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PrinciPALS Podcast Transcript: 5.02: Back to Basics: Let’s Talk About Sleep

By Emma Wellman, Brittney Hansen, and Conor Bentley

Listen below or on Apple Podcasts.

Ask any parent: if your child is sleeping well, life just seems to run smoother. But when good sleep feels out of reach? The pressure (and exhaustion!) can be intense.

In the first of a new batch of episodes going back to basics on raising children who thrive, the princiPALS are talking about sleep. Leaning on their own experiences as parents and educators, as well as a bit of sleep science, the pals share information on building healthy sleep routines, dealing with inevitable bumps or pushback, and knowing if your child is getting enough sleep.

The transcript of this episode appears below.


Conor Bentley (00:01):
From Rowland Hall in Salt Lake City, Utah...

Emma Wellman (00:04):
I’m Emma Wellman.

Brittney Hansen (00:05):
And I’m Brittney Hansen.

Conor (00:07):
And they're the princiPALS.

I’m Conor Bentley, and on today’s episode of princiPALS, we’ll be talking about your kids and sleep.

Emma (00:23):
On The PrinciPALS Podcast, we tackle big questions and share big ideas about how to raise excellent humans.

Conor (00:29):
Emma and Brittney, it’s so nice to be back with you in the princiPALS’ office today, and today we’re talking about sleep and young children. And we really hope that this is going to be an informative episode for all of you, and in no way will be a snooze, because this is a very relevant topic to parents and kids of all ages because we all sleep, right? This is something that literally everybody does every day, hopefully.

Brittney (00:57):
Definitely, Conor. It’s really hard to overstate, actually, how essential understanding sleep is for parents. For kids, it’s a time when the brain is doing some of its most important work. During sleep, the brain consolidates memories, it strengthens neural connections and clears out toxins that build up during the day. For toddlers and preschoolers, this is directly tied to developmental leaps in language and motor skills and emotional regulation. As kids get older, sleep continues to play a pretty crucial role. In elementary-age kids, sleep supports problem-solving, creativity, and attention. And research shows that kids who do get enough sleep do better academically, have fewer behavioral challenges, and are better able to manage stress day to day. So more specifically, there are studies that demonstrate that children who get at least 10 hours of sleep per night by age seven show improved memory retention, faster cognitive processing, and higher academic achievement scores.

Conversely, those kids who are sleep deprived are three-and-a-half times more likely to have academic and behavioral challenges. So this is really some significant and important stuff for parents to know about. There’s a piece here around memory consolidation. Sleep plays a pretty critical role in consolidating memories, and we’ll talk more about that later in the show. And for children, this means that the skills that they practice, whether it’s reading or math or motor tasks during the school days, are all more likely to stick if they’re supported by adequate sleep. There's also a really important bit here around executive functioning. Executive functions, such as problem-solving, emotional regulation, and planning, are all also directly tied to sleep quality. When children are sleep-deprived, these high-order cognitive functions are really impaired, leading to difficulty that we see around focusing and staying organized in a classroom setting.

Emma (02:44):
Yep, clearly it’s pretty important. And because of that importance, from both a health perspective and a growth and learning perspective, parents can often feel kind of flooded with advice, and sometimes a fair amount of pressure around how to best manage sleep routines for their kids. There’s an ocean of advice and guidance on the internet and from people that you know, and it can be really hard to know what advice to follow, what’s the right guidance for you. And it can feel a little bit like no matter what you do, you’re not doing it right. So our hope for this episode is that it provides folks with some helpful and actionable information without piling onto parental guilt. There’s enough of that out there already. We’re all doing our best out here and supporting good sleep is something that we’re all going to work at, knowing that we won’t get it perfect every time. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

So with that framing in mind, I thought it might be helpful to share some really important science about how sleep happens and what it is, because that should help folks know whether they want to take in advice and to evaluate information they’ve been getting. So here’s an overview, and I will just say I find this super interesting, but I’m hoping that it won’t be too boring for our less nerdy listeners.

So there are two main forces which control sleep—and I want to share that sleep’s a pretty complicated thing. I am not a neurobiologist, but I have done a fair amount of learning in this area because it interests me, both as an educator and just as a human person. And so what I’m about to share is not fully complete, but it is a helpful summary. So having said that, there are two forces which control sleep: adenosine is one, and the circadian cycle is the other. So adenosine is a compound in the body which builds up across hours of wakefulness. So the more hours that you are awake, the more adenosine is in your body, and then it dissipates when you’re asleep. And it’s responsible for our sleep drive, or the sleep pressure. So across the day, the more hours that you’re awake, the more tired and ready for bed that you will feel. And then the more hours that you spend asleep, the more ready you will be to be awake because of the variation and the amount of adenosine in your body.

And then the other is far more famous. The circadian cycle, or the circadian rhythm, our listeners have probably heard about, which regulates when we want to be awake and when we want to be asleep. And biologically it’s meant to be connected to light. And there are two main components of the circadian cycle. One is cortisol and the other is melatonin. So those are the main things that drive the sleep cycle for humans.

As an interesting aside, caffeine binds to adenosine receptors, and so it blocks the way that adenosine works to make us feel sleepy. So it prevents us from feeling sleepy, but it also increases dopamine, which is kind of famous in the brain because it makes us feel like we have energy and feel motivated. That’s maybe not super relevant for kids at school, because hopefully children are not having a latte every morning in elementary school, but it is kind of a fun fact.

Conor (05:48):
No, I think it’s a totally fun fact. As someone who’s been sleeping for nearly 42 years, I had no idea that caffeine and adenosine, that whole relationship there, so I found that fascinating.

Now, I’ve also heard other research emerging around something called sleep spindles. So how does that play into this, and is it relevant with what we’re talking about?

