Читать книгу A Spoonful of Sugar - Liz Fraser - Страница 28

The amount we need to sleep changes a lot with age, and also with how much activity (mental and physical) we do. Each person is different, and the amount we need varies from day to day. Know your child, and what he can cope with, and adjust accordingly.

An average toddler needs about eleven hours’ sleep per night, plus a nap in the day of an hour or so, while a child of ten doesn’t have a nap in the day at all, but still needs about ten hours’ sleep. By the time they hit adolescence children can get by with about eight and a half or nine hours’ sleep per night, but many don’t get half that amount because they’re up late, watching telly or out with friends.

School-aged children need to get enough sleep so that they can concentrate on their work, learn and behave well at school. Establish a sensible bedtime which enables this amount of sleep, and stick to it as much as possible.

Sleep is a basic need of the human body and prolonged periods of not getting enough can result in serious difficulties concentrating, working and keeping well. Kids are growing and learning at a phenomenal rate and generally using up a lot of energy all the time – they need sleep to recuperate!

Getting enough sleep can become a real battleground as kids get older because they want to stay up later to feel ‘grown up’. Sadly this does them no good if they are becoming sleep-deprived. Try to explain that sending them to bed is not a punishment – it’s what they need to learn, grow and be healthy. Even if you can bring bedtime forward by fifteen minutes, that’s a good step.

Now, all of this routine is something I believe in very strongly, but, to be quite honest, I think a completely rigid and unmove-able routine is not so very helpful. Children do need to learn that sometimes things change and we can’t always do what we’d like, or what we usually do. It teaches them flexibility; the ability to cope when things change.

For me, there was probably a little bit too much routine, though I’d say at least half of this was self-imposed, and I did develop some rather obsessive-compulsive tendencies from quite a young age that I used as a safety net. So long as the alarm clock rang six times, I got out of bed with my right foot and the bathroom light went on before I stepped into the room, all was well. That kind of thing. It can be hard to adapt to ‘unknowns’ if you are brought up with immoveable routines, so I’d advocate having a clear system throughout the week, but letting this shift ever so slightly as new things present themselves.

We still stick to a ‘no screen-time after dinner, bath, stories, lights out’ routine every night and have done for over ten years so far – but if there’s the odd one where we’re travelling or we’ve got friends round then it all goes out of the window for a day. Life is too short to be totally anal about these things – one night a month isn’t going to harm your kids!

So bedtime routine is important. What about other routines in the family home – is it helpful to have systems in place, patterns of activities and some kind of a rhythm in a home?

Granny thinks it is: ‘Listen, you don’t want to run a home like an army, with Mummy blowing her whistle when it’s time for dinner, or time to do homework. But if you can have some kind of routine each day it just makes life so much easier!’

‘For whom – the children or you?’

‘Well, for both actually. If kids have homework every day, or even every week when they’re little, have a “homework time”. That could be Saturday afternoon, or each day at 4 p.m. Whatever fits your family. That way it won’t get forgotten, and eventually it becomes a habit: Four o’clock is homework time. Then there’s no pushing and forcing them to do something – they know that’s what they do at that time. It’s clearer for them, and much easier for you.’