 Daylight savings starts each spring season (Sunday 31 March 2019). It is time to “spring forward” the clocks. It can be a dreaded time for parents of young children because with this, comes an adjustment that does not happen immediately. This is because children tend to be more structured in their bedtime and wake up around the same time each morning and that is why people usually see a greater affect on children when the time changes.
However there are some things you can do to help make the transition to the new time go a little smoother
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 Relax Kids uses a unique method to take children from high energy and stress levels to a state of relaxation that has been shown to have a positive impact on children’s mental and emotional health and wellbeing. The process involves movement exercises, social games, stretching, peer or self massage, breathing exercises, affirmations and relaxations including visualisations, mindful and autogenic exercises, all elements of which are evidence-based and play an important part in self-regulation.
 As a parent, experiencing what feels like endless unsettledness after your baby wakes up from their sleep in the night or takes short unpredictable naps in the day can be demoralising. I know all too well about those feelings of worry and not knowing how your baby’s sleep (and your own sleep) will improve. Once I got to grips with the different developmental stages and how they affect sleep, it was reassuring and helped me understand (and accept) the progress and changes my baby was going through.
 We tend to work on a common belief that tantrums are bad, we try all manner of things to get our children to be ‘good’ which in its self is not wrong, but when we mistake normal childhood behaviour of exploring, learning and pushing boundaries as naughtiness or don’t appreciate that children are sometimes not in control of their off-track behaviour we miss the opportunities to help them build ways of coping with big emotions.
We also beat ourselves up thinking we must be falling in some way as parents.  Sleep has always been, and will likely continue to be, a bit of a mystery, it is wonderfully complex and straightforward all at the same time. What happens in our bodies for sleep to come and how it supports us is amazing, I will look at 3 key areas of how sleep supports us in this blog and if you are a new parent who thinks sleep deprivation is par for the course - I will put a few matters straight.
 Hands up if this sounds familiar…
Your fussy baby finally falls asleep for her afternoon nap and you sit down for a much needed moment to yourself only to hear the postman bang at the door. Just like that, Sleeping Beauty is wide awake and mad… NOT a good combination. Or maybe you live in the country and you’re awoken at dawn by a wailing infant who has adorable (but ridiculously loud) birds chirping outside her window.  It was a super exciting morning in London with the crew of Super Shoppers. When the film company contacted me to take part in a show about whether Johnson & Johnson's bedtime range had a clinical stake in helping babies sleep better, I totally jumped at the opportunity. In this blog I explore the 3 questions we looked at in more detail and reveal what does have a clinical stake in helping babies sleep well.
 A Relax Kids Class incorporates dance, movement, games, simple stretches, peer and self massage, breathing exercises, positive affirmation exercises and guided visualisations and meditations.
 I feel that it matters we explore the difference between Sleep Training and Sleep Consultancy (as defined me, Nadia Edwards, Baby & Toddler Sleep Coach in Scotland, Fife). Why? well for one, most people think they are the same thing and that all professionals who support families to achieve better sleep use sleep training techniques. This isn’t always the case, or is depending what you class as ‘training’ for example some argue that rocking a baby to sleep is sleep training, training baby to fall asleep in a particular way.
 A massive 80% of new mothers who have postnatal depression suffer from insomnia and feel the very real effects of being sleep deprived. I was one of these mothers, even though I tried, I couldn’t relax enough to sleep. People would offer to come take my children out for a while so I could get some shut eye, it was useless, sleep was like the itch that couldn’t be itched.
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Copyright © - Nadia Edwards 2019, 3 Northbank Road, Cairneyhill, Dunfermline, Fife, KY128RN