Emma (06:12):
Yes. So sleep spindles are really cool. They’re traveling, coordinated brainwaves that occur during non-REM, light stages of sleep. (So REM sleep, remember, is rapid eye movement. It’s most frequently the kind of sleep when people are having dreams, or the most memorable dreams happen during REM sleep.) And these sleep spindles are really important for long-term memory. They seem to be responsible for adding new knowledge and experiences into the brain’s long-term storage. And having enough sleep spindles each night is super important for learning.

Brittney (06:46):
Yeah, and I actually find that emerging information about sleep spindles to be particularly interesting when we’re looking at it from a parenting or from a learning perspective. Memory consolidation, which is really just the transfer of information from short-term to long-term memory, is such a critical part of human development and the learning process. And now, thanks to this newly emerging research around spindles, we can more clearly understand the role that sleep plays in this process.

I also think it’s pretty helpful to know that spindle activity evolves over a person’s lifespan. So for young children, sleep spindles are less frequent because the neural circuits that are actually responsible for generating the sleep spindles are still maturing. They do play an important role in overall brain plasticity, though, and development, making high-quality sleep pretty important for young kids. Spindle activity really peaks, though, in adolescence. Adolescents with higher spindle activity often show stronger performance on tasks requiring memory and strong reasoning skills. So these are the skills that we really want to see in our kids in middle school and high school, right, as they’re doing that important learning work in the school setting. The amount of spindles that they’re accumulating in a night really does play an important part.

Conor (08:01):
How is this information useful for parents, and what can they actually do about helping their kids with sleep and, you know, all the things attached to it?

Emma (08:12):
So knowing how critically important sleep is for kids, and then knowing some about what’s actually happening during sleep and the biological underpinnings of that importance, can help motivate us, but also can help us decide what to do about it in our own particular household. So, routine is super helpful for kids in many areas—we’ve talked about that on other podcast episodes before; that’s something that lots of parents are familiar with. Sleep is certainly no exception. Building healthy sleep routines is something that can start at any time. And there are some kind of hallmark qualities of good sleep routines.

So the first is queuing the brain for bedtime. This is a term that Dr. Becky uses. (Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist who’s got a great presence on Instagram, and we’ll link to her stuff in the show notes. She’s a great resource for all kinds of things, including sleep.) So that looks like helping children practice skills that tell them, “Okay, now it’s time to downregulate. Now it’s time for me to be getting ready to go to sleep.”

Other things we can do are thinking about lighting, removing screens. This is something that we hear about a lot for adults, too, and I will say it’s really hard for me to not sleep right next to my phone. But for children it’s critically important because their brains are still being built, and those circadian rhythms, which are so sensitive to light input, are really being solidified in those earlier years of life. And so pulling back on screens, getting them out of the bedroom, helping kids disengage from screens and just not being under bright lights for the last half hour or so, especially before bed, is super helpful.

And then thinking about limiting high-energy activities and slowing things down shortly before bedtime can be really helpful—although there’s a bit of an asterisk here, which is especially for young children. Some of them really need to get the wiggles out just before settling down. And so some children, the pattern will be, you know, dinner and bathtime, perhaps, and then between pajamas and book reading, right before you go to sleep, there’s like the crazy zone. And that is sometimes exactly what children need in order to settle their nervous systems. They just need to kind of get those wiggles out, and that’s okay. We don’t have to stop them from doing that. They’re responding to what they can feel they need in their bodies.

Brittney (10:35):
Emma, I wonder, though, if that can be pretty tricky for a parent to discern, whether the child is doing that in a way that’s productive and helpful for them to eventually fall asleep, or if that’s, like, a signal of being overtired, right? And being a little bit sort of hyped-up, high energy because you’ve kind of missed the sleep window.

Emma (10:52):
Yes, absolutely. So I think there are two behaviors which might look the same in many ways. One is getting wiggles out for five, seven, ten minutes and then settling back in; it’s the way their nervous systems are helping them downshift. Or some children become sort of wild when they’re overtired, so we’ve missed the window for them to settle in, and they go from sleepy and low energy to all of a sudden bouncing off the walls. And I would say the biggest difference is the duration of that wiggle area, and also whether or not you can provide your child with some things to do that might help them. So some children are really seeking what we talk about as heavy work right before they’re ready to settle for bed. So what they want is, like, wrestling. They’re seeking out that kind of physical input with a sibling or maybe a parent. And other children literally, like, do a couple laps around the house. They just, like, run around the house a couple of times. But if they’re able to do that and then transition into the next part of the bedtime routine, that’s a pretty good guess that that’s just what their body needs. If, on the other hand, you find yourself saying over and over and over again, “Okay, now we’ve got to stop, now we’ve got to stop,” and they’re not able to get reregulated, then probably you need to look at your routine and the timing of things.

Conor (12:08):
And hopefully parents will know their kids to a degree where they can kind of know, “Okay, this is clearly going on a little longer than it should,” you know, “My kid doesn’t usually go this long,” kind of getting all, you know, amped up before bed. So I think that’s also the case-by-case kind of thing, is, you know, everybody’s different and some people can do that thing that you’re talking about of being a little bit more active before bed and calming right down, versus needing that kind of calm-down time before bed.

Emma (12:40):
Yeah. And I think the other thing that can be integrated fairly easily into a bedtime routine and can be really successful for kids—and there’s so many tools for this now, which is wonderful; many of them are free—for kids who are having a hard time quieting their mind, and there might be lots of different reasons, right, depending on the age of the child. Some kids are just having a hard time separating from family members. Some children are worrying about their math test the next day or about a social situation that’s happening at school. And so there are all kinds of audio guided meditations or unwinding routines that you can find online. They could do some deep breathing. They can do a meditative body scan. These are things that you can help by doing them with your child at the beginning, and over time kids will make the transition from awake to asleep on their own more successfully using these tools. And so you’ll help them with that skill and you’ll have helped them learn about resources which are effective for them when things inevitably get off track with sleep, right? Because as I said a little bit earlier, it’s not always going to be consistently easy—or, hopefully, consistently hard, either—doing bedtime.

