Quick Ways to Raise Your Child’s School Grades

Video Transcript Below:

Speaker 1: (00:00)
Report cards came out last week, how’d your child do? Pretty good. Could they use a little improvement? Are you a little worried? Are you looking for things to do that can help your child get better grades on today’s sleep coach? Let’s talk about kids and sleep and how that affects their grades and their learning ability.

Speaker 1: (00:23)
So before we start, I want to just bring up the fact that I’m not just talking from research, I’m also bringing forth experience of raising children and also seeing how their grades can suffer because of lack of sleep. Okay. Now that I’ve said that, so now let’s, let’s just continue. Okay. So when you saw your child’s report cards last week, did you see any grades that you think were there more capable of doing better with or that maybe you just feel like they weren’t applying themselves or maybe they’re just having problems remembering the topics and remembering enough to pass the tests? A lot of times that actually comes from a lack of sleep. The inability to focus and the inability to memorize topics or the inability to actually learn and pick up on what the teacher is saying or what’s being taught is actually blocked by a lack of sleep.

Speaker 1: (01:32)
Now you’re thinking to yourself, well, okay, but my child sleeps at least seven hours a night. Well, let me tell you, uh, studies and research show that any school age child is better off sleeping anywhere from eight to 11 hours a night. Now look, now think back, if your child’s going to sleep at 10 o’clock at night and yet waking up at six, how much of that is true sleep? Because we all know that when they lay down, they’re not really going to sleep. They’re laying there, they’re, they’re playing with their fiddling with them, with their, their thumbs. They’re, they’re, they’re sneaking in, you know, their tablet or whatnot. How much of that is real sleep? And it would surprise you to know that the majority of children take it can take up to an hour to two hours to really literally fall asleep. Now if you’re blessed with a child that falls asleep quickly, whatever, just don’t rub it in.

Speaker 1: (02:32)
We don’t need to know that the majority of us have kids that will take forever to fall asleep or we’ll look for any reason to come out of their bedroom. And I know I’m speaking to a lot of you right now because a lot of them you lay down, you’ve told them, Hey, go read. Or you’ve told them, go take your shower and then go to bed. And they look for any reason. Oh, I’m thirsty. Oh, I’m still hungry. Oh, I’m this on that. Okay, how do you fix that? Well, okay, going to address that too. So number one, your child needs eight hours or more of sleep if it, if your child is a school age child, okay, you can get away with seven hours, but you really can’t get away with anything less than that. And the reason being for that is that as a child learns, and this is especially true for babies, as a child learns, they need sleep to actually record the day’s lessons into their brains.

Speaker 1: (03:36)
So like they have a heavy day at school. They, they know they picked up some stuff, but the inability to record it and ingrain it into their brains is reliant on the lack of sleep that they got the night before. So if you’re looking for the quickest way to fix your child’s GPA or fix your child’s grades, then the answer is have a bedtime routine. And we’ve addressed bedtime routines before. You know, stop the TV, stop the TV about an hour before bed, take a take a nice warm shower. It helps you one wind, it helps you just kind of get rid of the day’s worries. Okay. Read whether you read to them or have them read. Just had, have somebody pick up a book. Okay. It calms you. It distracts your mind. It’s very important to do. And if your child has a phone, that phone really, really, really should not even be in their bedroom.

Speaker 1: (04:43)
Oh, but my child uses it as an alarm. Really? That’s the excuse you’re going to use because your child’s future depends on this. So take the phone, put it in the kitchen, buy them a watch with an alarm, buy them, buy them a cheap alarm clock. It’s eight bucks for crying out loud. It’s your child’s future to child’s grades, and I don’t mean to sound preachy, but I’ve seen it myself in my own house where we forget these standard things and it, it, it, it truly bugs me when we actually stopped to think about it. So routine an hour before bed, the TV goes off or an hour before bed, the child goes to take a warm shower. They can lay down and read a book for an hour. They can just generally unwind. And then at nine whether you want to put them to bed at nine or if you want to put them to bed at 10 o’clock nine o’clock is better, but 10 o’clock is acceptable.

