Sleep and Autism
Many children with Autism have sleep disorders, it's difficult for them to fall asleep and or stay asleep throughout the night. However there are different strategies you can use to help them with their sleep challenges.
The first strategy would be to look at sleep hygiene; this is just basically monitoring the behaviors surrounding the bedtime routine.
For example, it's good sleep hygiene, not to let your child watch any kind of a screen right before bedtime. That means no TV, no computer, no phone, no iPad, because all of those screens emit a very bright light and they have an awakening effect so it's going to make it harder for your child to fall asleep. The other thing you want to do is avoid giving them any food or drink with caffeine in it. Caffeine is a stimulant which can also make it very difficult for them to fall asleep and stay asleep. Therefore you want to refrain from giving them chocolate, cola or tea, for example, more than a few hours before bedtime.
The other thing you want to refrain from doing is roughhousing with them right before bed. A typical situation would be that the father works late, he gets home late, and he wants to understandably play with his kids when he gets home. They enjoy roughhousing, so he'll pick them up, throw the kids around, and then say, Okay, now it's time for bed. But you can't do that after you've just roughhoused with them because by now they are wide awake.
It's also very important to stick with a very, very consistent bedtime routine. So the bedtime and the time that you will wake the child up should be the same every single day. If you start changing the times around, it's going to affect their ability to sleep well.
An example of a good sleep routine would be, starting after dinner, the child takes a bath, brushes their teeth, gets dressed to go to bed. The parent reads them a bedtime story, the lights go off and they go to sleep by themselves. This routine should also be done at the same time every day.
So for children who wake up a lot during the night, there are different behaviors to look at. Very often with children who can fall asleep at the beginning of the night, but can't cannot stay asleep throughout the night is that they're unable to fall asleep on their own. They need someone either in their room with them or in the bed with them to fall asleep. They don't know how to fall asleep on their own. Some parents are lucky, their children are just able to fall asleep on their own without any kind of training. For many other children, it's a learned behavior. If a child is unable to fall asleep on his own or her own at the beginning of the night, then they wake up in the middle of the night, they're not going to be able to fall back asleep on their own. Part of part of the normal sleep cycle for everyone consists of partial awakenings throughout the night. So usually what happens is we go to sleep, we wake up, we fall right back asleep, and we don't even remember it happening. That's a partial awakening. With children who don't know how to put themselves to sleep in the first place that partial awakening becomes a full awakening. In the beginning of the night, mommy or daddy was in the bedroom with them, the lights were on. They had company. Then they wake up in the middle of the night, they're in a bed by themselves and the room is dark. Mommy and daddy are not in the room. So they're kind of surprised when they wake up.They're not comfortable. They want someone back in the room with them, because that's how it was in the beginning of the night and they need someone in the room with them to fall asleep.