Brittney (13:47):
That’s right. And I think it’s helpful to note that sleep and bedtime routines in households don’t have to be super elaborate and complicated, right? For many families it looks something like a bath and then pajamas, maybe a short story, and then lights out. And the most important thing, really, is that they’re consistent and predictable for the kids, right? The cues stay the same.

In my household, one of my favorite cues at the moment—and these will change, right, as the kids grow and change in their sleep habits and routines—but, for my six-year-old, we have the kids’ version of an Alexa in her room, and at 7 pm it starts playing quiet, sleep-time music. And she knows very clearly that when that music starts to play, it’s time to start quieting down her body. She knows the music comes on and she goes and brushes her teeth. She doesn’t need someone else to tell her that; she just knows what to do because it’s part of a really predictable routine. And it’s one of those cues, right, that Emma talked about referencing Dr. Becky, right? It’s one of those cues that helps her and her brain realize, “All right, this is the time to downregulate and start calming down.” And for some individuals it comes pretty easily, right, like my daughter that I’m talking about there. But for some, falling asleep independently and staying asleep can be a challenge, not only as a child, but for their whole lives, just because of the way nervous systems are built, right? Or temperament, right? The good news is, it’s really never too late to start building upon good sleep habits.

Conor (15:08):
See, and I was like your daughter. I was very good at the routine and, you know, we had a very established system about bedtime and, you know, little things like, okay, nightlight is on and I had to have a little radio going; like, I would listen to Jazz games as I drifted off to sleep. But it was pretty consistent and I was always a good sleeper, and I know that I’m very fortunate in that regard. Sounds like your daughter, same thing. But obviously we know that that’s not the case for everyone. And you know, sometimes you can put these things in place and it still doesn’t work or kids push back. So what happens when, you know, it’s not as simple or, you know, the kids aren’t as good at routine or some of these things that we’re talking about?

Brittney (15:51):
Yeah, absolutely. Tantrums and bedtime pushback are absolutely a real thing, and probably inevitable for most kids at some point, right, as they’re growing up and going through the process of developing their own sleep routines, right? But the resistance often comes down to kids wanting to feel a sense of control, right? So just like we talk about in all sorts of other areas of their lives, offering limited choices is often a helpful strategy to deploy. So you could say, “Do you want to read one book tonight or two? Would you like to sleep with the blue blanket or the red blanket tonight?” Right? And giving your kids a sense of agency without compromising on the routine is a really helpful strategy to deploy. And parents have to remember that setting and holding firm boundaries is really okay, even though sometimes it feels difficult. And in this case, it really is most often in the best interest of the kids.

Emma (16:41):
And I want to tack on that for some children, the falling asleep goes okay, but it’s the staying asleep and staying in their bedroom that’s the hard part. And that’s also a place where we can insert a routine and have firm boundaries. And so you can have the same kinds of, you know, limited option choices when kids get up and they say, “I need a glass of water,” for example, in the middle of the night. Or, “Oh, I need to go to the bathroom” for the 79th time. Or “I had a bad dream,” and you’re not actually convinced that they had a bad dream. But they’re coming out of their bedroom and they’re wanting a little bit of input and engagement. And you can, you know, have a routine where you say, okay, I’m going to give you a hug and a kiss and tuck you back in and say goodnight, and we’re not going to do a whole other bedtime routine with, like, three more books and another eight songs and that kind of thing. Because that consistency is what the kids are looking for, even if they seem to be asking for inconsistency.

Brittney (17:32):
That’s right. And those routines and those strategies might vary by child, right? As a parent with three kids, I know that we have different routines and boundaries that we have set with each of the three kids because we kind of have learned via trial and error, sometimes working well and sometimes not so much, what works for each of them. We have one child who comes in the night and reports that she’s scared and we do the hug and, “Now you go immediately back to bed,” because we know if it’s any longer than that, we are in for it for the whole night, right? And we have one where we can say, “You can stay for a minute and then I want you to head back to bed,” and she will do exactly that. She’ll stay for a minute and then she’ll head back to bed. But the same strategy wouldn’t work for the opposite child, right? And so it takes some figuring out on the part of the parents.

Emma (18:15):
Yeah. This is the “marathon, not a sprint” part.

Brittney (18:16):
Right.

Emma (18:16):
And the giving yourself grace and trying to be a bit of a scientist about it: give things a try and see how they work for you.

So yeah, so we’re talking a lot about why it’s important for children to sleep for themselves, but I also think it’s really worth noting that when children sleep well, it means that their parents sleep well. And well-rested adults are happier people who have more inner resources to be great parents and to support their kids during the day when they’re doing all kinds of important stuff too. And so, we can be motivated on behalf of our children, but also on behalf of ourselves, and that’s okay too.

So how do you know if your kid’s getting enough sleep? We’ve talked a lot about other components of this. So, some indicators in my mind about this is that kids will wake up on their own, ideally at a reasonable time, which is fairly consistent from one day to the next. And, same thing, they’ll be ready for bed at a reasonable time, which is fairly consistent from one day to the next. A bit of weekend catch-up of sleep is typical and nothing too big to worry about, especially as kids age and their school lives can become busier and heavier for them. But if your child’s having to sleep many extra hours every weekend, you might want to look at what’s happening on weeknights because they may be depleted across those weeknights in a way that is not good in the long-term.

Another thing to look for is that [usually kids] who are well-rested have enough energy to do all the things that are part of their lives—so, school and family obligations—without being lethargic or manic or melting down a whole bunch. And, of course, sometimes children will be all of those things within an hour, but in general, if your kiddo has the energy to do all the things that are part of their lives every day, then you’re on the right track.

