Parenting a Short Sleeper

I'm guest blogging today at Easy to Love but Hard to Raise about the challenges of parenting a short-sleeper: a child who needs less sleep than most.

Horrendous bedtimes. Night awakenings that seem never-ending. Feeling as though you never have a moment to yourself. Sound familiar? You may be living with a short-sleeper—a child who needs less sleep than most.

Many of us arrive at parenthood believing that babies sleep around the clock, only to find ourselves parenting a child who seems to barely sleep at all. In truth, kids’ sleep needs vary widely. Average sleep times for children are 14-16 hours of sleep per day for newborns, 12-14 hours for toddlers, 10-12 hours for children three to six, but some kids don’t need this much sleep. A few need significantly less.

Although true “short-sleepers”—people who can get by on just a few hours of nightly sleep— make up just 3-5 percent of the population, the percentage of kids who need less sleep than average is much higher. And these short sleepers can tax their tired parents emotionally and physically. 

The post includes 5 tips to help you live peacefully with your short sleeper.

Read the complete article at Easy to Love, and let me know either here or there: Do you have a child who needs less sleep than other kids? How have you handled it?