Knit Health Customer Stories: Noah

Watch this short video to hear Bethany, Stephan and Noah share their journey with Noah’s sleep and why Knit was the best fit for them.

How to Maintain the Perfect Humidity Level in the Bedroom

Dry air in the bedroom can do more than just make you thirsty; it can cause dry skin and chapped lips, and even impact breathing. But high humidity can have an equally detrimental impact on sleep.

Everything You Need to Know About White Noise

Here’s what you need to know about white noise, how it works, and how to choose the best background noise for your child’s nighttime slumbers.

How to Wash Allergens From Your Laundry Once and for All

When allergies don’t come and go with the seasons, the culprit could be your child’s room - and even his bed itself - that’s triggering his allergies.

Common beliefs about sleep which are misleading or incorrect

As you have probably realized by now, the correlation between bad nights and bad days is not 1:1. People often jump to the conclusion that they are feeling poorly during the day because they didn’t sleep the previous night, but typically they are actually feeling poorly because of stress or anxiety. Learning to stop worrying about sleep is one of the most difficult concepts to grasp, but it can be done with practice.

Managing an Active Mind at Night

Even when you’ve reduced your hyperarousal and optimized your sleep environment and routine, there will still be moments at night when you find you cannot fall asleep or cannot get back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night. Here are tips to help you overcome a "running brain".

Hyperarousal and nighttime anxiety and worry

During times of stress, it is supposed to be an ADAPTIVE response to sleep less deeply and a little less overall. When we are stressed, our body releases “fight or flight” type hormones to keep us more alert and ready to act at a moment’s notice. The state of increased alertness from stress is called “hyperarousal”.

Understanding the Structure of Normal Sleep

The starting point for improving our sleep is understanding what constitutes “good” or “normal” sleep. Moreover, there are many commonly held beliefs about what constitutes “good sleep”, some of which are incorrect. We will be discussing what normal sleep looks like to give you a jumping off point for your own sleep health improvement.

Creating a Bedtime Routine for Adults

In order to help your brain and body prepare for sleep it is important to “set the scene”. Keeping a predictable schedule and routine will give clear signals to your brain that sleep is coming and help you sleep better at night. Here are some suggestions for how to create a relaxing routine to prepare yourself for bed.

Tips for Using Light to Improve our Sleep and Alertness

By knowing about the biologic effects of blue light, you can actually use it to your advantage to create a robust internal clock and improve your sleep and daytime alertness.

Tips for Transitioning your Child’s Sleep for Daylight Saving Time

As a sleep medicine physician and mother of two young children (2.5 and 4.5 years old), I’m keenly aware of the importance of good sleep to our overall health and wellbeing. Because of this awareness, twice a year, when our society engages in the great modern experiment of transitioning into and out of daylight saving time, I implement a plan to make the transition as smooth as possible for my children and myself.

Knit Health Customer Stories: Sam

As parents of a child with autism, Mindy and Henry are always looking for ways to improve Sam’s quality of life and promote his brain development. Knit is one of the tools that allows them to do just that.

The Effects of Caffeine, Nicotine, Alcohol and Cannabis on Sleep

Studies have shown that psychoactive substances affect sleep, each one in a vastly different way. Here’s a deeper dive into the substances that disrupt our sleep.

The Surprising Truth About ADHD and Sleep

If your child has been diagnosed with ADHD, then you probably already know there’s a correlation between ADHD and sleep problems. Here’s the truth about sleep problems and ADHD: how they relate, how they feed each other and how they can be confused.

“Worry Time” Exercise

“Worry time” is a method to help children (and adults!) who have a tendency to worry at night (before bed and/or during the night). The goal of this exercise is to create time earlier in the day when you and your child can proactively anticipate and address the worrisome thoughts which take over during the night when the brain is less rational. It takes a few sessions of practice for this technique to work.

When you feel awake..but you’re really asleep

You’re lying in bed. You’re frustrated because you can’t fall asleep. You look at the alarm clock and see that it is 1am. Then your brain wanders. You look at the clock again, which now reads 2am. You are certain you were awake during that hour...but in reality, you may have been drifting in and out of sleep without realizing it, thinking thoughts intermingled with dream fragments.

