Autism Vox

Sleep Better!

by Kristina Chew, PhD on July 17th, 2006

Summer’s longer days—so that it is not fully dark until almost 9pm (where I live, on the East Coast)—are one reason that my son Charlie has been having a hard time going to sleep. But Charlie generally has difficulty going to sleep and he is hardly alone among autistic children in this, as an online article on Sleep and Autism notes. Parents tell of using melatonin to help children go to sleep at a reasonable hour (i.e., not midnight). Other children wake up at up at 3am, and stay up (Charlie has occasionally—not regularly, for us—-done this).

So I have been reading a book by V. Mark Durand, Ph.D., Sleep Better!: A Guide to Improving Sleep for Children with Special Needs. An excerpt about autistic children and bedtime routines:

[One child] would set up his extensive collection of stuffed animals around the bed, a task that could take 15 minutes given the large number the he had to arrange. Unfortunately, if one of the animals were out of place or missing, then he could not get to sleep. To complicate matters, if he happened to wake up at night and find the animals moved……..then he would scream and cry until his mother came into his room to fix things. (p. 63)

Dr. Durand suggests that “parents of children with autism should be cautious when introducing new routines and should consider building in variation (e.g., changing the order of the activities each night) from the very beginning” (p. 63).

What do you think Dr. Durand suggested to the mother to do?

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POSTED IN: Family, Health, Parenting, Psychology