Sleep is often in short supply with foster children. A good night’s sleep usually depends on feeling secure, and foster children often feel anything but secure since they have been removed from everything and everyone they know. What’s a foster parent to do to help their child and themselves get a good night’s sleep?
For most children to sleep well, they need to feel secure. One of the primary goals of foster parents is to help the foster child gain this sense of security. Routines and predictability help.
Insecurity in their new setting is not the only cause for disrupted sleep in foster children. The child may bring with him a history of bad experiences that happened at night or that come out at night to disrupt his sleep. Therapy is often crucial in helping foster children deal with these issues and allowing them to sleep better.
While we do not have a magic bullet to get your kid to bed and keep him there, Creating a Family does have resources to help you with sleep issues that foster children may face.
Here are a couple of recent resources we think you will find particularly helpful:
- Help! My Newly Placed Child is Regressing on Sleep (article)
- Understanding Psychotropic Medications (1 hr. podcast w/ expert)
Scroll to the very bottom of this page to see other resources we have on sleep issues with foster children in the form of blogs/articles, radio shows/podcasts, tip sheets, fact sheets and expert Q & A’s.
Additional Resources
