Kids’ Guided Meditation for Sleep: Sloth’s Bedtime

This free guided meditation for sleep will help your little one feel peaceful and sleep well. You’ll guide your child slowly through the gentle treetops as they imagine being a sleepy sloth.

Meditation is extremely beneficial for kids of all ages – specifically for teaching them how to relax and handle anxiety. The sweet, slow moving sloth makes this an especially helpful toddler sleep meditation.

You might even feel your own body relax as you imagine having nothing to do and no schedule to do it. That’s the beauty of using guided imagery with little ones. We can put ourselves in the place of an animal, a make-believe world, or our favorite comforting or exciting place.

Read this script to yourself to find the rhythm before reading it aloud to your child. Once your child is relaxed, simply read it in a calm voice, pausing to let the words and feelings sink in.

Sloth’s Bedtime: Kids’ Guided Meditation for Sleep

It’s time for our nightly meditation, so find a comfortable position and close your eyes. Take in a nice deep breath and send that breath all the way down to your tummy. 

Let your tummy get nice and big like a full balloon. And then exhale slowly.

Very good… let’s do that again now just as slowly.

Once more now, and this time, we are going to send calm and relaxation all the way down to our toes. And when we exhale, we are going to exhale out any thoughts or stress we hold anywhere in our bodies. We are going to let that all go, and just feel calm and peacefulness everywhere in our bodies now. 

(Pause)

Wonderful. Now continue breathing deeply and let your mind and body stay relaxed and calm. 

Imagine now, that you are an adorably lazy sloth. It’s okay to be lazy because a sloth is naturally slow and steady. And this is just how you want to feel as you get ready for bed – relaxed and lazy. 

Sloths are the world’s slowest animals, and that’s how you are right now. Imagine your sloth self, up high in a big, beautiful tree, in a lush rain forest.

Even though sloths normally can’t see very well, let’s imagine YOU can see all the beautiful colors that surround you. So you look around and you see colorful parrots flying from treetop to treetop talking and squawking. You’re too relaxed to pay that much attention.

You glance over at a nearby tree branch and see a tiny sparkling, bright green tree frog friend. He’s so little and cute with his bright orange webbed toes and his beautiful, shiny eyes blinking back at you. You giggle because he’s so little and sweet. 

The wind gently rustles the treetops and blows on your brown fur. It’s warm in this place, yet the big trees provide some cool. The air feels moist as you breathe it in.

You decide to move over one branch. Ever so slowly, you reach out and grab onto the branch with your strong front paws. It takes a lot of effort to do this because all you want to do is get back to sleep.

Sloths sleep sometimes 18 hours a day, and that’s all you want to do right now. You’ve been awake for a long time, and you need to relax and rest.

You finally make your way to the next branch but now you’re absolutely exhausted. That took a lot of energy, so it’s time to go back to sleep. You now curl your strong arms and legs around a tree branch and hang upside down as sloths do. 

And now… you sleep.

Deep, deep relaxing and peaceful sleep. It feels so wonderful to just hang here knowing you are perfectly safe and can sleep soundly all night. You’ve done a terrific job being a sloth.

Sweet dreams and good night. 

More Night Time Meditations for Kids

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