In addition, to keeping up with reading and mathematics this summer, it is a good idea to pay attention to your child’s sleeping patterns. How many hours a night and the type of sleep your child gets has a direct benefit to how long he/she is able to focus and how well he/she feels everyday while in school. Getting a good night’s sleep is an easy activity for most that delivers amazing benefit. Some of the benefits of quality sleep are not only include the typical results like quick mind, good attitude, and the ability to sustain concentration but also a good night’s sleep is known to help with weight control, creativity, and flexibility.
By the end of the summer, children have often developed a sleep diet that keeps them up into the wee hours and asleep to the later part of the morning. Unfortunately, it is this sleep pattern that many children enter the school year with and it is not only difficult for the child to make changes but also difficult for parents to manage.
It is during the summer that you can begin to adjust your child’s sleep patterns so that when the school year begins, healthy sleeping habits are in place. Most doctors recommend that children three to six need to sleep ten to twelve hours a night, children seven to twelve need to sleep ten to eleven hours a night and young adults twelve to eighteen need to sleep eight to nine hours each night. Given this information, the challenge is to figure out how to help your child and young adult adjust their summer sleeping schedule so that come the first day of school there is an easy transition.
First, I would recommend considering your child’s age and taking the amount of hours your child needs to sleep into account. Next, determine at what time the school day will begin and figure out what time the child needs to be asleep in order to ensure your child gets the prescribed amount of sleep. Secondly, during the summer months make sure that you stick to the sleep pattern that you want your child to have. You may need to start slowly and build to a time that the child should go to bed and be woken up. If you find that you are occasionally off by an hour here or there it will not have a dramatic consequence on the pattern that you are trying to establish.
Some say that good quality sleep is related to good diet and exercise. Providing your family with a balanced and healthy diet is sometimes difficult if you are busy, attend a lot of picnics, and are away from your home. When establishing sleep patterns, you may want to consider adjusting diet if the child’s diet and exercise routine isn’t healthy. You may even want to consult with your pediatrician for some dietary and exercise advice.
Sometimes it is impossible to meet your child’s sleep needs and one idea that you might want to try is thinking about the cycle of sleep that lasts ninety minutes. If you take the amount of time that you can be asleep and divide it by ninety minutes what you might find is that getting up an half hour earlier than what you planned might just be more restful. In other words, if you go to bed at 11:00 pm and need to get up at 7:00 am, you might find it more restful to wake up at 6:30am rather than 7:00am. At 7:00am you will have just begun another cycle of sleep and the consequence is that you will force yourself to wake in the beginning of a sleep cycle and feel like you are still sleepy. If instead you wake at 6:30 am it suggests that you have had seven complete sleeping cycles over a period of seven and one half hours of time.