When You Need A Nightlight

In the last post we talked about how your baby is not afraid of the dark, but what if you have a toddler or an older child?  Are they afraid of the dark?  The answer to that is, yes they can be.  They are old enough that the imagination center of their brain has developed, which means that you can have wonderful tea parties, sword fights, and forest expeditions, but unfortunately it also means that, to them, there might actually be monsters in the dark.  Thus, many children ask to have light on at night. 

You may not know this, but light can be the enemy of sleep.  Light is what sets our circadian rhythms – the waves of cortisol and melatonin that set our body clock.  Blue light is a hot button topic of late, and for good reason.  Blue light changes the times that our bodies make hormones which causes poor sleep.  This is why experts recommend ending the use of screens that emit blue light several hours before bedtime and not keeping the phone by the bed.  Lights in the blue spectrum, which include waves of violet and bright white, tell our photo receptors (which we have in both our eyes and our skin) that it is time to be awake.  This is not a good thing when you are trying to get your child to sleep at night.  If you have the option replacing the bedroom light, and possibly the bathroom if you do a bedtime bath, with a softer light that has yellow tones it can help a lot.  For choosing a nightlight, never pick a bright bulb.  A red light bulb is the best choice for nightlights as red does not trigger the photo receptors.  Other options are orange or yellow, but remember that the less red it has the more likely that it has some of the blue spectrum.  Here are some good options for lights: this square red nightlight, or you can replace a candle sized light bulb with this small red bulb, or replace a bigger light with this full sized red light bulb, and there are things like this okay-to-wake clock that has a lot of colors and you can choose to make it red at night (also great for helping to keep an older child in bed in the morning, remember, when the light is red you stay in bed).