New Technology and Established Science to Advance Sleep Medicine

The Knit Health technology is completely unique in the field of sleep health assessment. Understanding the science behind Knit reveals why it is the only in-home pediatric sleep assessment solution that can signal the presence of potential sleep issues and provide daily feedback necessary for improving long-term sleep health.

Constructive Worry Exercise

Constructive worry is a method for managing the tendency to worry during the quiet time at night when sleep is supposed to be taking over. The goal of this exercise is to create time earlier in the day when you can proactively anticipate and address the worrisome thoughts which take over at night.

Expert Seminar: Is Sleep Impacting Your Child's Day?

We asked Dr. Michelle Jonelis, one of our Knit sleep experts; to give a seminar to parents who were looking for answers about their child's sleep. With excellent questions from attendees and great advice, we highly recommend that you watch the recording of this seminar - you can’t help but learn something!

5 Mindfulness Strategies to Help Your Child Sleep

Anxiety is common in school-aged children. As your child grows more aware of the world, worries about everything from school and social life to natural disasters could occupy his mind as he’s trying to fall asleep. Here are a few simple mindfulness practices that could help your child calm down and sleep.

Brilliant Ways to Block Light From Your Child’s Bedroom

When your child is struggling with poor sleep, light is usually one of the biggest culprits. But when you fully block the light from outside, you can control how much light reaches your child’s eyes - at night and in the morning.

Opening the Black Box of Data about Kids’ Sleep

Leo is a sweet kid. But for a while there, he was having some rough days. He had always been sensitive, but in the last couple of years, he was becoming much more emotional and irritable. Around the same time, his parents, Matt and Eleese, were finding that bedtime was even more of a struggle than before. After a while, the entire family was feeling the effects of sleep deprivation.

Does Your Child’s Room Need an Air Filter?

Could better indoor air quality improve your child’s sleep? Although the primary concerns with indoor air pollutants are their impact on the lungs and the heart, there’s evidence that good ventilation in the bedroom can improve sleep as well. And, of course, if your child suffers from allergies, then indoor pollution from allergens will trigger a reaction and exacerbate sleep problems.

The Ultimate Guide to Better Sleep

If your child has struggled with sleep since babyhood, you may feel like you’ve tried everything. You’ve helped your child deal for so long with all the challenges that go along with poor sleep: irritability, trouble focusing and behavior issues. But if you’ve been trying to improve your child’s sleep with piecemeal techniques, maybe it’s time for a full overhaul of your family’s approach to sleep. There’s a whole spectrum of issues that can be affecting sleep, and with a systematic and thorough approach, you can help your child sleep better.

This is Knit Health

To understand how Knit Health helps families sleep better so they can live better, watch this quick 30 second video.

Helping Families Sleep Better so They Can Live Better

Knit Health is on a mission to help families get better sleep. In this video, the Knit founders share why they began studying pediatric sleep, as well as some of the parents whom Knit has already impacted.

Knit Health Customer Stories: Delainy

In their own words, Chelsea and Johan share how Knit helped their family by helping their daughter Delainy improve her sleep and her day. Watch the video now.

The Truth About Food and Sleep

Your 9 year old took advantage of a drop-off birthday party to help himself to an extra serving of cake after lunch. Ten hours later, he’s still wide awake, tossing in his bed and begging to watch TV. Is it the sugar in the cake that’s keeping him up all night? Or is that just a myth?

Are Allergies Affecting Your Child’s Sleep?

A sniffly nose and sneezing can be easy to blame on seasonal allergies. But if your child has a runny nose every morning, it might not be the great outdoors that's causing the problem. If your child suffers from year-round allergies, then it could be her bedroom that’s triggering the reaction - and night long allergic reactions can have a significant impact on sleep.

