Without an alarm clock set for school, sleep routines are anything but routine right now in many homes. A Michigan Health sleep psychologist shares what parents should know.
Dawn Dore-Stites, Ph.D., a pediatric sleep psychologist at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and Michigan Medicine’s Sleep Disorders Centers, says she’s seeing current events affect the sleep of entire families in her virtual clinic.
And because of this widespread stress and sleep disruption, Dore-Stites is actually relaxing her advice to parents right now. Even if some best habits she would normally teach are slipping, there will be time to correct them, she says.
“This is an unprecedented time and we’ve all got to be nice to ourselves,” she says. “I really worry about putting this undue pressure on parents right now as they’re trying to manage so much, when bedtime can already be the roughest part of the day in normal situations.”
uofmhealth.org