And I also want to say, occasionally there will always be bad nights of sleep. Someone’s sick, you're about to travel, someone’s just been in town at your house, something exciting or a little scary is happening at school the next day, there’s a big developmental shift happening for your child—all of that is okay. The trick is to have a framework you can fall back on once you’ve moved through that funky period so that you can kind of snap back to it, just like you do for lots of other kinds of routines in your family.

Brittney (20:30):
And sometimes it’s helpful, I think, to have the rough guidelines, so you can know sort of when you’re in range with regards to giving your children enough sleep. So for me, it’s as easy as understanding what the recommendations are from the American Academy of Pediatrics, so I’d love to share those.

For toddlers, the recommendation is 11 to 14 hours per day, which of course sounds like a ton, but that includes naps, which are regular, of course, for our toddler kids. In our preschool-age kids, that’s [ages] three to five, we’re looking at 10 to 13 hours per day, once again including naps. And as parents of three-to-five-year-olds know, that nap is somewhat variable from kid to kid with regards to, you know, how quickly you’re going to wean off of needing the nap during the day and lengthening the sleep during the nighttime period.

For our school-age kids, [ages] six to 12, we’re looking at nine to 12 hours per night, and for teenagers, [ages] 13 to 18, eight to 10 hours per night. And as you said, Emma, that’s the moment when oftentimes external pressures—so, activities, homework, social pressures—can sort of creep into the sleep hours and make it harder and harder for our kids to get the amount of sleep that they need, right? They just naturally are going to want to be staying up later based on those circadian rhythms we were talking about earlier and the way the body is developing. But oftentimes the school day starts at an hour that doesn’t allow for that full 10 hours, which presents a challenge for our growing teens.

Conor (21:54):
So what you’re saying is we all should aspire to be a toddler and get that 11 to 14 hours a day.

No, but I also am thinking about this, too, just with the time of year that it is. I mean, obviously, you know, we’re recording this in December ... it’s dark, right? It’s darker, you know, and I notice myself getting tired earlier, you know, this time of year when it’s darker earlier, and I notice myself being able to stay up later in the summer when the days are longer and there’s more light. So I know that that’s something for me, so I’m sure, you know, that has to affect kids at least as much or more because the environment is telling you, “Go to sleep, it’s dark. Get up, it’s light,” right? I mean, that’s very much happening for all of us.

Emma (22:42):
Yeah, I think one of the things for, practically speaking, for families around that change, depending on where you live in the world, right, there might be a bigger or a smaller change in the amount of light that you have seasonally. But certainly the going-to-bed hour when it’s still very light out in the summertime can be hard. And so there's, you know, people get blackout curtains and there’s all kinds of things that we have to do for that. And then, similarly, waking up in the morning when it’s still very dark outside can be hard for some kids. And so, you know, I think just trying to leverage routines again, as we talked about, and also getting sunlight in the eyes early in the morning as soon as there’s sun can be really helpful in setting that circadian rhythm. And then backing off the screens and the light later in the day can be really helpful, and just doing the best you can to manage.

Conor (23:27):
Well, it wouldn’t be a princiPALS without some homework. And so we have a couple of items of homework for those of you out there, and I think that this will be very helpful for people.

Emma (23:40):
We hope so. One thing we’d like to invite our listeners to do is to try paying some special attention for the next week or so to the sleep routines in your household to assess whether they seem to be working for you and your children. Think back to those indicators that kids are getting enough rest (you might think about them for yourselves also), and do a little self-assessment about whether or not you want to tinker with something, or whether or not you want to make a change.

Brittney (24:03):
And our second bit of homework is kind of piggybacking on that idea, but getting some more information about the hours of the day that your child is not with you by checking in with your child’s teacher for feedback about how well-rested they seem to be at school. And for older kids, this might not look like talking to their teacher, but instead talking to your child about whether or not they feel like they have enough energy to get through the day, and to help them make a plan to adjust as needed.

Conor (24:27):
So obviously, sleep, along with food and nutrition and exercise, are all very critical, basic things that we need to be focusing on with our children as we go through our daily lives.

Emma (24:41):
Yes. And actually this is the first in a series of what we’re calling back-to-basics episodes of The PrinciPALS Podcast, and you can look forward to hearing more about nutrition and exercise in future episodes.

Conor (24:53):
So as usual, we will have the resources mentioned here in the show notes, and you can find this podcast at rowlandhall.org/podcast and wherever else you download your podcasts.

So thank you all for joining us in the princiPALS’ office today, and I think, just based on the conversation, I’m ready for a little nap. So until next time ...

Emma (25:16):
I’m Emma Wellman.

Brittney (25:17):
And I’m Brittney Hansen.

Conor (25:18):
And they’re the princiPALS.


About Emma Wellman
Emma Wellman is the Beginning School and Lower School principal at Rowland Hall, an independent private school in Salt Lake City, Utah. Emma joined Rowland Hall in July 2018 and spent three years as the Beginning School (preschool) principal before also joining the Lower School (elementary) team. Prior to Rowland Hall, Emma was a teacher and administrator at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, an adjunct instructor at the City Colleges of Chicago, and the owner of a childcare business, Banana Mashers. Emma holds a bachelor’s degree in linguistics from the University of Michigan and a master’s in child development from the Erikson Institute.

About Brittney Hansen ’02
Brittney Hansen is a graduate of Rowland Hall’s class of 2002. She has been a Beginning School and Lower School assistant principal at Rowland Hall since 2022, and was a member of the Beginning School faculty from 2019 to 2022. Prior to Rowland Hall, Brittney interned briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and subsequently worked for six years at Washington University in various roles, including assistant director of residential life. Brittney holds a bachelor’s in social thought and analysis from Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s in education from Harvard University.

About Conor Bentley ’01
Conor Bentley is a graduate of Rowland Hall’s class of 2001. He holds a master’s in education, works in higher education, and has produced several podcasts, including the public-radio parody
 Consider Our Knowledge.

