How can changes to your daily routine help your child sleep at night?

When I work with families I always start by tweaking the daily routine. If your child becomes overtired during the day then the chances are they won’t sleep well at night. It seems to be a design flaw to me, you would think the more tired you are the better you’d sleep. That’s just not the case. When we become overtired (this is for all of us not just children) we actually struggle to fall asleep, and get a good quality sleep.

Making some changes to your child’s daily routine can really have a positive impact on their night sleep.

I was recently working with a family who’s 8 month old was waking as many as eight times a night. Obviously the parents were exhausted. We started by making some changes to the daily routine. We made sure that there daughter wasn’t getting overtired or over stimulated before we tried to get her down for a nap. We ensured she wasn’t napping too much, or, too little through the day. We adjusted feed and meal times.

Within two weeks the little girl had gone from waking around eight times a night to waking just twice. She would feed quickly and then go back down to sleep without a fuss.

This is with only making some changes to the daily routine. We didn’t change anything else!

When we tweak the routine and a child adjusts their night sleep, we don’t need to do as much work at night compared to if we had started straight away with the ‘sleep training’ during the night.