Successful sleep

1. Successfulsleep Mindful Parenting

2. What sleep problems are happening in your family?

3. Signs Child Isn’t Getting Enough Sleep: • Toddler to Preschooler: • Late afternoon is a nightmare • Napping in the car, especially on short rides • Ants in their pants (trying to fight sleep) • Short fuse (more than usual) • Clingyness or increased dependency • Elementary School Age: • Does not wake up on their own in the morning • “Loses it” over small things, like sharing • Experiences stomach or headaches • Is crabby, anxious or uncooperative in the morning • Has a poor appetite

4. Why is sleep important? Mindful Parenting

5. Research demonstrates that children who get more sleep: • Have higher grade averages. • Perform better on reasoning and mathematical skills. • Have higher reading scores. • Experience fewer accidents. • Get along with others better. • Get sick less frequently. • Are less likely to be overweight. • Are less likely to be depressed. • Are less likely to have behavior problems.

7. How much sleep is needed? Quiz time!

8. How much sleep is needed? Child’s Age Hours of Sleep Needed 16 to 20 total hours per day 14 to 16 total hours per day 12 to 14 total hours per day 11 to 13 total hours per day 10 to 11 hours at night 9 to 10 hours at night • Zero to Six Months • Seven to 18 months • 18 months to three years • Three to five years • Six to 12 years • Teenagers

10. More sleep facts: • Children two years old and under spend more time sleeping, per day, than they do awake. (Enjoy it while you can!) • Any schedule change that varies more than 30 to 60 minutes, creates schedule disruption and makes it harder to fall asleep and stay asleep.     • Sleep heals and repairs your heart and blood vessels. • Ongoing sleep deficiency is linked to an increased risk of heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke.

11. How can we improve sleep? Mindful Parenting

12. What should be avoided? • Caffeine (at least 4 hours before bedtime) • Heavy meals (at least one hour before bedtime) • TV/Screens/Video games/Cell phone • Exciting activity (active games, scary stories, physical exercise one hour before bed) • Rocking child to sleep, sleeping with child (if you want child to self-soothe) • Light

13. What should be improved? • Room temperature on the cool side, avoid bundling babies up too warmly • Routine • Build in calming activities like reading, listening to calm music • Bed as comfy as possible • Allowing enough transition time for child to be asleep at needed time • Teaching self-soothing • A sleep transition object that smells like you

14. R.E.S.T Technique Routine: Devise a bedtime routine and stick to it as much as possible Empowerment: Let your child be the leader in designing their bedtime routine. Offer them acceptable choices, let them design the chart (if you have one) Snuggle Time: Take time to read, sing or just talk with your child and connect with them one more time before the end of day Teach Relaxation Techniques: Teach your child how to use guided visualization, yoga, meditation or other mindfulness techniques to help them fall off to sleep.

15. Handling sleep issues Mindful Parenting

16. Getting Child To Sleep: • You can’t. Sleep is mostly in the child’s control. • You can create optimum conditions for sleep. • Wear child out • Reduce/eliminate daytime naps • Create and stick to routine • Be consistent about having child staying in bed/room • Optimize sleep environment

17. Nightmares and Night Terrors • Soothe child • If they can tell you about the dream, listen • Help them come up with a positive end to the dream (for example, they find out the monster is made of chocolate ice cream and eat it up) • Have them practice and visualize the new ending • Have them practice a muscle relaxation technique to relax their bodies for sleep • Have them focus on imagining themselves in a mundane activity to lull them to sleep (for example, swimming laps in a swimming pool, practicing shooting hoops)

18. Getting Child To Sleep Alone • Avoid rocking child to sleep or staying with child until they fall asleep from an early age • If child joins you in bed, gently take child back to their bed • No fanfare, just “you need to sleep in your bed” or say nothing. Don’t engage in conversation. • If child is distraught, you can stay in room, but not facing child or touching child. “I’ll stay in here as long as you stay in your bed. I will leave once you go to sleep. “ • Each time you have to stay, move farther away • Keep with putting the child back in bed. Eventually they will wear out. • Be matter of fact, not overly nurturing • Set up reward for sleeping in own bed (new sheets or a new bed, or just stickers).

19. Mindful Sleep solutions for adults Mindful Parenting

20. Mindfulness and Sleep Doing Mode Being Mode In bed, anxieties about coming events or past mistakes often come to visit The brain defaults to “doing” mode, trying to use past memories to solve our anxiety. This often leads to more anxiety, and thoughts spinning out of control It’s precisely because we are trying to control our thoughts that they get away from us The secret is to switch your brain to “being” mode • Our brains are excellent at task-based problem solving • Our brains are goal-oriented, wanting to find an answer for all problems • Our brains search the database of our memories for solutions to current problems • At bedtime, this goal-oriented facet of our brains keeps us awake as the brain tries to use this goal-based method dealing with emotion-based problems • This method doesn’t work for emotion-based problems!

21. How to Engage Being Mode “Being” means being in the present moment with yourself. Recognize that your worries are only thoughts. They are not reality or even good predictors of the future. Picture your thoughts as clouds, drifting across the sky, or currents in a river flowing by You are aware of them and acknowledge them, but you are just observing them, not judging them or acting on them. Just let them drift by.

