They had a wonderful day, they are exhausted, and it is half past ten and they are still awake, tossing and turning. In a highly sensitive child this isn’t defiance or a bad habit. Almost always it is the same thing: they haven’t been able to close the day.
Why it is harder for them
Falling asleep requires bringing arousal down. A child who has been processing stimuli all day arrives in bed with the engine at high revs, and with unfinished material too: what a friend said, the telling-off somebody else got, a question that occurred to them in the car and never got asked.
On top of that, bed is a quiet place. And in the quiet, what is inside is louder.
The hour before matters more than the routine
People talk a lot about the bedtime ritual and very little about what happens before it. And the hour before is the one that decides.
- Really lower the light. Not just switching off the ceiling light: bringing the light down across the whole house. Light tells the body what time it is, and with a sensitive child that message arrives with more force.
- No screens in the last hour. Not out of moralising. A screen doesn’t bring their revs down, it keeps them up.
- Lower the volume of the whole house. Yours included. If there is a lively conversation in the living room, they are following it from bed.
- No big subjects. Neither the argument still pending nor the conversation about changing schools. That is for the morning.
The emptying out
The tool that solves the most, by a wide margin, is giving them somewhere to put down the day’s material before bed. Ten minutes, sitting down, with no visible hurry.
With younger children it works to ask about three specific things: something good, something that was hard, and something they are curious about for tomorrow. The “something that was hard” is the important part and the one we usually skip for fear of stirring it up. It stirs far more if it doesn’t come out.
With older ones, a notebook by the bed and no obligation to show it to you. Writing down what is going round makes it stop going round.
The room
It deserves a sensory review, because what you don’t notice is keeping them awake.
- Pyjamas: no labels, no seams that dig in, in the fabric they choose.
- Sheets: if the new ones feel scratchy, wash them before they go on the bed.
- Standby lights: the blue LED on the socket, the one on the charger. Removed or covered.
- Noises: the fridge, the cistern, the lift. A soft white noise masks them better than silence does.
- Temperature: sensitive children usually notice heat long before adults do.
If they wake in the night
What works worst is turning on the light and starting to talk. They wake right up and you have to start from zero.
What works: going in without turning on the light, a very low voice, few words, staying a minute and leaving. The idea they need to learn is that night is boring and safe, not that night is when dad comes and there is conversation.
And if they wake from a bad dream, there is no need to interpret it or analyse it. Naming and staying is enough: “you had a nasty dream, I’m here, it’s over”.
When this goes beyond a website
If they snore regularly, if they breathe through their mouth constantly, if they wake up tired even having slept the hours, or if the problem lasts months and doesn’t give way to any of this, it is time to talk to the paediatrician. Some things show up in a check-up and don’t get fixed with a routine.
Sleep, breathing and night-time rituals are developed in Niños Altamente Sensibles.