How to have your children get a good night’s rest?
At night, while parents extend their work at home under bright artificial lights, little kids also lose their sense of a relaxed home. Their stress may be expressed in the form of irritability, crying, bed wetting, and misbehavior.
Here are some tips on how to have your children get a good night’s sleep:
1. Feed your children right. Children get poor sleep with stomach discomforts. Thus, they often wake up and cry at night. To avoid this, feed them with light, easily digestible, carbohydrate-rich food before sunset. Ripe banana of any variety is suggested because it contains serotonin and potassium that induce sound sleep. Children need light stomachs to sleep comfortably. Feeding them while tired or drowsy at late night may lead to indigestion, flatulence and discomfort.
2. Dedicate an early evening time with your kids. As soon as you get home from work, spend time (between 6 and 8 p.m.) with your family. Tag this period as “family time.” Attend to their needs and play with them in a variety of creative, less active endeavors both indoor and outdoor. Make this schedule regular and consistent.
3. Establish prebedtime routines at an early age. After family time, help your kids prepare their bottles, brush their teeth, empty their bladder, wash their face and body, change to their sleep clothes, and set their beddings. Massage them or simply tap them lightly for physical and nervous relaxation. This pattern will eventually become normal and spontaneous as they grow up. Likewise, such routines cue them to get to bed right away and condition them for a comfortable peaceful sleep.
4. Pray as a family before going to bed. Train your kids to say short prayers. Praying makes them feel safe knowing they have asked God to watch over them. Praying also instills int heir young minds faith and trust in God.
5. Use dim, shaded light. Put off all bright lights especially in your children’s bedroom. This signals the kids that it’s bedtime. Use dim, shaded lights only at strategic corners of the house. Under dim, shaded light, a sleep-inducing hormone from the pineal gland in the brain known as melatonin could increase concentratio. Normally, melatonin concentration drops during the day and increases gradually from sunset. Thus, humans tend to sleep at night. Bright artificial lights, however, extend daylight and disrupt this body mechanism.
6. Use soft, slow music. This kind of music diminishes brain excitement into subconscious and eventually into sleep by mellowing conscious nerve signal bombardment in the brain. It also tones down heart rate, decreases pulse rate and respiration, and sets the body to sleep.
7. Encourage them to wake up early. Before sleeping, encourage your children to wake up before sunrise. Never physically enforce them to wake up. Rather, described in an undemanding, but convincing, voice that pleasant things happen in the early morning hours. Treat them with both material and emotional incentives as they wake up early, such as an early morning walk to a nearby kiddy park, a good morning hug, an overseas call to grandma, or a new coloring book.
8. Employ a regular noon nap. Children get tired easily, but their energy gets restored easily, too. Thus they always need to take a noon nap for one-and-a-half hours at most.
9. Sleep with them soundly. As soon as they sleep, follow them right away. Avoid doing chores that may disturb them. Importantl, never bring home your work in fairness to your kid, your spouse, and to you.