Podcast

PrinciPALS Podcast Transcript: 5.02: Back to Basics: Let’s Talk About Sleep

By Emma Wellman, Brittney Hansen, and Conor Bentley

Listen below or on Apple Podcasts.

Ask any parent: if your child is sleeping well, life just seems to run smoother. But when good sleep feels out of reach? The pressure (and exhaustion!) can be intense.

In the first of a new batch of episodes going back to basics on raising children who thrive, the princiPALS are talking about sleep. Leaning on their own experiences as parents and educators, as well as a bit of sleep science, the pals share information on building healthy sleep routines, dealing with inevitable bumps or pushback, and knowing if your child is getting enough sleep.

The transcript of this episode appears below.


Conor Bentley (00:01):
From Rowland Hall in Salt Lake City, Utah...

Emma Wellman (00:04):
I’m Emma Wellman.

Brittney Hansen (00:05):
And I’m Brittney Hansen.

Conor (00:07):
And they're the princiPALS.

I’m Conor Bentley, and on today’s episode of princiPALS, we’ll be talking about your kids and sleep.

Emma (00:23):
On The PrinciPALS Podcast, we tackle big questions and share big ideas about how to raise excellent humans.

Conor (00:29):
Emma and Brittney, it’s so nice to be back with you in the princiPALS’ office today, and today we’re talking about sleep and young children. And we really hope that this is going to be an informative episode for all of you, and in no way will be a snooze, because this is a very relevant topic to parents and kids of all ages because we all sleep, right? This is something that literally everybody does every day, hopefully.

Brittney (00:57):
Definitely, Conor. It’s really hard to overstate, actually, how essential understanding sleep is for parents. For kids, it’s a time when the brain is doing some of its most important work. During sleep, the brain consolidates memories, it strengthens neural connections and clears out toxins that build up during the day. For toddlers and preschoolers, this is directly tied to developmental leaps in language and motor skills and emotional regulation. As kids get older, sleep continues to play a pretty crucial role. In elementary-age kids, sleep supports problem-solving, creativity, and attention. And research shows that kids who do get enough sleep do better academically, have fewer behavioral challenges, and are better able to manage stress day to day. So more specifically, there are studies that demonstrate that children who get at least 10 hours of sleep per night by age seven show improved memory retention, faster cognitive processing, and higher academic achievement scores.

Conversely, those kids who are sleep deprived are three-and-a-half times more likely to have academic and behavioral challenges. So this is really some significant and important stuff for parents to know about. There’s a piece here around memory consolidation. Sleep plays a pretty critical role in consolidating memories, and we’ll talk more about that later in the show. And for children, this means that the skills that they practice, whether it’s reading or math or motor tasks during the school days, are all more likely to stick if they’re supported by adequate sleep. There's also a really important bit here around executive functioning. Executive functions, such as problem-solving, emotional regulation, and planning, are all also directly tied to sleep quality. When children are sleep-deprived, these high-order cognitive functions are really impaired, leading to difficulty that we see around focusing and staying organized in a classroom setting.

Emma (02:44):
Yep, clearly it’s pretty important. And because of that importance, from both a health perspective and a growth and learning perspective, parents can often feel kind of flooded with advice, and sometimes a fair amount of pressure around how to best manage sleep routines for their kids. There’s an ocean of advice and guidance on the internet and from people that you know, and it can be really hard to know what advice to follow, what’s the right guidance for you. And it can feel a little bit like no matter what you do, you’re not doing it right. So our hope for this episode is that it provides folks with some helpful and actionable information without piling onto parental guilt. There’s enough of that out there already. We’re all doing our best out here and supporting good sleep is something that we’re all going to work at, knowing that we won’t get it perfect every time. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

So with that framing in mind, I thought it might be helpful to share some really important science about how sleep happens and what it is, because that should help folks know whether they want to take in advice and to evaluate information they’ve been getting. So here’s an overview, and I will just say I find this super interesting, but I’m hoping that it won’t be too boring for our less nerdy listeners.

So there are two main forces which control sleep—and I want to share that sleep’s a pretty complicated thing. I am not a neurobiologist, but I have done a fair amount of learning in this area because it interests me, both as an educator and just as a human person. And so what I’m about to share is not fully complete, but it is a helpful summary. So having said that, there are two forces which control sleep: adenosine is one, and the circadian cycle is the other. So adenosine is a compound in the body which builds up across hours of wakefulness. So the more hours that you are awake, the more adenosine is in your body, and then it dissipates when you’re asleep. And it’s responsible for our sleep drive, or the sleep pressure. So across the day, the more hours that you’re awake, the more tired and ready for bed that you will feel. And then the more hours that you spend asleep, the more ready you will be to be awake because of the variation and the amount of adenosine in your body.

And then the other is far more famous. The circadian cycle, or the circadian rhythm, our listeners have probably heard about, which regulates when we want to be awake and when we want to be asleep. And biologically it’s meant to be connected to light. And there are two main components of the circadian cycle. One is cortisol and the other is melatonin. So those are the main things that drive the sleep cycle for humans.

As an interesting aside, caffeine binds to adenosine receptors, and so it blocks the way that adenosine works to make us feel sleepy. So it prevents us from feeling sleepy, but it also increases dopamine, which is kind of famous in the brain because it makes us feel like we have energy and feel motivated. That’s maybe not super relevant for kids at school, because hopefully children are not having a latte every morning in elementary school, but it is kind of a fun fact.

Conor (05:48):
No, I think it’s a totally fun fact. As someone who’s been sleeping for nearly 42 years, I had no idea that caffeine and adenosine, that whole relationship there, so I found that fascinating.

Now, I’ve also heard other research emerging around something called sleep spindles. So how does that play into this, and is it relevant with what we’re talking about?

