How to reprogram a child’s internal clock With this groundwork covered, you’re ready to start the process of resetting your child’s internal clock. Don’t ask your child to go to bed before he or she starts feeling drowsy. Begin by setting an official bedtime that accommodates your child’s current internal clock. You need to approach your goal in steps.You need to make sure that late afternoon naps aren’t recharging your child’s “battery.”.You need to make sure bedtime isn’t confrontational.You need a solution that addresses all the factors that contribute to your child’s sleep habits.
So if you want to get your child adapted to an earlier bedtime, you need to pay attention to the big picture. In effect, you could be training your child to develop the mental habits that can cause chronic insomnia. Instead of learning to associate your calls for bedtime with calmness and drowsiness, your child will be learning to associate bedtime with feeling alert, distressed, or restless. With repeated, nightly conflicts, your child will be learning all the wrong lessons. If bedtime conflicts cause stress, you’ll have made it even harder for your child to become drowsy. Put it all together, and you can see why trying to force sleep is a bad idea. Our brains are also equipped with a kind of emergency override, a system that keeps us awake when we’re anxious, stressed, or otherwise excited.Īnd what’s a common trigger of such feelings at night?īattles over bedtime. A timely surge of melatonin, and sleep pressure, won’t guarantee that you’ll fall asleep. Moreover, our brains aren’t slaves to either of these systems - the internal clock and the battery. And if we take a long nap too late in the day, we may find it very difficult to fall asleep at bedtime - even if our internal clock is telling us that it’s late at night. A long nap may recharge our battery for many hours. A brief nap will help purge that drowsy feeling for a while. When we finally doze again, we start to reduce this “sleep pressure.” The battery begins to recharge. We feel an ever-increasing, physiological pressure to asleep. It’s as if we’re beginning the day with a freshly-charged battery.īut the longer we remain awake, the more that battery drains. When we wake up after a restful night’s sleep, we feel refreshed and alert. So you might assume that the solution focuses on reprogramming the internal clock, and that’s not totally wrong.īut it’s an incomplete solution, because circadian processes aren’t the only processes that affect sleep. Their circadian rhythms are out of sync with their official bedtime (LeBourgeois et al 2013). These kids can’t fall asleep, and it isn’t their fault. And research confirms this is a widespread problem, particularly for young children. What happens if we pressure children to sleep before their brains experience the surge in melatonin?įailure. This sudden rise triggers feelings of drowsiness, making it easy for us to fall asleep.īut the precise timing varies from individual to individual, and this is true in children as well as adults. When all goes well, we experience a surge in melatonin after nightfall. Sleep is regulated by an internal clock - our circadian rhythms - and a key ingredient in the process is the hormone, melatonin. You can’t make a child fall asleep on command. Trying to force the issue is counterproductive. Your child isn’t falling asleep early enough at night.
Or maybe you need to prepare your child for a new schedule.Įither way, you face a problem. Maybe you’ve got a kid who stays up too late. Understanding the big picture: How circadian rhythms, daytime naps, and social factors impact your child’s ability to feel drowsy at bedtime But to make sure kids feel physiologically drowsy at bedtime, we need to use additional strategies. How can we help kids adapt to an earlier schedule? Morning sunlight, exercise, and other environmental cues can help reset a child’s internal clock. © 2020 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved