A Healthy Child Needs a Healthy Brain, A Healthy Brain Needs Healthy Sleep

1. Because your older child appreciates how she feels better with healthy sleep, she strives for sleep.  For you child, early sleep training prevents subjective blindness to one’s own sleep loss (Blog Post 241 & 242).  
2. Healthy sleep continues in the older child because the parents have established a foundation for it based on:
   A. Routines (Blog Post 242A)
   B. Establish Priorities (Blog Post 242B)
   C. Family Values (Blog post 242C)
3. Among older children who appreciate feeling better when well-rested and who have a family foundation for sleep, there is less resistance and more self-direction regarding sleep (Blog Post 242D).
4. Helping older children sleep may be difficult, but it is not impossible. Early sleep training makes it easier to help older children sleep (Blog Post 242E).

Survey

I asked the same parents if they continued later to put forth the effort, with age-appropriate modifications, to encourage healthy sleep in their preteen or teenager, or whether they were forced to abandon trying to help their older child sleep well because it was an impossible task. 

To summarize their responses: helping preteens and teenagers to sleep well continues to be a part of parenting, but there are many challenges, individual variations, and no guarantees. Here are some parents’ reports:

1. Guidance and Suggestions, but Not Mandates

Battles with teens are many. I have consciously decided not to make sleep one of them. We provide guidance and suggestions, but not mandates.

Ellen is in eleventh grade. For her, we try to encourage sleep without bludgeoning. Alice is now a freshman in college. At this point, when it comes to Alice’s sleep, we offer advice when solicited but feel it is no longer our place to comment. Our approach with the girls has always been to treat them, first and foremost, with respect. As they have gotten older, we recognize that when they choose to go to sleep is their decision, but as their parents, we are still in a position to help them see their options.

Sleep patterns and the effectiveness of early childhood sleep discipline depend on the child. I can’t help but think the early foundation is helpful. I am confident that up to this point in my children’s lives I have laid the foundation for healthy sleep habits, and I’m willing to give them some freedom with respect to their sleep rituals to find out what works best for them.