
Bedtime can be tricky for parents, especially when their child is experiencing behavioural sleep problems, but help is on the way with an app in development designed to help parents manage their child's sleep problems.

Griffith University researchers from the School of Applied Psychology are developing the Lights Out App, an evidence-based approach to provide children aged between three and 12 years of age accessible sleep interventions to improve their sleep.
Griffith's Professor Caroline Donovan said around one third of Australian children have some kind of sleep difficulty, many of which are behavioural in nature.
"Behavioural sleep problems include difficulty initiating and/or maintaining sleep, bedtime resistance, and difficulty sleeping without parental presence or assistance," Professor Donovan said.
"It's a problem many families experience and need help with, as sleep is essential for physical and emotional health and wellbeing."
In recent years, Professor Donovan and her team have researched the efficacy and success of the Lights Out program in face-to-face, vide-conferenced, and web-based formats, and found it to be successful in improving child sleep, anxiety and behaviour problems.
The Lights Out program covered:
- Psychoeducation on sleep problems, nighttime fears and anxiety
- Goal setting
- Sleep hygiene
- Bedtime routine reward charts
- How to praise and reward children
- Strategies for managing anxiety at night-time
- Strategies for managing oppositional behaviours at night-time
- Maintenance and relapse prevention
Interviews with parents suggested they want an app-based version of the Lights Out program.
Through winning the Cogniss Priority Digital Health Challenge, Professor Donovan said her team can take the Lights Out program to the next level by working with Cogniss to turn the program into an app and thereby delivering the program in a format parents have asked for.
"We hope to have the app operational by the end of the year so families can have a user-friendly, evidence-based and efficient program at their fingertips," she said.
