– Hi, I'm Dana. Welcome to this week's video. Well, kids are almost back to school. The summer has come to an end, and we need to start
thinking about getting our little people to bed
again at a decent hour. I've just gone through this with my teens, so it's fresh in my mind. I wanna give you a few tips here today to get yourself set up
for a great school year. The first thing is you gotta start early. You can't just do this Sunday night before the first day of school because it's gonna be too much of a shock to their little systems, especially if you've let
things slide over the summer and they've been going to
bed much later than usual.
So first of all, make sure it's nice and dark in the room. I know in a lot of places,
it's still summer hours, which means the sun is up until nine or 10 o'clock at night some places, so we need to get some
blackout blinds in there or hang some navy sheets on the windows. Just really get darkness on our side because that plays a huge, huge role in stimulating our melatonin and getting us sleepy enough for bed. Then, I would say at least a week, two would be even better, but at least a week before school starts, you need to start getting their
body clocks back on track. If you've gone way off the rails and they've been going to bed much later, then slowly start moving it back by about 1/2 an hour
every two or three nights. Kinda keep slowly bumping it back to the original bedtime. This will mean, too, that you may have to do a
little bit of manipulation on the morning side,
too, with waking them up or opening the door a little bit, letting some sunlight in
to stimulate a wake-up, so that they're waking up early enough that they can be ready for
bed at an earlier hour.
Bedtime routines are also super important. Hopefully, those haven't
gone too far off track. You might need to clean
it up a little bit, but we want a bedtime routine of about five steps in that process. We need it to be sort of repetitive, the same every night. Start with a bath, then jammies, teeth brush, story time, bed. Those are my favorite five, and just get this really
predictable for the child. You could start a reward chart. If you've got a child who's not super in love with going back to school or getting back on track with bed, you could start a little
simple reward chart where if you can get yourself
ready for bed on time, if we can do it in a cooperative manner and get the lights out
at the time we need to, then you can have a reward
in the morning for that.
The reward needs to
come pretty immediately, so as soon as she wakes up for the day, she needs to be given that reward to really make that set in. And that'll help sort of
get things back on track. Another thing you really
wanna be watching out for, and this can be with any age but certainly with school-age children, any kind of screen activity needs to be turned off at
least an hour before bed. And that's gonna help get that melatonin where we need it to be. Any kind of screen from a phone to a television to a computer screen, all of that emits what we call blue light, which is the most… interferes the most with
melatonin production. So, keeping screens completely off, even going around and turning off any unnecessary lighting in the house, that will be helpful for
getting your little ones ready and back on track for bed and back to school time. It is a beautiful thing. Thanks so much for watching today. Sleep well!.
