SLEEP WITH DISABILITY
For Children & Teenagers with Sleep Difficulties
Sleep with Disability is an education service developed by Annie O’Connell that aims to increase the knowledge, skill and confidence of allied health professionals and educators who support families with children and teenagers with sleep difficulties. Sleep with Disability supports the training of professionals through SIX online webinars and links to resources.
- Sleep is an essential part of everyone’s daily routine and strongly related to quality of life, learning, health and emotional well-being. Sleep, like diet and exercise, helps us to grow, recover from the wear and tear of daily life and build immunity. While sleeping, the brain sorts and stores memories for future learning.
Over 80% of children and teenagers with developmental disabilities have disturbed sleep that affects their development, day time behaviour (hyper activity, mood swings, lethargy, aggression & self-injury), learning and health.
A child’s inadequate sleep can have a large impact on the whole family with increased emotional and physical stress. Sleep deprived parents and carers find it harder to manage family and work commitments. Parent’s own health can be greatly impacted by poor sleep.
For some children, sleep improves with age. Others continue to experience sleep disturbance into their school years.
Therapists and educators can support families to develop better sleeping patterns for their children with a family centered individualised sleep plan.
Annie has been facilitating training of allied health professionals and educators since 2005 in sleep education, assessing a sleep disturbance, developing and monitoring a sleep plan for individual families. The webinar series are based on the two day training completed by hundreds of therapists and educators.
- This training provides guidelines for an individual therapeutic sleep intervention. This training does not provide guidelines for sleep standards, policy or procedures for an educational setting.
Click Here 7 good reasons to consider your child’s sleep.
Sleepwise E-Manual
Adequate sleep is essential for all children and adolescent’s health and development. Parents or carers may experience emotional and physical stress as a result of sleep disturbed nights.
While sleep disturbance is common in typically developing children and adolescents, there is an increased prevalence of sleep disturbance in children and adolescents with developmental disabilities.
The revised Sleepwise e-manual is intended for allied health and educational practitioners working with individual families in their homes or local community. Research & clinical practice in addressing sleep disturbance is growing and there is now a body of evidence to support intervention.
Sleepwise e-manual is a comprehensive resource supporting children and adolescents with developmental disabilities’s sleep including:
- Parental and carer sleep education,
- Assessment of a child or adolescent’s sleep,
- Individual sleep plans using communication, sensory and behavioural strategies
- Family monitoring and support.
