't have any right to be mad at me. The thought underneath that is, if she does have a right to be mad at me, it means there is something wrong with me. 
Feeling -- angry, defensive
Action -- obsessing about the situation.
Result -- I am sitting with a belief that there's something wrong with me because my friend said these words to me. What am I not doing? I'm not sitting in a place of compassion for either one of us. This is not how I want to show up in my life.  ​

I need to give my friend space to have her own model. I want to be in a space of love and compassion. But I'm not there yet. So I am working on an intermediate thought. One to bridge the gap and get me to a place of compassion for each of us. How about, "she's working through something right now." Or, "she's having some big feelings right now." Maybe I'm not ready for compassion right now. 

My coach said "she said some words. I'm learning to believe that these words don't mean anything about me. Her words reflect her model. I'm practicing believing this. I'm practicing the belief that she has a model that has nothing to do with me. I'm practicing the belief that I'm not responsible for her happiness or unhappiness. 

Intentional Model
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Circumstance -- "I think I need a break right now. Thank you for understanding."
​Thought -- She's working through her own model right now that sounds hard or painful for her. I am not responsible for her model. I can have compassion for the pain she may be experiencing.  All of our feelings are based on our thoughts, not on our circumstances. Her feelings don't mean anything about me. 
Feeling -- relief
Action -- I stop obsessing and focus on things that I can control, like my own thoughts and actions.
Results -- I am available to people who want my time and energy, like the loving friends and family that called this weekend to wish me a happy birthday. 

What if it's not true that other people's feelings are not our responsibility? What if our children get to create their own models, too? What does it mean about us as parents if our children are unhappy?

If your children aren't getting the sleep they need, they can't be their happiest. But you can't force them to get better sleep or to be happier. When you change their circumstances to allow for better sleep, they may be sad or angry at first. We can create space for their big emotions without it meaning about us as parents. This isn't easy work to do. I'm still "practicing" it myself. 

I'd love to support you do this work to get your children the sleep they need so that they have the opportunity to be their best selves. Set up a free consult and I'll share with you how we can support your children through a challenging transition on their way to better sleep. In nearly every case, the transition is far easier than parents fear. 

Oh, and Amelie is back in school and after a week, the tantrums are gradually fading away again. Thank goodness. But I am ready to practice letting her have her feelings when they return. 



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