It’s Never Too Late: Get Bedtime Back on Track for Your Child with Special Needs

Keeping children on track is difficult, but it can be especially difficult with special needs children. As we track towards the end of the summer, there are few tips and tricks that can help keep you and your family on track to help adjust to the new school year in September. First is to add in time. An extra 15-20 minutes before the scheduled bedtime can help with any issues that may arise and still keep your children on track for the planned time. This ties in well to mindfulness, especially with those “freak outs” that may happen. Giving your child time to focus and meditate on those issues will help refocus him or her to the task at hand. If that doesn’t help, deep pressure and massage can help with that calming process and give you more physical contact opportunities with your special needs child. The last bit of advise is charting, which really is a rewards system. It allows your child to visually see how they are doing and earn those gold stars to track the progress. This is also an opportunity for independence, in that you can put in tasks such as “brush your teeth” or “clean up toys” as part of the charting and help keep your child in an orderly and schedule driven routine as school starts back up again.

Key Points:

  • 1Review your night time schedule, and find things you could possibly do later that will allow your child to go to sleep 15-20 minutes earlier than usual.
  • 2Massages can help your child feel more calm and aware of how their body is feeling.
  • 3Keeping a sleep manners chart creates a visual aid and rewards system for children to follow a routine sleep schedule.


Help your child practice strategies around mindfulness so that she can learn to move to a more peaceful place in her mind and body independently.
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Written by HealthStatus
Medical Writer & Editor

HealthStatus has been operating since 1998 providing the best interactive health tools on the Internet, millions of visitors have used our health risk assessment, body fat and calories burned calculators. The HealthStatus editorial team has continued that commitment to excellence by providing our visitors with easy to understand high quality health content for many years.

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