Supporting your child's sleep

Getting a good night’s sleep is essential in supporting your child to reach their full potential. Sleep can affect every aspect of life including behaviour, learning, health and mood – for your child and the entire family.

However, changing any child’s sleep routine is difficult – it takes perseverance, consistency and can often feel like it gets worse before it gets better. These are all common experiences and feelings for all parents, and you are not alone in this. We also recognise that when your child has additional needs or a learning disability you will be up against another set of unique challenges, and this process may take even longer.

Watch Ruth, a Family Engagement and Support Worker, talk you through the importance of sleep, the significance of sleep cycles and offer some advice on how to improve your sleep including how to deal with night waking, encouraging self-settling and establishing a good routine.

What can I do?

The key elements to success are consistency, patience and maintaining a routine. However, there are no guaranteed fixes, and different behavioural approaches will have varying degrees of success with individual children. Below are our initial tips and strategies you can try when assessing your child's sleeping routine.

Keep a Sleep Diary

Use a sleep diary to track your child’s bedtime routine and sleeping habits for 2 weeks. This diary will help you to identify patterns in their routine – including whether certain sleep aids are working, the potential triggers to their routine and the average amount of sleep your child is getting each day. Use your completed diary to make changes to your child’s routine. A sleep diary can also be helpful to show to professionals such as GPs and can be used to support applications for DLA (Disability Living Allowance) to evidence how often you get up in the night to help your child.

Monitor your child's naps

Naps can help a child to sleep better at night, as it prevents them from getting over tired, or falling asleep inappropriately early in the evening.

A child’s daytime sleep cycle is around 45 minutes, it’s recommended that your child sleeps for at least one cycle to get the full benefits from their nap. Ideally, naps should happen in your child’s bed or cot to help build the association between certain environments and going to sleep. However, we recognise this isn’t always possible so don’t worry if your child ends up sleeping in their pushchair or in the car!

Monitor naps by logging them in your sleep diary – this will help you keep track of how long, how often and how effective your child’s naps are throughout the day and may help you to identify patterns as to how this affects them at night. Ask nursery, education providers and other family members to keep track of any naps your child has while with them, so you can build a full picture of exactly how much sleep your child is getting.

Create a sleep routine that works for you and your child

Spend time before bed doing activities that relax your child – for some this may be singing or bath time, but for others it could be doing a puzzle, playing with lego or reading a story. Limit screen time for an hour before bedtime, as the blue light from devices interferes with the production of sleep hormones.

Have a snack! It’s hard to relax and fall asleep if you’re hungry. Some foods such as banana, cherries, dairy and grains can even help with the natural production of melatonin (the hormone that helps regulate sleep). Read more about ‘sleepy foods’.

Ensure bedroom surroundings are comfortable and relaxing. Consider your child’s sensory sensitivities when thinking about temperature of the room, texture of pyjamas and bedding. Remove or cover any bright, noisy or stimulating toys from the room. Any sleep aids such as music, white noise or nightlights should be left on throughout the period the child is asleep if possible, to avoid disorientation and waking due to change of environment.

Be as consistent as possible with your routine, so a child can associate certain times, activities, sensations and environments with going to bed. This includes weekends!

Explain sleep and your child's sleep routine

Various sensory needs mean that a child with additional needs may not recognise physically feeling tired, as sensory feedback can be delayed. Use our social story to explain the need for sleep to your child, as well as to offer help with understanding the social cues and routines that lead up to winding down – the pages are unnumbered so download, print and assemble into an order that reflect your child’s routine.

Put together a visual timetable of this routine, you can use our printable pack of night-time related activities to help.

Medication

For some individuals especially those with autism, problems with sleep could be due to irregular melatonin levels (the hormone that makes you sleepy at night). Synthetic melatonin supplements are only available through prescription – speak to your child’s GP about this. Prior to receiving a prescription, many GPs will want to see that you’ve tried alternate strategies such as behaviour or sleep training - evidence of a sleep diary or the attendance at a sleep course or a Sleep Charity accredited training course can help with this.

What can we do?

Our Family Support Team offers sleep training courses. Please email familysupport@leedsmencap.org.uk if you are interested in attending a course.

Useful resources

We've created some resources that can be used to support your child's sleep:

Sleep diary (PDF)

My bedtime: A social story (PDF)

Bedtime communication cards (PDF)

My bedtime: Visual timetable template (PDF)

The bedroom environment (PDF)

The bedroom environment - easy read (PDF)

Additional support from Leeds Mencap

Check out the rest of our Family Support offer. We have:

Weekly Chats and Tots coffee morning
Family Engagement and Support Workers who can offer advice, signposting and support
Lots of tips and resources on our website

Additional Support and Resources:

This information is not affiliated with Leeds Mencap.