Don’t Let These Sleep Hazards Ruin Your Holidays

With winter break fast approaching, you might be hoping that you and your kids will finally get to catch up on the sleep you’ve missed in the hectic rush of fall. But sleeping in over Christmas isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, letting your family catch up on sleep by sleeping in late could be the worst thing you could do for your long-term sleep goals. Here’s why - and what you can do instead.

Everything You Need to Know About Circadian Rhythms

When you feel sleepy at bedtime, or when you feel the urge to nap after lunch, you’re feeling the effect of your circadian rhythms. That’s because of your biologically built-in cycle of sleeping and waking. This cycle regulates when you feel sleepy, when you’re most alert, when you actually fall asleep, and when you wake up. But there’s a lot more to this internal clock than just sleeping and waking - and the way it changes over time means that your kids’ clock might be very different from your own. Here’s what you need to know about circadian rhythms, and how you can leverage them to help your kids get better sleep.

Don’t Miss These Key Signs of Disrupted Sleep Stages

Seven a.m. Your child’s alarm goes off, but she doesn’t get up. You have to shake her three times before she reluctantly drags herself out of bed, and even then, she’s grumpy and irritable. She insists she’s still tired, even though she went to bed at 8. And she’s been tired every morning now for months.

Knit vs. a Sleep Lab

Breathing disturbances are the primary cause of sleep disorders. Knit is the only non-wearable technology outside of a sleep lab that is able to provide an initial sleep assessment by detecting pediatric sleep breathing disturbances. Knit also works as a highly beneficial companion to a sleep assessment, providing ongoing visibility once issues have been diagnosed and treatment implementation has begun.

A Deep Dive into the Four Cornerstones of Healthy Sleep

Working with experts in the field of sleep science, we’ve defined the four most influential factors to sleep health. Since the science behind sleep can be rather complex (just like science in general tends to be complex), we wanted to provide a combination guide and glossary that parents can use when reading and absorbing the sleep report they receive for their child.

Tip Sheet: Combating Jet Lag

Heading out of town for the holidays? If your relatives live in a different time zone, your holiday trip could wreak havoc on your family’s sleep. And if you’re traveling across more than one time zone, your trip that’s supposed to be a break could cause serious sleep deprivation that affects your kids for weeks. If you’re planning a trip to family on the other side of the country, here’s how you can combat the effects of jet lag and make your trip as pleasant as possible.

5 Secrets to a Consistent Weekend Bedtime

When your kids were really young, you paid for late bedtimes with tantrums the next day. But as your kids get older and better able to handle some shifts in their schedules, it feels like no big deal to let the weekend bedtime slide. But is it? The truth is, a late Friday night doesn’t just affect Saturday morning. Long-term, a consistently late bedtime on the weekend can wreak havoc on your child’s sleep all week long.

Is Your Child Struggling With Bad Behavior or Bad Sleep?

It’s 3:27 pm. Your eight year old just got home from school. You ask her how her day was, and she bursts into tears. You’re mystified, because she’s never freaked out about little things before. Nothing major in her life has changed over the past few months, so what gives? If your child is over-emotional and overreacting to stress, it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s starting teenage angst four years early. It could be a much simpler problem: poor sleep.

10 Ways to Optimize Your Child’s Bedroom for Better Sleep

Toys scattered on the floor. Streetlights shining through the window. Bright stripes on the walls. And an iPad on the nightstand. Could these be the real reasons why your child isn’t sleeping well?

10 Creative Ideas for a Calming Bedtime Routine

Warm bath, 3 books, lights out. You know the drill. A good bedtime routine can do wonders for your child’s sleep. The same activities repeated in the same order every night will signal your child’s brain that it’s time to sleep, making it easy for him to drift off after lights out - no fighting or late-night curtain calls required.

Knit Advisor Profile: Mark Burhenne, DDS

It’s not commonly known that dentists are on the front lines of identifying potential sleep issues. Facial structure, teeth grinding and other oral signs are clear indicators of a sleep issue and ones for which doctors do not often check. Dr. B has helped thousands of patients identify and treat their sleep issues with oral appliances and general awareness.

