For most parents, bedtime can’t come fast enough. But if you have kids that take a long time to fall asleep or get in and out of bed multiple times before finally settling in, even bedtime can feel like a long time.
If you’re tired of dealing with this with your own kids, here are three tips to help get your kids to fall asleep faster at night.
Give Kids Their Own Bedtime
According to Carissa Stephens, a contributor to Healthline.com, it can be very hard to change the sleep patterns of kids. If your kids wake up early in the morning regardless of when you put them to bed or don’t typically fall asleep as early as you might like, you may have better luck working with their own internal clock than against it.
With this in mind, you may want to consider giving your kids their own bedtimes. To determine this, consider setting up a baby monitor in each kids room to see what time they really fall asleep and wake up each day. Then, you can try to set their bedtime and wake up time around how their body clock naturally works for them. While this might require you to be a little more flexible, bedtime might not be such a fight each night.
Stop Screen Time Earlier
One thing that might be causing your kids to have a hard time falling asleep at night could be how much screen time they have during their waking hours.
Especially in the last hour or two before bedtime, Amanda MacMillan, a contributor to WebMD.com, advises that you turn off all screens for your kids. This will help your kids’ brains to start naturally producing melatonin rather than having this function be stopped as a result of the lights coming from the screens.
Be More Active During The Day
In addition to stopping the use of screens at night as you lead up to your bedtime routine with your kids, you can also adjust what your kids do during the day to help them be more ready to sleep at night.
According to Jill Wiseman, a contributor to Sleep Foundation, getting enough physical activity earlier in the day can help make it easier for kids to fall asleep at night. Ideally, you should aim for your kids to get at least an hour of exercise throughout the day. However, try not to get them too physically riled up later in the evening for best sleep results.
If you’ve been having a hard time getting your kids to fall asleep quickly when going to bed at night, consider using the tips mentioned above to help make evenings and bedtime more peaceful.