Sleep Patterns for Children Kendal

By  Supernanny Team 28/08/2007

Once your child is back at school, a good night’s sleep will be more important than ever – but a new study from The Sleep Council indicates that 30% of children only get four to seven hours on school nights instead of the recommended eight or nine, and that up to 50% of teenagers feel tired at school.

If your tween or teen falls short when it comes to shut-eye, schooldays can easily turn into school daze, with grades suffering as a result. What’s causing the malaise? Too much technology may be the main culprit: 98% of children have either a phone, music system or TV in their bedrooms and two thirds have all three. A quarter of kids say they fall asleep watching the TV.

It’s up to parents to make the link between sleep and wellbeing – because teens are ignoring it, as top UK sleep expert Dr Chris Idzikowski, of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre, says: “I’m staggered that so few teenagers make the link between getting enough good quality sleep and how they feel during the day. Teenagers need to wake up to the fact that to feel well, perform well and look well, they need to do something about their sleep.

This is an incredibly worrying trend. What we’re seeing is the emergence of Junk Sleep – that is, sleep that’s neither the length nor quality that it should be in order to feed the brain with the rest it needs to perform properly at school.

Parents who ban media from their children’s rooms also have problem sleepers on their hands: kids who simply refuse to go to bed or suffer from insomnia, night terrors and sleepwalking. Another culprit can be sleep apnea, which is characterised by pauses in breathing that can rouse a child from sleep several times a night (snoring and unexplained tiredness during the day are giveaway signs that your child may be affected). Often caused by enlarged tonsils or adenoids, sleep apnea in kids is increasing as the rate of child obesity rockets, since obesity can cause tonsils and adenoids to grow larger than normal. Children with sleep apnea on average score 15 points lower on IQ tests and it’s not too much of a leap to assume that tiredness at school may be a factor.

Sleep tips for school-age kids

• Get your child into a bedtime routine from an early age. If he starts to act up in his tweens, emphasise that tiredness at school will affect his marks (US research suggests that kids who do badly at school go to bed later and get less sleep than their peers) as well as robbing him of the energy he needs to do the things he enjoys. Plus, lack of sleep plays havoc with teenage hormones, so just remind your child about all the spots that will result from those late nights!
• Make sleep easy Give your child a milky drink and encourage him to do a little quiet reading before lights out to help him wind down. Don’t let him spend the evening glued to the TV – watching the box too close to bedtime is associated with bedtime resistance, difficulty falling asleep, anxiety, nightmares...

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