Emma (06:12):
Yes. So sleep spindles are really cool. They’re traveling, coordinated brainwaves that occur during non-REM, light stages of sleep. (So REM sleep, remember, is rapid eye movement. It’s most frequently the kind of sleep when people are having dreams, or the most memorable dreams happen during REM sleep.) And these sleep spindles are really important for long-term memory. They seem to be responsible for adding new knowledge and experiences into the brain’s long-term storage. And having enough sleep spindles each night is super important for learning.

Brittney (06:46):
Yeah, and I actually find that emerging information about sleep spindles to be particularly interesting when we’re looking at it from a parenting or from a learning perspective. Memory consolidation, which is really just the transfer of information from short-term to long-term memory, is such a critical part of human development and the learning process. And now, thanks to this newly emerging research around spindles, we can more clearly understand the role that sleep plays in this process.

I also think it’s pretty helpful to know that spindle activity evolves over a person’s lifespan. So for young children, sleep spindles are less frequent because the neural circuits that are actually responsible for generating the sleep spindles are still maturing. They do play an important role in overall brain plasticity, though, and development, making high-quality sleep pretty important for young kids. Spindle activity really peaks, though, in adolescence. Adolescents with higher spindle activity often show stronger performance on tasks requiring memory and strong reasoning skills. So these are the skills that we really want to see in our kids in middle school and high school, right, as they’re doing that important learning work in the school setting. The amount of spindles that they’re accumulating in a night really does play an important part.

Conor (08:01):
How is this information useful for parents, and what can they actually do about helping their kids with sleep and, you know, all the things attached to it?

Emma (08:12):
So knowing how critically important sleep is for kids, and then knowing some about what’s actually happening during sleep and the biological underpinnings of that importance, can help motivate us, but also can help us decide what to do about it in our own particular household. So, routine is super helpful for kids in many areas—we’ve talked about that on other podcast episodes before; that’s something that lots of parents are familiar with. Sleep is certainly no exception. Building healthy sleep routines is something that can start at any time. And there are some kind of hallmark qualities of good sleep routines.

So the first is queuing the brain for bedtime. This is a term that Dr. Becky uses. (Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist who’s got a great presence on Instagram, and we’ll link to her stuff in the show notes. She’s a great resource for all kinds of things, including sleep.) So that looks like helping children practice skills that tell them, “Okay, now it’s time to downregulate. Now it’s time for me to be getting ready to go to sleep.”

Other things we can do are thinking about lighting, removing screens. This is something that we hear about a lot for adults, too, and I will say it’s really hard for me to not sleep right next to my phone. But for children it’s critically important because their brains are still being built, and those circadian rhythms, which are so sensitive to light input, are really being solidified in those earlier years of life. And so pulling back on screens, getting them out of the bedroom, helping kids disengage from screens and just not being under bright lights for the last half hour or so, especially before bed, is super helpful.

And then thinking about limiting high-energy activities and slowing things down shortly before bedtime can be really helpful—although there’s a bit of an asterisk here, which is especially for young children. Some of them really need to get the wiggles out just before settling down. And so some children, the pattern will be, you know, dinner and bathtime, perhaps, and then between pajamas and book reading, right before you go to sleep, there’s like the crazy zone. And that is sometimes exactly what children need in order to settle their nervous systems. They just need to kind of get those wiggles out, and that’s okay. We don’t have to stop them from doing that. They’re responding to what they can feel they need in their bodies.

Brittney (10:35):
Emma, I wonder, though, if that can be pretty tricky for a parent to discern, whether the child is doing that in a way that’s productive and helpful for them to eventually fall asleep, or if that’s, like, a signal of being overtired, right? And being a little bit sort of hyped-up, high energy because you’ve kind of missed the sleep window.

Emma (10:52):
Yes, absolutely. So I think there are two behaviors which might look the same in many ways. One is getting wiggles out for five, seven, ten minutes and then settling back in; it’s the way their nervous systems are helping them downshift. Or some children become sort of wild when they’re overtired, so we’ve missed the window for them to settle in, and they go from sleepy and low energy to all of a sudden bouncing off the walls. And I would say the biggest difference is the duration of that wiggle area, and also whether or not you can provide your child with some things to do that might help them. So some children are really seeking what we talk about as heavy work right before they’re ready to settle for bed. So what they want is, like, wrestling. They’re seeking out that kind of physical input with a sibling or maybe a parent. And other children literally, like, do a couple laps around the house. They just, like, run around the house a couple of times. But if they’re able to do that and then transition into the next part of the bedtime routine, that’s a pretty good guess that that’s just what their body needs. If, on the other hand, you find yourself saying over and over and over again, “Okay, now we’ve got to stop, now we’ve got to stop,” and they’re not able to get reregulated, then probably you need to look at your routine and the timing of things.

Conor (12:08):
And hopefully parents will know their kids to a degree where they can kind of know, “Okay, this is clearly going on a little longer than it should,” you know, “My kid doesn’t usually go this long,” kind of getting all, you know, amped up before bed. So I think that’s also the case-by-case kind of thing, is, you know, everybody’s different and some people can do that thing that you’re talking about of being a little bit more active before bed and calming right down, versus needing that kind of calm-down time before bed.

Emma (12:40):
Yeah. And I think the other thing that can be integrated fairly easily into a bedtime routine and can be really successful for kids—and there’s so many tools for this now, which is wonderful; many of them are free—for kids who are having a hard time quieting their mind, and there might be lots of different reasons, right, depending on the age of the child. Some kids are just having a hard time separating from family members. Some children are worrying about their math test the next day or about a social situation that’s happening at school. And so there are all kinds of audio guided meditations or unwinding routines that you can find online. They could do some deep breathing. They can do a meditative body scan. These are things that you can help by doing them with your child at the beginning, and over time kids will make the transition from awake to asleep on their own more successfully using these tools. And so you’ll help them with that skill and you’ll have helped them learn about resources which are effective for them when things inevitably get off track with sleep, right? Because as I said a little bit earlier, it’s not always going to be consistently easy—or, hopefully, consistently hard, either—doing bedtime.

