Better sleep habits for teens

Hi, I’m Gemma Arnold from Toddlers, Teens, and Between. I’m the between and toddler expert. And I’m Sophie Ziff, our teen expert. And we’re really excited to share our top tips to help equip you as parents for your toddlers, your teens, and between.

Something that we often hear is how parents can actually support their teenagers with better sleep habits. We’ve got a few tips to give for guys now. And the first one is really thinking about the fact that teenagers see the nights as a break from all the expectations and pressure that the day holds. And the kind of they’re free to procrastinate because it’s nighttime and it’s not the day where you’ve kind of you’re, you’re expected to achieve or do or complete.

Like they’ve been holding themselves together all day. And then the nighttime is like, they can just let go of yeah.

Which is why we often see during like half term and end of terms at school, especially this kind of big shift in terms of suddenly being nocturnal and may, you know, asleep all day and awake all night. So we’ve got some tips for parents about how to manage that.

And the very first thing is always to talk to your teenager, how is their sleep? How is the quality of their sleep? How many hours are they roughly getting? Are they enjoying their sleep? Like are they are they getting feeling refreshed when they wake up in the morning?

We love advising a few tips. So the first is to rather than kind of endless the scrolling on the phone, the last thing you do is actually to encourage, three little and three big grateful things that they’ve achieved or done or experienced or seen in the day. So it’s a really lovely way to change a mindset before sleep, to kind of just end with gratitude.

Also it’s involving them in their day and kind of reflecting on their day. So it’s really good to have them kind of come up with it and sit with them and give them the space and the time so that they can process it and reflect back.

And it doesn’t have to be with you. It could be that you get them a journal or may have that on the side of their bed. And that’s the sort of thing that they do just before sleep, you could also do really simple things like buy a little pillow spray, or you could, there’s loads of things. You can get a proper alarm clock rather than having their phone as their alarm, because it’s just so easy to scroll. So actually charging it outside.

And also things like mindfulness apps that they can listen to as an audio book, but kind of with the phone further away from the bed.

There’s lots and it’s okay that kids suffer with different, difficult sleep. That it’s a pattern and it’s a period of time and it will get better.

And something you might also notice is the shift between when the term ends versus when they’re going back to school and they might not be able to cope with it so well and you might just see a general change and again, that’s okay, it happens. They’ve kind of gone from one Headspace and the entering another, and they’re still processing that.

So actually encouraging earlier bedtimes 45 minutes before, as you head back to school, it’s always helpful.