Overstimulated, overscheduled kids are getting at least an hour’s less sleep than they need – a deficiency that, new research reveals, has the power to set their cognitive abilities back years, writes New York mag.com. According to surveys by the US National Sleep Foundation, 90% of American parents think their child is getting enough sleep. But it has been documented in a handful of major studies that children, from elementary school through to high school, get about an hour less sleep each night than was the case 30 years ago.
Why? Overscheduling of activities, burdensome homework, lax bedtimes, television and mobile phones in the bedroom all contribute. So does guilt. Parents, home from work after dark, want time with their children and are reluctant to play the hard-arse who orders them to bed.
But we now know the true cost to children. Using newly developed technological and statistical tools, sleep scientists have recently been able to isolate and measure the impact of this single lost hour. 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.
The surprise is how much sleep affects academic performance and emotional stability, as well as phenomena that we assumed to be entirely unrelated, such as the international obesity epidemic and the rise of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
A few scientists theorise 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.
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