089: How to help your child get better sleep – with Gitte Winter Graugaard

Raise your hand if you’ve got a child at home that refuses to sleep? There is a reason terrorists use sleep deprivation as one of their tactics… it messes with your mind, it wears down your body, and you start to unravel slowly.

My special guest today is author Gitte Winter Graugaard and she’s simplifying how to help your child get better sleep. If you’re exhausted from the nightly bedtime struggle or simply just want to make the experience a wee less stressful, Gitte shares her tips that’ll help soothe your child to sleep and create a strong bond between the two of you.

Gitte Winter Graugaard simplifies how to help your child get better sleep.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why sleep is so important and what the consequences are of not getting enough quality sleep
• How the connection we have with our kids affects how we run our businesses, as well
• If your child isn’t sleeping well at night, where to begin that will help them (and yourself)
• How the 4 elements (fire, water, earth, air) apply to how we react and respond when we are triggered and this relates to our sleep quality
• How to create sacred space in our bedtime routines at night that will help our children feel safe, calm and loved
• What the “love mountain” visualization is and how it can help your child sleep better at night

If you’re at your wits’ end when it comes to helping your child get better sleep, girl, I feel ya. My youngest didn’t sleep all the way through the night until he was a year and a half old! That’s well over 500 days of getting 3 hours of sleep wherever I could!! (Gosh, I sure could’ve used Gitte insight way back when.) I hope today’s episode brings you a new perspective on sleep and helps you both to connect and calm down together tonight at bedtime.

#DoTheThing!

Links, books and apps mentioned:

Book: The Children’s Meditations in my Heart – Gitte Winter Graugaard

Book: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear – Elizabeth Gilbert

Tool: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Talk: TEDx talk by Gitte Winter Graugaard – Help your child to sleep – empower connection to relax

Favorite quotes from this episode:

[06:44] Think of it as a dishwasher and you want the dishes to be clean when the program is over. So you run specific programs according to what you put in the dishwasher. And if it’s really dirty, then you run a longer program. So if we’re really tired, we should sleep longer. [But] what happens if you open the dishwasher too soon before it’s over, right? It’s bad news bears, you’ve got dirty dishes, you get sprayed in the face, right? Yes… which you also get from tired children. So, we want to make sure that our children’s inner dishwashers are run properly.

 – Gitte

 

[11:20] We need to parent ourselves before we parent the child.

 – Gitte

 

[11:54] As soon as the parent understands how our energy is affecting our child, there were so many things that change. This is what we call the conscious parenting.

 – Gitte

 

[13:18] When you have a conflict, just pause for a second and figure out, “what am I radiating? Did I join the drama?” We often do that. So if the children are experiencing drama, we join the drama and we yell even higher… we tend to be the boss of the situation. The first step is just to do some observations of how you feel and then try to parent yourself.

 – Gitte

About Gitte

Gitte Winter Graugaard, is a Danish writer, life coach, energy mentor, and lightworker for Room for Reflection. She is on a mission to help parents help their children to thrive through child meditation. 

Gitte helps parents become aware of their energy and what they radiate and teaches parents to always parent themselves first before they parent their children. 

Gitte is also the founder of the Momo Academy, which enables Danish schools to offer mindfulness to their pupils as part of their education. In addition, she helps other lightworkers bring more products to the market by being a business mentor.