So leading on from that then, what other sensory or environmental adjustments do you think generally tend to make the biggest difference for neurodivergent young people at bedtime?

I think it is the sensory needs.

So it's like you said about moving on from it, but I'd like to stay with it because it's just so important.

So it's not just thinking about the bath, but it's thinking about how can we do some purposeful play with them in the evenings? How can we put pressure through their bodies? So they might get their legs up and get them to do some wheelbarrows around the house, or if you've got some bathroom weighing scales, you can get them to, like, push their upper body down or do a plank, and they can see the numbers changing.

You can do tug of war with a des- dressing gown cord, or if you've got some physio resistance bands, you know, you can put that around their body and th- that you can hold the ends of it, and they can run off and grab a toy from the floor or have pillow fights or do some body crashing, hanging upside down off the back of the sofa.

There's so many ways you can meet sensory needs.

Like, at the moment in the, you know, it's, it's nice weather, but even in the winter, you can do a fantastic sensory circuit or mini obstacle course in a small space in your kitchen or in your lounge, and your child's gonna love it, and they're gonna meet their sensory needs.

Mm.

What about screens in this process? Can you use them? Are they a tool for good or are they the root of all evil or somewhere in between?

Yeah, so Michael Gradizar, Australian, he's really changing the narrative around screen use and adolescence and children and how screens are here to stay.

You know, we're not going to get rid of a teenager's phone.

And so...

A lot of neurodivergent children use their phone or their screen as a regulation tool.

And if I was to come along, and a lot of parents will say, especially if they've got a teenager, and then maybe the teenager's on the free call with me, will say, you know, are you going to say they can't use their phone? And the thing I want them to realize is the phone isn't the thing that's stopping them falling asleep.

They can use that phone on the run up to bedtime.

What's your thoughts, advice? What's the research say about melatonin in neurodivergent kids?

What can parents do to finally get their kids to sleep?

Yeah.

So, well, the traditional standard advice, should we say, is aimed at neurotypical brains and it often fails neurodivergent children because we're not thinking about their sensory needs.

We're not thinking about maybe their demand avoidance.

We're not thinking about how can we support a ADHD brain who's hyper focused on something they're doing before bed to help them transition up to bed so it's trying to think about um thinking about sleep from a neurodivergent brain perspective coming up with coming up with um ideas and practical strategies that are going to work with their child's brain rather than against it so for example like a bedtime routine is just like a so stacked with demands.

First off, they've got to stop doing what they were doing.

Then we've got to get upstairs.

Yeah.

He just can't get back to sleep because of anxiety.

yeah but he may also be like because of the type of week he's been having he is more anxious he is probably more hyper alert which is stopping him like getting down maybe i don't know what time he's waking in the night but he's had his deep sleep happening at the beginning of the night and then you do more dream sleep towards the end of the night the second half of the night you're doing much more dreaming so he's probably dropping out of the dream sleep and then struggling to get back to sleep but Sometimes I support children and teenagers who have got like a recurring dream or a recurring theme to their dreams.

And we need to help them process their dreams.

So I don't know.

A recurring dream I had when I was a child was there was a witch chasing me down my back garden path.

So if that was happening for... a child I was supporting, or if Otto's having recurring dreams or those feet, like you're talking about, we can reenact those feet.

Like what may go through his shoes and your shoes? Like what shoes do you think it sounds like? What colour are these shoes? Like we can...

And I don't hear it talked about enough.