Time To Say Goodnight

By David Dawdy, M.D., Associated Pediatrics, Westerville, Ohio and the Central Ohio Pediatric Society

Your child can be a better sleeper! In spite of genetic variations in sleep patterns, and parental anxieties about our children's nighttime comfort and emotional welll being, sleep skills can be taught.

Newborns sleep about 15 to 18 hours, but seldom more than 3 hours at a time. By four months of age most babies are sleeping about 15 hours a day with two to four naps. Older babies need 13 to 14 hours of sleep and two or three naps. By the middle teenage years most children need 8 to 9 hours of sleep.

Sleep consists of two distinct cycles. Just like motor and speech skills, sleep cycles mature from infancy to adolescence. Regardless of age, we all awaken and cycle back into deep sleep several times each night. Thus, the key to good sleep is not staying asleep but rather learning to fall back asleep. Until age 4 to 5 most children can't establish prolonged deep sleep patterns, so they tend to awaken many times each night. Learning to self-soothe and go back to sleep is a mandatory life skill.

Start teaching your child to be a good sleeper in the first month of life by introducing the differences between day and night.

Some children are poor sleepers because of medical or surgical conditions. Up to 50% of children with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and as many as 80% of special needs children will have sleep issues. Your pediatrician can help with these unique problems. Although bedtime resistance is a normal part of growing up, remember that as parents, we are ultimately in control and responsible for enforcing bedtime rituals and requiring nighttime self-soothing. There must be a line that cannot be crossed if we are to give our children the gift of good sleep.