Improving parent-child cooperation with structured sleep schedules
While the importance of sleep cannot be over emphasized, the salient fact that parents self awareness to daily regimen and acuity of self are tantamount not only to the development and cooperativeness in children but also their free-willed mutualism. Parents do well to remember it all starts with them. All parents understandably want what’s best for their children and in this case sleep is no different... or is it? Let’s consider some of the many factors that are involved.
While discussing just a few of the many ways in which daily improvement of parent-child mutuality is achievable by instilling and maintaining structured sleep schedules it’s important to first elaborate and expound on all other commonly daily extant habits that contribute to this cooperation.
It’s presumed that parents are doing everything else to nurture their child’s willingness to comply not just with parents requests of daily “do’s and don’ts” but also to parents daily agenda’s offered/imposed onto their child, etc. :
Do’s (in short):
Consistent wake time, everyday including the weekends
Every morning start with (i.e. Brushing teeth, then eating breakfast, then getting ready for school
Consistent daily school start and end time
Consistent breakfast, lunch and dinner times, 3 nutritious/well-balanced meals (Not as readily attainable for low socio-economic status families/parents/children)
Consistent daily school vs screen (i.e. Movie vs Zoom) vs physical activity times (i.e. playing outside and/or at the park (i.e. Outdoor (w/non-family members) vs indoor (w/family members) socialization/problem-solving)
Consistent daily/every-other day naps/social break times
Consistent right-before-bed rituals (i.e. Pajamas, then brush teeth, then night-time story, then readied for bed, etc.)
Consistent sleep time, everyday including the weekends
Although reasonably difficult, daily agenda’s or rituals are only effective if they are consistent. Here, consistency is key for setting up daily awake habits that will best support those when asleep. One of the most important precursors for children to attain increased quality of night sleep/rest, also just for there overall social-emotional-psychological (psychosocial) betterment and health, is to establish and regulate their daily stimuli. Parents attention given to children is the best stimuli the brain can drink… Screen’s are junk food, who’s stimuli is not readily digestible and usable to the brain outside of keeping it awake unnecessarily.
Now let us consider what research has to say. Follow along with some question and answers…
Does well-rested practice make all else perfect in the parent-child bond?
The consistency of a child’s routine throughout the day carries into the night wherein their affected quality of sleep is worth further consideration. Research in early childhood to pre-adolescent development recursively notes children’s social-cognitive responsiveness to comply with siblings, school peers/teachers, and especially parents, depending a lot on styles of nurturing, associated attachment, and established social reciprocity. This ‘monkey see, monkey do’ applies to most innate and learned tendencies, as related to routine of daily schedules, but recent research suggests child’s mimicry of parents’ behaviors goes beyond those that are overtly encouraged and reinforced. Now more than ever parents are discomfited by pandemic fatigue, which has exacerbated a seemingly endless list of frustrations related to getting children to bed and keeping them asleep. Associated vexations related to children’s nightly sleep irregularities, from easily awakened to terrors, are considerably heterogeneous as they are concerning.
What biological functions does our sleep control?
The brain never sleeps and processes information all day and particularly at night during sleep when our bodies are seemingly turned off and sleep cures our sleepiness. In a nutshell, sleep is critical for all biological systems but is most important to the hormonal and immune functionalities among other homeostasis-innate systems. When sleep is restricted insulin levels become imbalanced in nearly all study participants as they quickly begin to exhibit pre-diabetic symptoms, which are not always easily reversed. Healthy subjects clear most sugar out of their body with a normal nights sleep. Otherwise, with only about 2-4 hours of sleep a night for about a week, spikes turn into blunted insulin response across the body with deleterious side effects that ensue unremittingly. Inadequate acquisition of sleep, from 2% every minute (About the equivalent to the amount of sugar in 1 can of Pepsi), reduced to 1.4%, disables the body’s circulatory system from metabolizing and extinguishing free floating glucose from its blood stream. With the body no longer absorbing and sequestering the right amounts of glucose for and away from the body this not only leads to increased insulin deregulation and impending type 2 diabetes/diabetic syndrome onset but also pedals the main underlying collage of factors involved in the highly regnant and statistically correlated obesity epidemic known nationwide.
What about inadequate sleep effects on immune function?
Sleep studies with deprived sleep participants, that are also newly vaccinated, verses well rested and immunized controls shows that the former eventually induces a series of degraded, delayed and compromising immune responses that typically under stimulates most antibody effectiveness. Likewise, those already presenting with innate predisposition and autoimmune comorbidities (e.g. Asthma, Lupus, etc.) will mostly experience higher highs if not lower lows of immune response pairings with elicited autonomic immunity response cascades. Incomplete and divergent immune responses then takes hold and in a cyclical and domino fashion, among others, deregulates blood sugar levels and eventually affects proper hormonal biochemistry, physiology and functionality of other major organs before their unmitigated shut-down.
How does a compromised biology impact an individual’s psychopathological prognosis, if not overall health and well-being?
Sleep is also critical for all psychiatric health. For more than half a century it has been well known that the main underlying variable related to most psychiatric disorder (Depression, Anxiety (GAD), Bipolar) is the non-voluntary interruption of sleep. In years past, the effectual severity of one’s psychopathology were misconstrued as these measures incorrectly linked mental/cognitive dissonance and disquietude, as primary causal factors responsible for inhibited potential for participants to acquire a full night of quality sleep. Recent research has rectified this misstep by showing that it is mainly the disruption that leads to the deprivation of sleep schedules, which then in turn exacerbates and causes such anomalous severities of individual psychopathologies.
Anything interesting that I don’t already know about sleep?
