Kids and Sleep November 16, 2007

An interesting article about how sleep has an effect on kids, and some excerpts from this articles follows:

• “90 percent of American parents think their child is getting enough sleep.”

• “60 percent of high schoolers report extreme daytime sleepiness” and “[o]ver 25 percent fall asleep in class at least once a week.”

• “Half of all adolescents get less than seven hours of sleep on weeknights” and “[o]nly 5 percent of high-school seniors average eight hours.”

• “While parents obsess over babies’ sleep, this concern falls off the priority list after preschool. Even kindergartners get 30 minutes less a night than they used to.”

• “Because children’s brains are a work-in-progress until the age of 21, and because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults.”

• “A few scientists theorize that sleep problems during formative years can cause permanent changes in a child’s brain structure: damage that one can’t sleep off like a hangover. It’s even possible that many of the hallmark characteristics of being a tweener and teen—moodiness, depression, and even binge eating—are actually symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation.”

• “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development”

• “[T]he sleep-shift factor alone is correlated with performance on a standardized school-readiness test. Every hour of weekend shift costs students seven points on the test.”

• “Teens who received A’s averaged about fifteen more minutes sleep than the B students, who in turn averaged eleven more minutes than the C’s, and the C’s had ten more minutes than the D’s.”

• “Tired children can’t remember what they just learned, for instance, because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory.”

• “[T]ired people have difficulty with impulse control, and their abstract goals like studying take a back seat to more entertaining diversions.”

• “[S]leep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.”

• “Sleep loss increases the hormone ghrelin, which signals hunger, and decreases its metabolic opposite, leptin, which suppresses appetite. Sleep loss also elevates the stress hormone cortisol.”

• “On average, children who sleep less are fatter than children who sleep more.”

• “[A]dolescents’ odds of obesity went up 80 percent for each hour of lost sleep.”

• “Sleep is a biological imperative for every species on Earth. But humans alone try to resist its pull. Instead, we see sleep not as a physical need but a statement of character. It’s considered a sign of weakness to admit fatigue, and it’s a sign of strength to refuse to succumb to slumber. Sleep is for wusses.”

Now, how do you get your child to sleep more? Another article to provide some insight.

The authors’ blog can be found here.