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A SLEEP expert has revealed that you can get your kids to bed at 5.30pm without them waking up early in the morning.
Child Sleep Coach Autumn, who posts under the Instagram page @restgrowthrive, gushed about the benefits of an early bedtime.
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Taking to her social media page, she wrote: “Tell a parent to put their little one to bed at 5:30/6:00 p.m. and you’ll get some wide eyes. ⠀
“Trust me, I get it – an early bedtime can be SCARY!
“Most often, parents think it will lead to an early wakeup. But, in many circumstances an early bedtime can be your secret weapon to your child getting a GREAT night of rest and repaying any built up sleep debts.
“It *typically* winds up with the child sleeping in until their normal wakeup time.”
Autumn said that most babies and toddlers do best with a regular bedtime falling somewhere between 6-8:00pm.
She added: “When I talk about super early bedtimes, a bedtime as early as 5:30 p.m. is NOT meant to be their new normal forever.”
The sleep expert said the early bedtime is a “temporary solution” for a number of situations, including when children are losing “an entire sleep period in a nap transition.”’
She said: “Bumping bedtime up temporarily is key to protecting night sleep and avoiding a cycle of over tiredness.”
She added: “It’s always a good idea to bump bedtime earlier if naps throughout the day were short, on-the-go, or totally nonexistent.”
Another scenario that benefits from an early bedtime is when you’ve been seeing early wakeups for a while.
She said: “If your child has been waking up for the day in the 5’s (or the 4s!); it is often due to a bit of chronic sleep debt and a few nights of an earlier bedtime can help them repay that sleep debt.” ⠀
She added that you should not be “afraid” of the early bedtime.
Since uploading her video, it has been viewed over 3.8million times, and her tip could be a life changer for busy parents.
In many circumstances an early bedtime can be your secret weapon to your child getting a GREAT night of rest and repaying any built up sleep debts.
Autumn, Sleep Coach
Lyndsey Hookway, the co-founder of the Holistic Sleep Coaching Program, said children’s sleep varies enormously both by age, and from child to child.
She explained that in general, children need less sleep as they get older – reducing from 12-15 hours in total at 6 months, to 10-13 hours by the age of 5 years.
She said: “These sleep totals are based on several large multi-country studies of average sleep, and of course there will also be children who fall outside of these ranges.
“I call these children ‘low sleep need’ and ‘high sleep need’ children. Children’s sleep is affected by their age, unique sleep needs, genetics, environment, lifestyle, exercise levels, stress, health and diet.
“The average 2 year old needs 11-13 hours of sleep in 24 hours.
“This includes daytime sleep, so if a child is napping for 90 minutes in the day, and their unique sleep need is only 12 hours in 24, this means that they only need 10.5 hours overnight – so a bedtime of 8pm may be appropriate for a child who wakes up at 6.30am.”
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