Brittney (13:47):
That’s right. And I think it’s helpful to note that sleep and bedtime routines in households don’t have to be super elaborate and complicated, right? For many families it looks something like a bath and then pajamas, maybe a short story, and then lights out. And the most important thing, really, is that they’re consistent and predictable for the kids, right? The cues stay the same.

In my household, one of my favorite cues at the moment—and these will change, right, as the kids grow and change in their sleep habits and routines—but, for my six-year-old, we have the kids’ version of an Alexa in her room, and at 7 pm it starts playing quiet, sleep-time music. And she knows very clearly that when that music starts to play, it’s time to start quieting down her body. She knows the music comes on and she goes and brushes her teeth. She doesn’t need someone else to tell her that; she just knows what to do because it’s part of a really predictable routine. And it’s one of those cues, right, that Emma talked about referencing Dr. Becky, right? It’s one of those cues that helps her and her brain realize, “All right, this is the time to downregulate and start calming down.” And for some individuals it comes pretty easily, right, like my daughter that I’m talking about there. But for some, falling asleep independently and staying asleep can be a challenge, not only as a child, but for their whole lives, just because of the way nervous systems are built, right? Or temperament, right? The good news is, it’s really never too late to start building upon good sleep habits.

Conor (15:08):
See, and I was like your daughter. I was very good at the routine and, you know, we had a very established system about bedtime and, you know, little things like, okay, nightlight is on and I had to have a little radio going; like, I would listen to Jazz games as I drifted off to sleep. But it was pretty consistent and I was always a good sleeper, and I know that I’m very fortunate in that regard. Sounds like your daughter, same thing. But obviously we know that that’s not the case for everyone. And you know, sometimes you can put these things in place and it still doesn’t work or kids push back. So what happens when, you know, it’s not as simple or, you know, the kids aren’t as good at routine or some of these things that we’re talking about?

Brittney (15:51):
Yeah, absolutely. Tantrums and bedtime pushback are absolutely a real thing, and probably inevitable for most kids at some point, right, as they’re growing up and going through the process of developing their own sleep routines, right? But the resistance often comes down to kids wanting to feel a sense of control, right? So just like we talk about in all sorts of other areas of their lives, offering limited choices is often a helpful strategy to deploy. So you could say, “Do you want to read one book tonight or two? Would you like to sleep with the blue blanket or the red blanket tonight?” Right? And giving your kids a sense of agency without compromising on the routine is a really helpful strategy to deploy. And parents have to remember that setting and holding firm boundaries is really okay, even though sometimes it feels difficult. And in this case, it really is most often in the best interest of the kids.

Emma (16:41):
And I want to tack on that for some children, the falling asleep goes okay, but it’s the staying asleep and staying in their bedroom that’s the hard part. And that’s also a place where we can insert a routine and have firm boundaries. And so you can have the same kinds of, you know, limited option choices when kids get up and they say, “I need a glass of water,” for example, in the middle of the night. Or, “Oh, I need to go to the bathroom” for the 79th time. Or “I had a bad dream,” and you’re not actually convinced that they had a bad dream. But they’re coming out of their bedroom and they’re wanting a little bit of input and engagement. And you can, you know, have a routine where you say, okay, I’m going to give you a hug and a kiss and tuck you back in and say goodnight, and we’re not going to do a whole other bedtime routine with, like, three more books and another eight songs and that kind of thing. Because that consistency is what the kids are looking for, even if they seem to be asking for inconsistency.

Brittney (17:32):
That’s right. And those routines and those strategies might vary by child, right? As a parent with three kids, I know that we have different routines and boundaries that we have set with each of the three kids because we kind of have learned via trial and error, sometimes working well and sometimes not so much, what works for each of them. We have one child who comes in the night and reports that she’s scared and we do the hug and, “Now you go immediately back to bed,” because we know if it’s any longer than that, we are in for it for the whole night, right? And we have one where we can say, “You can stay for a minute and then I want you to head back to bed,” and she will do exactly that. She’ll stay for a minute and then she’ll head back to bed. But the same strategy wouldn’t work for the opposite child, right? And so it takes some figuring out on the part of the parents.

Emma (18:15):
Yeah. This is the “marathon, not a sprint” part.

Brittney (18:16):
Right.

Emma (18:16):
And the giving yourself grace and trying to be a bit of a scientist about it: give things a try and see how they work for you.

So yeah, so we’re talking a lot about why it’s important for children to sleep for themselves, but I also think it’s really worth noting that when children sleep well, it means that their parents sleep well. And well-rested adults are happier people who have more inner resources to be great parents and to support their kids during the day when they’re doing all kinds of important stuff too. And so, we can be motivated on behalf of our children, but also on behalf of ourselves, and that’s okay too.

So how do you know if your kid’s getting enough sleep? We’ve talked a lot about other components of this. So, some indicators in my mind about this is that kids will wake up on their own, ideally at a reasonable time, which is fairly consistent from one day to the next. And, same thing, they’ll be ready for bed at a reasonable time, which is fairly consistent from one day to the next. A bit of weekend catch-up of sleep is typical and nothing too big to worry about, especially as kids age and their school lives can become busier and heavier for them. But if your child’s having to sleep many extra hours every weekend, you might want to look at what’s happening on weeknights because they may be depleted across those weeknights in a way that is not good in the long-term.

Another thing to look for is that [usually kids] who are well-rested have enough energy to do all the things that are part of their lives—so, school and family obligations—without being lethargic or manic or melting down a whole bunch. And, of course, sometimes children will be all of those things within an hour, but in general, if your kiddo has the energy to do all the things that are part of their lives every day, then you’re on the right track.

