Supporting children to sleep better is an important part of mind health – Grant Rix

Many of us are not getting enough sleep.

Our friends at Southern Cross looked into it in their Healthy Futures 2024 Report and found that 56% of New Zealanders surveyed are sleep deprived. In fact, they are getting less sleep than they were two years ago, with the average number of hours we sleep every day coming in below the recommended 7-9 hours, at an average of 6.86 hours per night.

Almost 50 percent of those surveyed blamed their lack of sleep on having too much to think about and being stressed. Nearly 30 percent attributed sleep hindrance to being on a device or watching TV.

That’s no good for anyone, but it’s especially bad for our tamariki and rangatahi.

As adults, we know (at least intellectually) that getting enough sleep is imperative to feeling and being well, because our bodies and minds need time to rest and repair. We already know that stress and life pressures plus having our phones in our bedrooms is detrimental.

Even so, we struggle to manage stress and maintain good sleep habits. If we find it so challenging, how can we expect children and young people to be mindful of the effect of devices and constant stimulation on their sleep?

According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, on average children aged 8-12 spend 4-6 hours a day watching or using screens. Teens spend even more, up to 9 hours. The numbers are probably similar here in Aotearoa.

That time on devices — phones, tablets and iPads, laptops, TVs — has a negative impact on our children’s sleep: they’re watching content on the internet that can activate a stress response due to adult themes, plus taking in the many harmful messages that permeate social media.

When the stress response is triggered and children go into ‘fight-or-flight’ mode, they are not as able to learn, create, collaborate and recall information because they are dysregulated. The brain’s executive functions, which are important for regulation, go offline and a whole lot of things happen as a consequence, including irritability, anxiousness, detachment from educational and emotional engagement, and more. If our children aren’t able to self-soothe after the impact of that time online, as well as manage the other stresses in their lives such as peer group dynamics, homework and academic pressures, and a myriad of other daily worries, they can struggle to sleep well. They might lie down in bed at night and find that anxiety bubbles up as their brains try to process all of the information they’ve been taking on board in the day.

Most adults are familiar with the negative feedback loop that we can get stuck in when we try to go to sleep: an anxious feeling prevents you from sleeping, and then the lack of sleep perpetuates the anxious state of being. Before you know it, you’re in a cycle.

The ability to regulate emotions—to manage various responses and feelings that come up over a day—is important for children to get better sleep.

Emotion regulation is a key skill tamariki learn by practising Pause Breathe Smile; to breathe and move mindfully and to tap into how they feel. They learn the language of those emotions by feeling the sensations of the body. Exercises help them to ‘name it to tame it’, encouraging tamariki to express emotions in healthy ways. Practising gratitude in the classroom or at home can also counter negative thoughts by bringing their attention to things that are going well instead of fixating on what they are worried about.

All of these things become strategies for managing ‘fight-or-flight’ reactions, but tamariki also need help from their parents, caregivers and teachers. Children feel safe around calm adults and draw comfort and reassurance from the people around them.

For this reason, tamariki need us, the adults in their lives, to do the same: to model for them, by regulating our own emotions and helping them to regulate theirs. We also co-regulate—which means that we use our own calming practices to soothe ourselves alongside our children—which, over time and with consistency, enables tamariki to self-regulate and calm.

That comfort is not something mindlessly numbing out on a device can provide, so try putting down the phone, getting outside, and working through boredom by using imagination and creativity is a great way to https://pausebreathesmile.nz/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/MIndfulness-1.jpg a better sleep too.

But there are some apps that can provide some https://pausebreathesmile.nz/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/MIndfulness-1.jpg for settling in. For example, the Pause Breathe Smile app (free) offers guided audio tracks for use during the day and a special one for before sleep. You can also check out more free resources here on our website.