It is quite revealing that approximately 9 out of 20 children with ADHD have severe seep related problems, with many experiencing problems in falling asleep, resisting to go to bed and experiencing tiredness after waking up in the morning. ADHD children with sleep problems have a great likelihood to be late for school, with their caregivers being late for work quite often.
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These children could have rapid eye movement during sleep signifying that they sleep much less than other children and could have significant daytime drowsiness and some neurobehavioral impairment. You as a parent of such an affected child would agree that such children love simulative activities a lot and it is difficult to convince them to sleep.
Sleep medicine experts contend that that there is a straight forward relationship between ADHD and sleep disorders, with their treatment with psychotropic medication and other psychiatric conditions like anxiety and mood swings themselves causing sleep problems and daytime manifestations of primary sleep disorders. So it is best for you to understand that sleeping disorders in children need to be taken seriously with consulting a pediatrician/sleep specialist and finding out ways in which you can help your child with development of behavioral strategies to deal with struggles at bedtime.
Helping your ADHD child deal with sleep problems
As a parent it is good for you to recognize that it is ADHD alone that causes sleeping problems in children. It is found that children with ADHD had much shorter sleeping times than other children as they on an average slept for only 8 hours and 19 minutes as compared to others that slept 8 hours and 52 minutes, the reason being primarily due to their average rapid eye movement (REM) sleep time giving them 16 minutes of less sleep. So it would be best to consult a pediatrician/sleep specialist to know more about the sleeping problems of your ADHD child and find ways to deal with sleeplessness.
One major cause that could promote sleeping problems in ADHD children is the change of schedule that could make a major impact, with such children suffering from sleeplessness during vacation times. Experience has shown many parents that continuing with at least one scheduled activity that such a child did during school times would help make a positive impact in the sleeping patterns and general physical, mental and emotional health of such children.
You could also observe that some children with ADHD symptoms cannot just sleep at night and they get stimulated with highly creative thoughts that make them unable to get quality sleep at night only to get up tired and have problems getting up in the morning. This is found to be more common in teenagers and parents can do their bit with insisting on a scheduled wake-up time that would help induce natural sleep with advance of bedtime. It is also common to observe that children can be helped to lull off to sleep with background noise that is music with neither words nor lyrics. Waves, rivers and rain that are natural background rhythmic sounds also help.
The modern busy lifestyle contributes to variable bed times, too many/too less nap hours and late afternoon naps resulting in inability to sleep all night, nightmares and bed-wetting. A smart parent would face the challenge with abstaining from giving stimulating beverages and snacks in the late evening and disciplining ADHD children from watching stimulating TV shows in the late evening. This would avoid hypersensitivity to fictional events in these ADHD children. In addition avoiding playing simulative TV and games like Play station 2 during late evenings and school days helped make quality and calm times with the family before falling off to sleep.
To conclude, striving to be consistent and avoiding overstimulation at bedtime would be able to lull your ADHD child off to sleep to get up refreshed in the morning.