The Children's Sleep Charity

I’ve been involved in the Autism community for over half of my life now. I started working as a volunteer in a special school when I was just 15 years old, supporting a young man with Autism. I then went on to train as a teacher and taught children in both special schools and mainstream. In 2012 I set up The Children’s Sleep Charity to help families of children with sleep issues, many of these families have a child who is on the autistic spectrum.

I like to spread the word about what we do as often families feel that nothing can help to improve their child’s sleep issues. We use a behavioural approach to sleep and have successfully supported thousands of families who have a child with autism to get a better night’s sleep. Research shows that a high number of children with autism have sleep difficulties and we are here to support their families. The charity has worked with a number of leading organisations to provide written support such as the Early Support guide to sleep and also more recently we’ve worked with Contact A Family to develop an information guide for parents that is available from their site. We have also worked with The Sleep Council to produce a guide that can be downloaded from here http://www.sleepcouncil.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/the_good_night_guide_for_children.pdf

Many parents feel that they’ve tried everything and they probably have . . With the support of a sleep practitioner they can explore the difficulty and work out the trigger then use appropriate strategies. We work with leading sleep professionals in order to stay informed about developments and research. The vast majority of sleep issues are behavioural which means that they can be improved with the right support. We offer sleep workshops across the country and clinics. We also deliver a 3 day accredited sleep practitioner course which is extremely popular, we recently trained a number of staff from respite centres, child development centres and nursing backgrounds who will embed our work in their localities.

We passionately believe that families needs support when they are sleep deprived and are working hard to raise the profile of sleep across the country. Sleep deprived children can’t meet their full potential and neither can their parents . . . For details of our work please visit www.thechildrenssleepcharity.org.uk and follow us on Facebook.

Vicki Dawson

Founder and CEO, The Children's Sleep Charity

07852 951165

www.thechildrenssleepcharity.org.uk

If you would like to donate to our charity we would be extremely grateful. We receive very little in the way of funding and every penny donated helps us to offer more support to families who are often in crisis. Simply click on this link https://www.charitycheckout.co.uk/1150585/Donate Thank you