Sleeping Well in the Summertime
There are a number of reasons why your little one’s sleep can get derailed in the summer. Hotter temperatures, longer days, and the change to their schedule as school lets out are just a few of them.
But, as always, there are solutions to those challenges! If you know how to prepare for them and what to do when problems pop up, they can be a minor nuisance instead of a full blown disaster.
So with that in mind, I’ve got a little survival kit in this week’s video that will help you anticipate and prevent the most common summertime sleep disruptors, ensuring your little one will be well-rested and ready for the best summer ever!
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Hi, Dana here. So for a lot of us, the summer months are upon us, and with that comes a lot of flexibility. Most of our kids are out of school or we’re taking family holidays.
Those longer summer days make us feel like we don’t have to go to bed at the normal time. This like false sense that it’s still daytime is tricky for all of our circadian rhythms. I grew up in Canada, and in the summer months it was light until 10:30, 11:00 at night, and it tricks our circadian rhythm into thinking it’s not time for bed, we’re not tired yet, and it wreaks havoc on an adult’s circadian rhythm, and so we need to be really mindful of that when we’re thinking about our children.
Because the way that body clocks work best is when there’s consistency around when we go to bed and when we wake up in the morning, so even though it’s tempting to let those summer nights stretch on and have our kids going to bed later and later that’s actually not the most beneficial to their body clock. And so keeping that consistency strong through the summer months will actually help them do better and keep them on track for when school or the real world starts again in the fall.
So here’s my tips for dealing with the summer months. A, block out that sun. So if you’ve got a child who’s used to going to bed at 7:00, 7:30, but it looks like, you know, midday where you live, you’re going to need to put some sort of sun blocker up on the windows, so whether you get a blackout curtain or blackout screens. I’ve had clients who just put garbage bags up over the window to block out the light. We do know that the dimming or the darkening of the sky triggers our melatonin production, so if that’s not happening naturally with the sun going down then we have to artificially manufacture it with blocking out sunlight.
So even the couple of hours leading up to bedtime, I would say close the curtains, turn off any unnecessary lighting in the house. Through your child’s bedtime routine, make sure the lights are dimmed, the curtains are drawn, the blackout blinds are up so by the time they’re ready to go into their crib or their bed for the night, we’ve got a head start. We’ve got some melatonin happening naturally in the system that’s gonna make things a lot easier for the child.
On the other end of that, we wanna keep that morning sunlight out. Again, in Canada, the sun went down at 11:00 but started to rise again at 5:00 in the morning, so we really need to keep that out in the morning as well or we’re gonna have early wakers who are not gonna have had enough sleep because they went to bed a little bit too late. So we really need to minimize the disrupt to the nighttime sleep quality. So again, keeping those blackout blinds up over the windows however we can. Even taping down the corners so no light is getting in around the edges will really help. And then I think the next thing to think about is just like remembering how important sleep is.
Like, I get it, if you’re on holidays or you’re going for, you know, after dinner ice cream or whatever is happening that’s a little bit fun for those summer months, you know, one time a week is not gonna be the end of the world, but if you’re doing that day after day or three or four times a week, it’s going to start affecting your child’s circadian rhythm. It’s gonna get thrown off balance. And when that happens, it actually makes it a little harder for them to get to sleep when it’s time, they start having inconsistent morning wake up times, and it just kind of throws a wrench into their body rhythm.
And so we just wanna be really mindful, you know? Sleep is as important as anything else in our lives, so I always equal it to food. We would not like deprive our child of dinner for any reason that we could conceive of, and so pushing bedtimes or letting those slip and slide around is really the same as depriving them of dinner, which you would agree you would never do.
So let’s not do it with sleep either because it’s that important to keeping them healthy and regulated, keeping their moods stabilized. I mean, sleep plays a role in every single thing that shows up in our lives, so let’s keep it going even through those summer months. It’ll keep your summer going well, and it’s gonna keep them on track so that when fall does roll around it’s not such a shock to the system to get back on track.
Thanks for watching. Sleep well.
If your baby, infant or toddler is having trouble sleeping through the night, help is just a click away! The Sleep Sense Program has helped over 107,000 parents to get their kids sleeping 11-12 hours through the night AND taking long, restful naps during the day. If you’re ready to get started – I’m looking forward to helping you!