Why Your Child Sleeps Poorly: Understanding the Causes and Finding Solutions

Does your child have trouble falling asleep at night, and only naps while watching cartoons during the day? In this article, we will talk about how this can be fixed.

First of all, it is important to assess the child's overall routine, as well as the quality of their sleep. The answers to the following questions will help you create a more detailed picture.

• What does the child do during the day? If they have too many impressions or an excessive workload of activities and classes, and also if they spend too much time in front of the TV and with gadgets, then their nervous system may become overexcited. At 4 years old, the inhibitory system in children is not yet sufficiently developed, and they simply cannot calm themselves down and inhibit themselves. Then it is worth considering reducing the workload.

  If a child attends kindergarten, this is already a very noticeable burden on their nervous system, and additional activities in the evenings can worsen the situation.

• Do they have enough physical activity? Active walks, research and exploration activities during the day, and as much movement as possible are the key to ensuring that the child can realize their full potential and release excess energy. But it is important that such activities do not exhaust the child too much - for example, long walks over long distances are not necessary at this age.

• Analyze the amount of sleep. At the age of 4, children's nighttime sleep should generally last about 9-11 hours, and daytime sleep - 1-2 hours.

  It happens that children go to bed for a daytime sleep quite late, which leads to the fact that they do not have time to "accumulate" fatigue by the evening. Or during the daytime, sleep becomes very long due to a decrease in nighttime sleep.

What Can Be Done

• Review the daily routine. Some children at the age of 4 no longer need a daytime sleep - but this is a purely individual story, and it is better to make such a decision together with a specialist and after careful observation of the child. If a child starts to be capricious at 5-6 pm, or becomes lethargic, or simply falls asleep on their own - then they still need sleep, but it is worth shifting it to an earlier time. Often, нарушения of the sleep and rest regime is associated with the fact that it is more convenient for the parents themselves to get up later and go to bed later as well. But the child's nervous system is not adapted to such a schedule. And then you need to choose: either parental comfort, or the health of the child's nervous system.

• Exclude cartoons from the daytime sleep ritual. Cartoons and gadgets in general are a strong irritant for the nervous system. And the child falls asleep under them not because they calm them down, but on the contrary. Their nervous system becomes so overloaded that sleep is the only salvation from excessive visual and auditory stimuli.

• Complicate the rituals for nighttime sleep. Rituals are still important at this age, but it is worth considering that they are becoming more complex. The ritual can take from 30 to 60 minutes and should be the same day after day. Usually, rituals include a certain sequence of familiar and pleasant actions for the child, which are aimed at their relaxation. This can be reading a book, putting toys to bed, a calm conversation with a parent.

  Remember that a bath and water procedures in general do not have a calming effect on all children. For some, they have the opposite effect.

  The ritual should also not include negative or exciting activities, such as cleaning ears or games with a lot of laughter. A shortened version of the ritual is applicable to going to daytime sleep.

It is worth remembering that at a young age, a child will rather want to play with you than sleep, so it is extremely important to be able to negotiate with the child and remember that it is the mother/father who is the main person in the family and she/he sets the rules and helps to follow them.