Get Ready For Back-To School
A Monmouth expert offers tips and tricks to ensure your student starts the new year with ease.
The child or teen in your life is probably sulking as you read this. School is officially back in session, meaning that it’s out with sleep-ins and poolside days with friends and in with homework assignments and after-school sports and activities—and, for parents, it’s in with chauffeuring everyone to and from those activities. The transition from summer to school year can be difficult for all.
Of course, you can set your kids up to succeed. Make sure you’re picking up hand sanitizer and tissues to stash in backpacks, cars and coat pockets, and that you’ve scheduled an annual well visit if you haven’t already. If you have a teen in your life who needs access to specific software for schoolwork or passion projects, make sure you glance over student discounts they can take advantage of.
How else can you ease everyone back into school year structures? Here are some tips from Gagandeep Singh, M.D., a board-certified child psychiatrist affiliated who practices in Freehold, on ways to make the transition easy:
Get those Zs. Sleep is vital for everyone, but it’s particularly important for children and teens. Dr. Singh singles out a healthy, consistent sleep schedule as one of the most important good habits for children and teens to build. “Sleep is actually a very complicated process,” he says. “There are different stages of sleep, all of which allow for types of different rest and recharging of the brain. There is also data linking circadian rhythm [your body’s 24-hour clock, which controls when you feel awake or tired] to mood and anxiety.” When a child or teen is sleep-deprived, you can tell—the amygdala, the part of the brain that regulates emotion, becomes overreactive and causes everything from anxiety and irritability to difficulty concentrating.
To keep sleep consistent, the doctor recommends “disconnecting from screens at least a half hour before bed.” Blue light, given off by phone and computer screens, can suppress melatonin production and sends the brain a confusing message that it’s still daytime, which can keep people awake. “Practice good sleep hygiene strategies—keep your bedroom cool and use a white noise machine to keep things quiet. If you’re tossing and turning, don’t lie in bed; that will keep you awake. Get up, sit somewhere else and do something calming, like reading a book,” says Dr. Singh.
Keep everyone moving. Building time into your family’s day for movement and exercise is also vital. Exercise floods your system with endorphins and serotonin, our natural mood stabilizers, and burns off excess cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) agrees, and recommends that children ages 3 to 5 be active “throughout the day” and ages 6 to 17 be physically active for at least 60 minutes every day. The CDC suggests incorporating physical activity into your family’s daily routine via group walks or games. Dr. Singh echoes the sentiment. “It’s important to build being physically active and getting outside into daily routines,” he says. “In addition to those endorphins, it gives you a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day and can help with sleep.”
Adds the doctor: “Kids joke now about how you feel bad if you don’t ‘touch grass,’ but there’s really some truth to that. You can’t sit inside with the curtains drawn and LED lights overhead and expect to feel healthy. We’re diurnal creatures and our bodies need sunlight.” Getting kids outside and in natural environments also increases opportunities for exercise without pushing them to join competitive sports if they don’t want to.
Know signs of stress. If your child is struggling, he or she probably won’t just announce it. So it’s important for parents to keep an eye out for signs of anxiety or stress. “Watch for disturbances in sleep, changes in energy levels and loss of appetite,” says Dr. Singh, “particularly if combined with a slip in grades, increased irritability and any kind of self-isolating behavior.”
If you suspect your child is feeling overwhelmed about something, he advises, “The best thing to do is to offer an open door. Make it clear that you’re asking from a place of love and not a place of judgment. Saying ‘I know you want your space and independence, and we want to give you that, but it’s our job is to keep you safe and protected. We want your mental health in a good place because we love you’ goes a long way.”
Offering simple anxiety management tools such as “box breathing” (inhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds) or the five-senses grounding technique (naming five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell and one you can taste) is also often effective.
Want more health stories and seasonal inspiration? Make sure you check out the September issue of MONMOUTH.
