The Importance of Sleep

Guest Post by Kelley of MyChildSleeps.com

Is your child happy, energetic, focused, and willing to roll with the flow, most days? Or does your child complain, fight, cry, or yell for no apparent reason? Without sufficient sleep, your child’s performance, mood, focus, and ability to work with others deteriorates rapidly.

Unfortunately, we live in a sleep deprived society. But sleep is so crucial in your child’s develop. By the age of five, your child has spent half his life asleep. This time is important for the brain to develop and retain all the skills and information learned each day. Eighty-five percent of the brain development occurs by the age of 5. If your child isn’t getting the sleep he needs, he’s missing out on the restorative time his brain needs to develop and grow.

Here are some keys points about sleep that you should know:

• First and foremost, make sure all medical issues have been ruled out. Frequent night sweating, snoring, mouth breathing, restless sleeping are all possible signs of a sleep disorder. If your child exhibits these signs, talk to your doctor.
• Sleep is a learned skill. Babies need to be taught how to put themselves to sleep without the aid of sleep crutches, like rocking, and nursing.
• We all wake up periodically throughout the night. Partial arousals occur frequently in young children, especially in the early morning hours. If a child doesn’t know how to get back to sleep on their own, they are going to cry out until someone helps them get back to sleep.
• Be aware of your child’s sleep windows. Children have a natural rhythm of awake and sleep times. If you miss those natural sleepy times, your child’s brain begins to secrete hormones, one of them being cortisol. Cortisol acts like a mild form of adrenaline which makes is difficult, if not impossible to get your child to sleep until it wears off.
• Quantity and quality matter in sleep. Not only does the amount of sleep your child gets important, but so is the type of sleep. Once a child reaches 4-5 months old, all sleep, including daytime naps, should be in a quiet, dark, cool, and motionless location.
• No matter your method for sleep training, consistency is of utmost importance! If you are trying to teach your child to sleep in their own bed, but you let him in your bed at 4am because you are too tired to enforce anything else, then you are using intermittent reinforcement. If you are not consistent with the rules, then your child will not understand what you really expect of them.