Health and Wellbeing
Improve Children’s Sleep With These Top Tips
A calm hour before bed and a few habits you can stick to can help children and teenagers get the sleep they need.
- 37 minutes
- 10 modules
- Certificate
Members
Parent membership: all 50 courses for parents and carers, £40 a year or £4 a month after 14 days free.
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What you'll learn
- Set up a wind-down routine that starts an hour before bed
- Make a bedroom calmer for sleep, including light, noise and toys
- Handle night-time waking and night terrors calmly and consistently
- Negotiate sleep habits with teenagers whose body clocks run later
- Know when to get help from a health visitor, school nurse or GP
About this course
A tired child finds everything harder. Concentration goes, tempers get shorter and ordinary ups and downs feel much bigger. Teenagers are their own battle, partly because their body clock really does run later, so being woken at 7am can feel to them the way 4am feels to you.
Here you'll find practical sleep tips to use at home, or to pass on to families if you work in a school. At the heart of it is a wind-down window: screens off an hour before bed, a warm bath, a milky drink and three good things from the day. There's advice for younger children, including what to do about night terrors, and for teenagers, where negotiation gets further than rules.
None of it works in a single night. Stick with a change for a couple of weeks, and you'll know when it's time to ask the school nurse or GP.
10 modules
Open in order
- 2 min
Introduction
- 4 min
What is sleep?
- 3 min
Lack of sleep
- 6 min
Wind down window
- 11 min
Primary school age
- 6 min
Secondary school age and over
- 3 min
What to avoid!
- 3 min
What else could be affecting your sleep?
- 2 min
When to get help
- 2 min
Wrap up