Sleep/screens/friends help!!

[Givemestrengthplease]

I'm at a total loss... My 9 year old is a rubbish sleeper. He takes ages to get to sleep and if he wakes in the night he stays awake. He has plenty of activity and we give him ample chilling time before bed eg drawing, colouring, listening to music. Reading leaves him too wired. For quite some time with had issues with him trying to read all night. Now it's spread to screens. Everything now has a password, screen time limits etc apart from the tv which doesn't have this option. He constantly looks exhausted and he gets mega moody when he's tired. He's a delight when he's slept! No amount of screen bans or punishments seem to to help. Last night he knew that if he got up again to watch tv he'd have to miss a party today that he's been looking forward to for months. 6am I find him watching cartoons.... There are a few issues that I don't know how to handle:

1. How do I improve his sleep? Getting to sleep and staying asleep?

1. A lot of his friends watch tv at night and play on games during night hours which makes it harder to fight against. How can I address this? He then gets teased about it 😡

1. Standard punishments don't work so any ideas what to try instead? He's generally well behaved, polite, pushes some boundaries as expected etc but I feel like I'm losing my mind. It's impacting the whole family.

Any help much appreciated!

Hi.
I'm not going to be any help sorry. My son Is a similar age and also has problems sleeping. I've installed screen limits etc too.
We've just had a major meltdown and he thinks all his friends can play when they want on tablets etc. I said that's not true.
Surely most children that age are not playing games online at night?
I hope someone comes along with wise words, I've honestly even asked the doctor for sleeping tablets for him but they say there isn't any.
Anyway your not alone. Hope you get a solution soon.

Has he got a tv in his room? My son did but I took it away and it has helped a bit.

I think you need to be quite hard line about screens at night / early morning as if you don't crack it now you won't have any chance when he's a teenager.

Total screen ban, remove TV aerial at night if really necessary?
Lots of fresh air and exercise in the day to physically exhaust him.

It sounds like he has never learned to self settle? DD1 (who we adopted age 8) didn't learn properly how to self settle until she was 12 or 13. She standardly took 1hr+ to get to sleep. Even if up later. So she just had to go to bed earlier to allow for the 60min+ settling time.

We tried

• night light, no light night
• gentle stories on CD (special ones not David Walliams!)
• whale music etc.
• reading / no reading

In the end with DD she relaxed more and learned how to do it for herself.