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Establishing a great bedtime routine

Unless your child has specific neurological problems, there is no reason why they shouldn't be able to sleep. A good sleep pattern is something that you help your children learn

Extract taken from Your Child Your Way by Dr Tanya Byron, published by Michael Joseph

Some parents have children who fall into a good sleep pattern easily and some don't but, fundamentally, as parents it is our responsibility to train our children to sleep. From six months onwards they should be in a pattern where you can put them down, they can fall asleep on their own from being awake on their own in a dark or dimly lit room and sleep right through until the morning when they wake and they ask to see you.

The key thing about sleep is the environmental cues that you set up for your child to sleep. Think about what your child would perceive as being the cue for sleeping. It might be lying on your lap on the sofa sucking on a bottle, while the TV is on.

If those are the environmental cues that they have to help them to go to sleep, then they will continue to need those cues because you have conditioned their sleep behaviour around them. A calm bedtime routine is crucial for children, something similar to this:

• Last meal of the day, around 5.30pm
• Play for a bit, maybe watch a bit of TV until 6, 6.30pm
• Go upstairs, have a warm bath, because if you increase the core body temperature, it can induce sleep, then straight into pyjamas
• Have a final drink
• Clean their teeth
• Get into bed
• Have a story and a song and a kiss and a goodnight

Keep your child calm

Be aware of your children's arousal levels before they go to bed. Often parents will come home from work, want to play with them and be throwing them in the air and spinning them round, and, of course, the kids are on the ceiling and can't sleep.

If they're drinking lots of fizzy drinks and eating loads of sweets, then that will have an impact on their wakefulness. I think it's important that once little ones are in their pyjamas, they then go straight into bed, still warm and cosy from the bath, and we sit and read to them as a sleep cue. Once you've done that and said goodnight, don't keep popping back in as you will reinforce wakeful behaviour rather than sleep.

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