Truthfully, the chances that your child’s sleep schedule aren’t the best are quite high. Adolescents in high school and college, despite needing a sufficient amount of sleep, do not get the recommended eight hours of uninterrupted sleep per night. There are tons of reasons for this: technology, caffeine, and just being too busy are just a few factors, to name a few.
Another big one is mental illness. Depression and anxiety can lead to using technology and endlessly scrolling on phones as a coping mechanisms, and mental illness symptoms can be triggered by the stress that comes with school and having too many things to do. Overall, it’s understandable why sleep hygiene is so poor in youths today.
We’ve shared a lot of the common tips to help manage sleep before, including making sure your child doesn’t use a screen at least half an hour before bed and keeping their phone away from them, so they have to get up out of bed to turn off the alarms that they’ve set.
We also wanted to share a couple of resources that have compiled some of these tips together into a checklist, so if your child is someone who likes to have a reference and likes to plan things out, these might work for them.
Sleep Check!
Sleep Hygiene Checklist
Sleep Hygiene for Teens
Sleep Strategies and Checklists
While these might be designed for out of your child’s age range, this could be a good opportunity for them to get creative and customize a sleep checklist for themselves! They can download them on their phone, print them out and keep it next to their bed, or copy and paste the tips that apply to them most and create their own checklist.
What is your child’s sleep schedule like? What have you done to talk to them and help them with their sleep? How have these conversations gone? What do you think causes sleep issues, and what have they shared about what causes issues in their sleep?