As schools begin to reopen around the country, many parents will be wondering how to get their children back into the weekday routine.
While the first week of school is always a challenging time, this year schools have been closed for around six months – meaning it’s been March since many children and teenagers had to get up for school as normal.
So what advice is there for parents hoping to get their children up early and back into bed at a reasonable time in the evenings?
Niamh O’Reilly, baby and child sleep expert with TheNursery.ie, offered her tips on today’s Newstalk Breakfast.
She explained that children inevitably react to change, just like adults do.
She said: “It’s not just [school children] that are going to have these early mornings and frantic mornings again.
“In a perfect world, we would have had a couple of weeks under our belts of practising getting up – but it’s not too late to make changes now.
“Whatever about going to bed earlier, it’s also getting them up a little bit earlier as well – just getting them up to that change. [Then] you’re shifting their body clock completely, in the morning and in the evening.”
Niamh explained that many children are inevitably “irritable” when they’re tired, and they often don’t cope well with change.
She said: “It’s not fair on them to have this expectation that they’ll just hack it – the best thing to do is try and adjust.
“Be mindful of how much sleep your little ones need. The little school-going kids – say up to six years old – they need about 10.5 to 12 hours sleep a night… some will fall at different ends of that… and as they get a little bit older they might [need less sleep].
“You may also find some of the junior infants who may not have been napping up until now may need a bit of a nap or downtime in the afternoon, as they get used to learning new stuff.”
Meanwhile, Niamh suggested parents should work to give teenagers a ‘bit of ownership’ over their sleeping habits.
She said: “In general, teenagers need 8-10 hours of sleep a night – but if they’re going to bed at midnight, that means they should be getting up some time between 8am and 10am the next day: that’s just not possible when they’re going back to school.
“I would ask them to take a little bit of responsibility about it – I would be encouraging them to get to bed a bit earlier, or even just to wind down a bit earlier. Even that can help them to adjust a bit better.
“Sleep hygiene are really important for the teenagers – things like no TVs or screens before bedtime… use books, reading [instead]… even audiobooks would be better than watching TV.”