Speaker 1: (05:39)
If they’re waking up at six then that’s perfect. At that point, what you would do is make sure that it’s lights off. All screens have been off, all excitable or all, all pieces of excitement in the bedroom has been put to the side. They’ve been able to unwind for a while. They’re ready for bed. If your child has a habit to get up and drink water, anticipate it, put a cup or a glass next to their bed. It’s all simple, simple, simple routines that you and your child can get into. And I promise you it’ll help them sleep better. So what about teens? Teens are a special case. Teens are awesome. So here, here’s the deal. As your child grows, their sleep needs change. So so does their circadian rhythm. Their circadian rhythm is the time of day. That is their prime time of day.

Speaker 1: (06:37)
In other words, when you see a teen and it’s eight o’clock nine o’clock in the morning and they’re still walking around like a zombie, heck, half the time they look like zombies anyway, but not attacking, not being mean. I’m just saying the truth anyways. So eight or nine o’clock they still look like zombies. There’s a reason for that. Teams have a different circadian rhythm from us because they’re developing hormonally and they’re developing mentally and psychotic psychologically. Okay? And what happens is when you enter the teen years, your more likely to be a night owl than you are to be a morning. I don’t even remember what the saying is, but anyways, yeah. You know what I mean? You’re more likely to be a night owl if you’re a teen. And the reason being is because of the development of self. Does that mean that you can, you can beat this and there’s a tactic for it?

Speaker 1: (07:29)
No, no. There really isn’t. In fact, a lot of school districts have seen this. They’ve read the studies, they’ve seen the scientific research and they’ve actually raised the time that school starts for high school. Yeah. If you, if you, if you do the research, there are private schools, there are actual schools around the nation that are, are starting school sometime around eight 39 o’clock and that’s because they know that team’s circadian rhythm is so messed up that they really don’t start waking up until about nine, 10, 11 o’clock. Um, what does this mean to your child as a teen? It means that you can help them because you know a team isn’t more like I’m telling you to do this. It’s more like a guide them because they’re trying to develop themselves, but you can guide them to know how important sleep is because if you started that child as a younger, knowing the sleep was important and knowing that a bedtime set bedtime and a set wake time was important, then it shouldn’t be that hard with it with a teenager because they know the importance. Can you change your teens sleep up sleep habits now? Yeah, you can. What you can do is guide them. You can give them the facts and yes, we know that teams all think they’re different or whatnot, but do what I did with me. Experiment with them, show them that, Hey, this is you going to sleep at midnight and waking up at six. Don’t you feel like crap?

Speaker 1: (08:53)
Okay. Common sense says, Hey, if you go to sleep at 10 the next day and have them wake up at the same time again, what’s going to happen? Holy cow, mom, I think you’re right. I think, I think I feel right here. Right? And your team says that. My point is, is that help them, guide them through their own sleep so that way their grades don’t suffer and that way their learning ability continues. So now we go onto the college aged kids. How can we help college aged kids? Well, really they’re on their own. They’re starting to learn how to be an adult. What we can do at that point is we can remind them of the routines that we helped them develop when they were children.

Speaker 1: (09:37)
A child in college is looking for theirself and they’re looking for being their own person, but it doesn’t hurt when you as a parent help them throughout their entire life, set up a good bedtime routine. Now, am I saying that a child that that’s already in college, can you help them or whatnot? You can. You can. You can lead them to know the importance of sleep. You can let them know that their own heroes, the stars or whatever YouTube person that they’re talking about, the sayings are no longer, I’ll rest when I die. The sayings are, I need enough sleep so that way I can be the best me that I can be.

Speaker 2: (10:16)
And what’s that?

Speaker 1: (10:18)
I’m going to share stuff, share the charts and everything from the national sleep foundation so that way you can see the research. I’m also going to share a couple of links to other stories where parents have taken bedtime routines and they’ve kind of mastered them.

Speaker 1: (10:34)
And I hope that this video has been helpful to you. If it has, please like the video, share the video, help us get to more people so that way we can all enjoy a better life through better sleep, especially parents. Think about the parents that got the report cards where their kid was an a student and now all of a sudden they’ve got two or three season there. What went wrong? Well, I can tell you 90% of the time it was the child’s lack of sleep during that quarter. With that, I’m Javier, this has been sleep coach. And if you have any questions, please contact us at live. Well, mattress and furnishing centers and until next time, have a great day.