Foods That Will Help Him Sleep

Improve the likelihood of a good night with some simple changes to your youngster’s diet

- Katie Masters

There are some very easy ways to help your youngster sleep well this summer: you could put up a black-out blind at the window; cool down his room with a fan; block out the barbecue chatter with some white noise…and feed him foods that help him sleep. “What he’s eating and when he eats it can have a big impact on how well he sleeps,” says sleep expert Lucy Wolfe. And it’s easy…

Have tea early

Whatever age we are, our blood sugar rises when we eat, and so do our levels of insulin – the hormone produced by the body to use that blood sugar. The result? We feel more awake and our levels of melatonin, the hormone that helps us to relax and drift off to sleep, reduce. So it makes perfect sense to leave enough time for this process to finish before bedtime.

There’s another reason to have an earlier tea, too. “For your little one to fall asleep, he needs to feel full, but his digestive system must be relaxed, too,” says Lucy. “In the hour or so after he eats, his stomach and gut are busy working away digesting the food, and all that bodily activity makes him more wakeful.”

Make your youngster’s last meal of the day two hours before he goes to sleep and, if that means he needs a light snack later on, give it to him no less than an hour before bedtime. If you’re running late, then you can help the digestion process along by giving your little one a drink of water 15 minutes before he has his tea, rather than a big beaker-full with his meal. “If he drinks lots at the same time as he eats his food, the liquid can dilute his digestive juices and slow the process down,” explains Lucy.