And I also want to say, occasionally there will always be bad nights of sleep. Someone’s sick, you're about to travel, someone’s just been in town at your house, something exciting or a little scary is happening at school the next day, there’s a big developmental shift happening for your child—all of that is okay. The trick is to have a framework you can fall back on once you’ve moved through that funky period so that you can kind of snap back to it, just like you do for lots of other kinds of routines in your family.

Brittney (20:30):
And sometimes it’s helpful, I think, to have the rough guidelines, so you can know sort of when you’re in range with regards to giving your children enough sleep. So for me, it’s as easy as understanding what the recommendations are from the American Academy of Pediatrics, so I’d love to share those.

For toddlers, the recommendation is 11 to 14 hours per day, which of course sounds like a ton, but that includes naps, which are regular, of course, for our toddler kids. In our preschool-age kids, that’s [ages] three to five, we’re looking at 10 to 13 hours per day, once again including naps. And as parents of three-to-five-year-olds know, that nap is somewhat variable from kid to kid with regards to, you know, how quickly you’re going to wean off of needing the nap during the day and lengthening the sleep during the nighttime period.

For our school-age kids, [ages] six to 12, we’re looking at nine to 12 hours per night, and for teenagers, [ages] 13 to 18, eight to 10 hours per night. And as you said, Emma, that’s the moment when oftentimes external pressures—so, activities, homework, social pressures—can sort of creep into the sleep hours and make it harder and harder for our kids to get the amount of sleep that they need, right? They just naturally are going to want to be staying up later based on those circadian rhythms we were talking about earlier and the way the body is developing. But oftentimes the school day starts at an hour that doesn’t allow for that full 10 hours, which presents a challenge for our growing teens.

Conor (21:54):
So what you’re saying is we all should aspire to be a toddler and get that 11 to 14 hours a day.

No, but I also am thinking about this, too, just with the time of year that it is. I mean, obviously, you know, we’re recording this in December ... it’s dark, right? It’s darker, you know, and I notice myself getting tired earlier, you know, this time of year when it’s darker earlier, and I notice myself being able to stay up later in the summer when the days are longer and there’s more light. So I know that that’s something for me, so I’m sure, you know, that has to affect kids at least as much or more because the environment is telling you, “Go to sleep, it’s dark. Get up, it’s light,” right? I mean, that’s very much happening for all of us.

Emma (22:42):
Yeah, I think one of the things for, practically speaking, for families around that change, depending on where you live in the world, right, there might be a bigger or a smaller change in the amount of light that you have seasonally. But certainly the going-to-bed hour when it’s still very light out in the summertime can be hard. And so there's, you know, people get blackout curtains and there’s all kinds of things that we have to do for that. And then, similarly, waking up in the morning when it’s still very dark outside can be hard for some kids. And so, you know, I think just trying to leverage routines again, as we talked about, and also getting sunlight in the eyes early in the morning as soon as there’s sun can be really helpful in setting that circadian rhythm. And then backing off the screens and the light later in the day can be really helpful, and just doing the best you can to manage.

Conor (23:27):
Well, it wouldn’t be a princiPALS without some homework. And so we have a couple of items of homework for those of you out there, and I think that this will be very helpful for people.

Emma (23:40):
We hope so. One thing we’d like to invite our listeners to do is to try paying some special attention for the next week or so to the sleep routines in your household to assess whether they seem to be working for you and your children. Think back to those indicators that kids are getting enough rest (you might think about them for yourselves also), and do a little self-assessment about whether or not you want to tinker with something, or whether or not you want to make a change.

Brittney (24:03):
And our second bit of homework is kind of piggybacking on that idea, but getting some more information about the hours of the day that your child is not with you by checking in with your child’s teacher for feedback about how well-rested they seem to be at school. And for older kids, this might not look like talking to their teacher, but instead talking to your child about whether or not they feel like they have enough energy to get through the day, and to help them make a plan to adjust as needed.

Conor (24:27):
So obviously, sleep, along with food and nutrition and exercise, are all very critical, basic things that we need to be focusing on with our children as we go through our daily lives.

Emma (24:41):
Yes. And actually this is the first in a series of what we’re calling back-to-basics episodes of The PrinciPALS Podcast, and you can look forward to hearing more about nutrition and exercise in future episodes.

Conor (24:53):
So as usual, we will have the resources mentioned here in the show notes, and you can find this podcast at rowlandhall.org/podcast and wherever else you download your podcasts.

So thank you all for joining us in the princiPALS’ office today, and I think, just based on the conversation, I’m ready for a little nap. So until next time ...

Emma (25:16):
I’m Emma Wellman.

Brittney (25:17):
And I’m Brittney Hansen.

Conor (25:18):
And they’re the princiPALS.


About Emma Wellman
Emma Wellman is the Beginning School and Lower School principal at Rowland Hall, an independent private school in Salt Lake City, Utah. Emma joined Rowland Hall in July 2018 and spent three years as the Beginning School (preschool) principal before also joining the Lower School (elementary) team. Prior to Rowland Hall, Emma was a teacher and administrator at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, an adjunct instructor at the City Colleges of Chicago, and the owner of a childcare business, Banana Mashers. Emma holds a bachelor’s degree in linguistics from the University of Michigan and a master’s in child development from the Erikson Institute.

About Brittney Hansen ’02
Brittney Hansen is a graduate of Rowland Hall’s class of 2002. She has been a Beginning School and Lower School assistant principal at Rowland Hall since 2022, and was a member of the Beginning School faculty from 2019 to 2022. Prior to Rowland Hall, Brittney interned briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and subsequently worked for six years at Washington University in various roles, including assistant director of residential life. Brittney holds a bachelor’s in social thought and analysis from Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s in education from Harvard University.

About Conor Bentley ’01
Conor Bentley is a graduate of Rowland Hall’s class of 2001. He holds a master’s in education, works in higher education, and has produced several podcasts, including the public-radio parody
 Consider Our Knowledge.

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