Recent studies have also shown that sleep helps ‘scrub’ the brain. While we sleep our brain cells shrink in fascinating ways wherein the space in between these cells grow bigger and bigger more easily allowing cerebral spinal fluid to rush and clear metabolic waste and or plaques products from the its periphery, specifically beta amyloid proteins. Without the clearing of these biochemical tangles by cerebral spinal fluid what exponentially mounds is the increased propensity for Alzheimer’s. This scrubbing and cleaning of the brain is most effectively concurrent during a good nights sleep. Sleep indeed does more than just turn off and cure our sleepiness. It certainly allows amicable biological functioning to persist.
REM sleep is the type of sleep that recycles its function about every 90 minutes across the average individuals night sleep. While REM sleep is known for cognitive optimization and problem solving its hallmarked rapid eye movement and signature is more commonly known as the very cognitively active yet corporally paralyzed state of dreaming. Some that wake up from this sleep are often paralyzed and hallucinate. Thankfully we then likely experience falling quickly back to sleep before our brain’s record and recall our slow wave midnight alien abductions. Interestingly during REM midline limbic structures become active during REM sleep which explains the fear and emotion involved in these dreams, and sometimes terrors.
Other important functions of sleep are its ability to resolve and manage emotion and logic. Sleep is even critical to the decision of whether or not the stimulus that is activating your amygdala, your brain’s fear center, during sleep is real and a legitimate danger or not. If you’re a child and sleep deprived and watching a scary scene from Indian Jones “Temple of Doom” movie then your amygdala takes over and you quickly freak out. In comparison to children well rested, yet still viewing the same cinematically and age inappropriate movie, their amygdala is saying “it’s just a movie.” Dis-connectivity between the amygdala, medial orbital frontal cortex (right behind your eyes) and other “reality” centers is just one of the many costs of sleep disruption to deprivation seen in children and adults. Likewise, consistent assault of cerebral regulatory systems, otherwise bolstered with a good night’s rest, is indelibly deleterious to other more “can’t live without” cognitive systems like memory.
As we typically remember better, either negative or positive events that are tied to emotion, its important to notice how studies have time and again outlined that those sleep deprived tend to only remember the negative and in general their 70,000 foot outlook and rationale is centered on the negative than the positive. In this way sleep influences perception and daily decision-making. Sleep not only takes in all the different kinds of memories but also the rich differences invoked upon the upload and visualization of each memory. It’s then safe to say that sleep, by one route or another, directly and/or indirectly, impacts our cognitive and cerebral performance. What this boils down to is that levels and quality of sleep influences overall functioning, biologic to qualitatively psychological, but also, and lastly, affects our ability to learn.
Times of sleep matter. Circadian rhythms are the daily wake and night time sleep episodes that regulates the core of our involuntary to voluntary functioning. What’s interesting is what happens to information and learning when we are asleep verses awake. It turns out that while we are sleeping our brains hold on to what’s been learned are shakes off the intricate details that often snag us into a rabbit whole of deep thought. Sleep is great for detail memory, but this accrues over consistently high quality sleep sessions. This is most readily achieved by establishing consistent sleep schedules first by adults for themselves and then, through modeling and positive reinforcement, for our children. Without us thinking about it, and infinitely more complex than can be literarily described, our human brains loves patterns. Setting-up and practicing parent and child sleep cycles is a pattern that the brain quickly recognizes, rehearses, reinforces and is recapitulated during the day but is only reproducible by first being affirmed and established during our sleep.
What drives consistent parent-child reciprocity of sleep schedules in a pandemic?
Although reasonably difficult, daily agenda’s or rituals are only effective if they are consistent. Here, consistency is key for setting up daily awake habits that will best support those when asleep. One of the most important precursors for children to attain increased quality of night sleep/rest, also just for there overall social-emotional-psychological (psychosocial) betterment and health, is to establish and regulate their daily stimuli. Parents attention given to children is the best stimuli the brain can drink. In comparison screen’s are junk food, who’s stimuli is not readily digestible and usable to the brain outside of keeping it awake unnecessarily.
Children need parent’s attention for social emotional development, attachment, and compliance. Reasonably, parents rarely have time to give themselves attention so when we say that children need their parents attention it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to be getting on the floor playing pretend all day long. Providing our full attention for our children can consist of playing for 30 minutes, reading a book together at lunch or bedtime, or playing a board game through beginning to end. Now, in terms of sleep... If we make it known when we are going to sleep and actually follow through, research shows that over time, eventually that such children are more likely to incorporate these perceptions and understandings and habits into their cognitive space = they sleep when we, parents, sleep (monkey see monkey do)
How do parent-child mutualism and family roles assist sleep and wake schedules of routine?
Parents have to have a long and well-established 'good record' with what their body needs before "at least doing this for my children's sake." That's not how the human brain works. We have to ‘put the oxygen mask on first before we can then help our children with theirs’ through understanding, reflecting, practice and routine. This subtle understanding is laymen, yet it seems to elude the academic and social upper echelon alike. Indeed an unfortunate and common modern day paradox that is clearly present in our community.
Children needs parents attention for social emotional development, attachment, and compliance. Reasonably, parents rarely have time to give themselves attention so when we say that children need their parents attention it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to be getting on the floor playing pretend all day long. Providing our full attention for our children can consist of playing for 30 minutes, reading a book together at lunch or bedtime, or playing a board game through beginning to end.
Conclusion
In short, successful parent-child mutualism with sleep schedules and general good parenting first starts with the parent. The parents’ ability to be successful involves the fact that the parent has worked out who they are, what they stand for, and the fruitful habits and culpabilities they will purposefully pass on to their progeny. Lastly, to best support the internalization of these habits, how you present or frame questions as well as how you provide answers or rationale is important - the tone matters. These tips will be discussed in a later blog. I hope you enjoyed.
Sleep well everyone! ☺
Copyright 2022 Christopher Schroeder of New World Psychology, LLC.
