SLEEP TRAINING?

NEW RESOURCE: Guide To Better Sleep Patient Handout. Find it under Other Practice Tools, free with your subscription to the Counselling Cue Cards. Give your patients concise pearls even if they don't want to hear it directly from you.

What can you do to help your patients' children get to sleep?

Click here for previous newsletters.

1. Counselling Conundrum: a real question from a patient

2. Concise Conclusion: a straight-forward patient-friendly answer 

3. Quick Wrap-up 

Clearly, there are nuances that may not be captured in this format. The goal here is to provide you with helpful counselling tips which often draw from multiple sources or those which are not commonly accessed by busy healthcare providers serving the community.

Counselling Conundrum: "My 2 year old just won't sleep. What can I do?"

Concise Conclusion: This is unfortunately very common, and it can be a complex issue, but I can give you some tips.

Make sure the room is dark, cool (keep in mind that if they are too warm or cold, you can adjust their sleep wear), and quiet (or use a fan/white noise machine to block noise).

Make sure they are waking up at the same time every single day, and keep naps as consistent as possible. You may want to consider decreasing the length of their naps or how late the nap might be in the day.

A consistent bedtime routine is also very important. Keep the order and timing the same day-to-day that way they know what is coming next, e.g. bath time, read a book, milk, then sleep.

One last tip I will share is to "pause" when they wake up; give them around 15 minutes to self-soothe and get back to sleep on their own, rather than rushing in the moment they wake (unless you suspect they are ill or there may be a safety risk of course).

Quick Wrap-up: We have included a few evidence-based book recommendations this time in the Dive Deeper section. Different families tend to have specific needs, but there are still some overarching principles. And remember to include our Guide To Better Sleep Patient Handout for your adult patients.

Dive Deeper

1) It's Never Too Late To Sleep Train - Craig Canapari

2) Sleeping Through The Night - Jodi A. Mindell

3) Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker

We hope you have found this useful. A reply to this email with any feedback or topic suggestion you may have would be greatly appreciated. Your input will be the key to making this newsletter the best it can be.