A Mother’s Intuition about Sleep is On the Mark Again

“I am jolted awake. I wait a heartbeat to get my bearings, and then realize what woke me up. It’s Delainy, talking in her sleep again, which I can hear, clear as day, because Delainy is sleeping in a closet in our bedroom, on a cot. But I am the mom here. I know Delainy is scared to sleep in her own room, and I have to admit, this is better than her tossing and turning and kicking the bejesus out of me when she slept in our bed. But something has to change. I can’t spend another two years waking up every other hour because I hear her toss and I turn. I have got to figure out what’s wrong with my daughter’s sleep so I can get some of my own.” - Chelsea, mom

No More Acting Out: A Family’s Journey to Good Sleep

Mom’s phone rings during school hours (again). Her heart rate skyrockets and she immediately thinks, “What did my son do this time?” He had set off the sprinkler system playing with a bunsen burner in science class and sent his school into chaos. Mom is shocked...and also not. Her son’s behavioral issues have been escalating for years. Her life is consumed by trying to figure out what’s going on so she can help.

The Value of Knit Extends Beyond the Report

Natalie and her husband, Stephen, had a tough time with Dylan before he turned 4. His behavior wasn’t improving, and they worried about his future development. It took a number of specialists and a misdiagnosis or two, but at long last, they finally were able to identify that his adenoids and tonsils were an issue. Removing these can unblock the airway, allowing kids to breath more easily during sleep, and with improved sleep comes improved daytime behavior.

The Sleep-Disrupting Science of the Danger Behind the Screen

It’s been a long day, and you’re exhausted. You’ve been running nonstop since 6 am. And as dinner is winding down, your son starts begging for twenty minutes of screentime. You know that a few minutes of Minecraft would finally get him out of your hair for a few so you can wash the dishes -- or better yet, sit down for the first time today.

Tip Sheet: How to tell if your child is getting enough sleep

You can look at recommendations and guidelines till your own eyes start to droop, but those are all based on averages. None of them can tell you for sure whether your individual child is getting enough sleep. The only way to know that is to watch your child for signs that he’s overtired or well-rested.

The transition from baby monitor to sleep issue detection technology

Letter from CEO David Janssens about the change in direction of Knit Health. Earlier this year, we made the difficult decision to shift the focus of Knit Health away from infant sleep monitoring and instead towards helping assess sleep issues in children to help families get the help they need. This difficult decision left a lot of people wondering: but why? And as we continue to get that question, I wanted to get the reasons down on paper since I believe in transparency and want to share our thinking with supporters, friends and family.

Bad sleep and bad days: not a 1 to 1 ratio, especially for our kids

A good night’s sleep can feel like magic. You wake up feeling positive, patient and quick on the draw intellectually. But after a bad night of sleep, you wake up cranky, slow or generally unhappy. The connection between sleep and one’s mood and capability during their day is almost painfully obvious.

Knit has the potential to fully understand sleep

I’ve been approached by a number of companies seeking my perspective on the viability of their sleep health product. Unfortunately, however, nearly all of them are hashing out some iteration of the same flawed technologies that already plague clinical sleep medicine. Alternatively, they have such grand yet scientifically-unfounded ideas that what they're hoping to do (and at the price point they're hoping to do it) is completely impractical...which is saying a lot because I'm willing to dream big.

Kids' cute snores might be a sign of sleep apnea

Gosh, it’s cute when your little one snores. Or does pretty much anything. Except that moment when they’re throwing a tantrum/crying on the ground/generally being a tiny irrational creature. And here’s the rub: the adorable snoring could be the root cause of their little (or big) outburst.

Tip Sheet: How to banish night terrors

Everyone in your house is sleeping peacefully. Suddenly, you wake up to the sound of screaming. You rush to your kid’s room, only to find him sitting up and sobbing. But your usual methods of comfort don’t seem to help. You try to talk with him, but he doesn’t seem to hear you. It’s almost as if he’s still asleep with his eyes open.

Better nights lead to better days, and they both start here.

Hello! We’re happy you’re here. Landing on this blog means you’re taking the very important first step in your child’s sleep journey - and that’s understanding how much sleep impacts their health.