22. Other Mindfulness Techniques • Breathing Awareness: There’s no right way to breathe, and no need to control your breath. Just relax and breathe however is natural to you. • Try to imagine the air is coming from far away and you are blowing it out to a distant place. You might also say to yourself ‘in’ and ‘out’ to match your breathing. Or perhaps think of the word ‘relax’ on each out breath. • Concentrate on your chest or abdomen rising and falling – can you feel it? Can you taste the air as it enters your mouth? Is it cool or warm? Is there any scent? • Your mind will probably wander at some point, and thoughts will arise. Each time it does, don’t worry about it. Acknowledge the thoughts you have, then gently bring your focus back to your breathing. • You may find that this happens many times, and that’s perfectly normal. So don’t worry if it does, don’t criticize yourself or worry that you’re not doing it properly or it isn’t working. • Just keep bringing your attention back to the breath. And as you do this, little by little feel your body gently sink into your mattress.

23. Body Scan Relaxation: Start by imagining your brain leaving your head and travelling through your body to one of your feet. Once there, imagine your toe and foot muscles tightening and then relaxing. • Then imagine taking your mind up to your calf, knee and thigh. Stopping in each place to repeat the muscle tensing and relaxing. You can then repeat the exercise with your other leg and the rest of your body. • You may find your mind wanders many times. And as before, acknowledge these thoughts in a positive way, but bring your mind gently back to concentrate on your muscles. • Gratitude Practice: Starting with the beginning of your day, think of each thing that you can be grateful, focusing on each small gift throughout the entire day. For example, gratitude that you woke up. Gratitude that you had breakfast. Gratitude that you have children to wake up to. This is a great one if your mind wants to be filled with something, and keeps reverting to worry. Your mind will wander, but just keep bringing yourself gently back to think about your gratitude. • Guided Visualization for Sleep: Search Youtube, there are dozens!

24. Review

25. Upstairs, Downstairs

26. Breathe

27. 7 Attitudes of Mindful Parenting • 1.NON-JUDGING:  Being an impartial witness of your child’s experience requires that you become aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner And outer experiences that we are normally caught up in, observe it, and step back from it.  Just observe how much you are preoccupied with liking and disliking your child’s behavior or judging it as “good” or “bad”  during a ten-minute period as you parent your child. • 2.PATIENCE:  A form of wisdom, it demonstrates that we accept the fact that sometimes things for our children must unfold in their own time.  We intentionally remind ourselves not to be impatient with our child’s growth and development because we are tense or agitated or frightened.  We give our children room to grow and develop at their own pace even when we might wish them to develop more quickly (for example, toilet training).  Why?  Because they are going to develop on their own timetable anyway!  Each moment is their life in that moment, don’t blink or you might miss something precious. • 3.BEGINNER’S MIND:  an open, beginner’s mind allows us to be receptive to new possibilities for our child and prevents us from getting stuck in the rut of our own expertise about our child’s behavior.  No moment is the same as any other - each one is unique and contains unique possibilities.  Our child may surprise us if we allow it! Are you able to see your child as a unique being filled with endless possibilities? • 4.TRUST:  developing a basic trust in yourself and your feelings and intuition is an integral part of parenting.  It is far better to trust in your intuition and your own authority regarding your child, even if you make some mistakes, than always to look outside yourself for guidance.  You are the expert on your child.  If something doesn’t feel right, why not honour your feelings?   • 5.NON-STRIVING: your child’s only goal is to be their own person..  The irony is that they already are.  This craziness may be pointing you toward a new way of seeing your child, one in which you stop comparing your child to other children, and enjoy them for who they are more.  If you think, “my child must be a good student, or an athlete, or I  must control their behavior”, you have introduced an idea in your mind of where your child should be, and that they are not OK right now.  This attitude undermines mindfulness, which involves simply paying attention to whatever is happening. • 6.ACCEPTANCE:  seeing things as they actually are in the present.  If your child is developmentally delayed, has challenging behavior. Or has a disability, accept that your child is not developing typically.  In the course of our daily lives, we often waste a lot of energy denying and resisting what is already fact.  When we do that, we are basically trying to force situations to be the way we would like them to be, which only makes for more tension, which actually prevents positive change from occurring.  Acceptance sets the stage for acting appropriately in your child’s life  no matter what is happening. • 7.LETTING GO:  when we start paying attention to our inner experience, we rapidly discover that there are certain thoughts and feelings and situations about our child(ren) that our mind seems to want to hold on to.  Similarly, there are other thoughts or feelings about our child(ren) that we try to get rid of or prevent or protect ourselves from having.  In mindfulness, we intentionally put aside the elevation of some experiences more than others.  Instead, we let our experience with our children be what it is.  Letting go is a way of letting things with your children be, without grasping and pushing away.  If you have difficulty picturing what letting go of your children feels like, picture holding on.  Holding on is the opposite of letting go.  Letting go is not a foreign experience - we do it every time we go to sleep.  If we can’t let go, we find we are unable to sleep.  Now we can practice applying this skill in waking situations with our children as well.