Why One More Hour of Sleep May Give You a New Child

Can one measly hour of sleep really be that important?

Absolutely, say Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, authors of Nurture Shock:  New Thinking About Children.

Sixty percent of high schoolers say they experience extreme daytime sleepiness.

Fifty percent of adolescents sleep less than seven hours per night.

Elementary children are averaging one hour less sleep per night than they did thirty years ago.

Why is this?  Too many activities.  Too much homework.  Television.  Cell phones in kids’ rooms.  Parents who feel guilty for being gone all day and keep the kids up later in order to spend time with them.

But what’s the big deal about one lost hour?

A bunch.  According to Nurture Shock, “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.”

An impact that includes moodiness, depression, and obesity.

Dr. Avi Sadeh at Tel Aviv University gave some fourth graders directions to go to bed thirty minutes earlier and some directions to go to bed thirty minutes later.  He was worried that depriving children of one measly hour of sleep might not have any effect at all.  He needn’t have worried.

The performance gap that lost hour caused was huge.  “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” said Sadeh.  In other words, a tired fourth grader performs like a second grader.

In fact, every study done on this topic shows a correlation between sleep and grades, especially in high school:  Teens who averaged A’s slept 15 minutes more than those who received B’s.  B students 15 more minutes than C’s, proving that every fifteen minutes counts.

What exactly happens when a child is tired?

1.  Neuron plasticity is lost.  Kids cannot encode new memory.

2.  With sleep loss, the body cannot extract glucose from the blood.  The prefontal cortex suffers, and with it, a child’s ability to complete a goal, or contemplate the consequences of actions.  They become impulsive, stuck on wrong answers, and lose the ability to come up with creative alternatives to those wrong answers.

3.  Without enough sleep, children cannot embed memorized material like vocabulary words, multiplication tables, and historical dates.

4.  Sleep deprived children become more negative:  Negative stimuli gets processed in one part of the brain, positive in another.  Sleep deprivation hits the area with positive stimuli the most, resulting in a tired child being able to recall the negative memories better than the good ones.

Teens:  A Special Case

During puberty, a teen’s biological clock shifts.  Melatonin keeps flowing for 90 minutes past the point when it stops for children and adults.  That’s what makes teens want to stay up later.  At dawn, when teens need to get up for school, melatonin is still being released all the way through their first period in school. (Teens are responsible for half of the 100,000 sleep related crashes each year).  Some high schools have adjusted start times to accommodate these findings and have had startling results:  SAT scores in tested areas rose from 683/605 to 739/761 in one year.  That’s a 56 point boost in math and a 156 boost in verbal scores.  Teens with more sleep report more motivation and less depression.  Typical ‘teen’ traits like being negative, withdrawn, disengaged, bored to tears, or moody are also symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation.  “Might our culture-wise perception of what it means to be a teenager be unwittingly skewed by the fact they don’t get enough sleep?”

Additionally, a study in KY showed that later start times resulted in a 25% decrease in car accidents among teens.  But, despite the growing evidence, school districts are wary of change:  Moving start times later would mean doubling bus drivers and the bus fleet.

Sleep and Obesity:

Sleep loss increases ghrelin, our hunger signal, while depressing leptin, our appetite suppressant.  It increases our stress hormone cortisol, which in turn stimulates our bodies to make us fat.  Your child’s growth hormone, necessary for the breakdown of fat, is disrupted.  Studies show tired children are fatter than children who sleep more.  In fact, kids who get less than eight hours of sleep have a 300% higher rate of obesity than children who get ten hours.  In one Houston study, obesity in middle-schoolers and teens increased 80% for every hour of lost sleep.

Convinced yet?

I asked a friend of mine, a manager at a local sleep center, what his recommendations are:

1.  Give kids a consistent, seven-day a week bedtime.

2.  If possible (as in the case of homeschooling), allow your teens to stay up later and sleep in until they wake up naturally.  Again, set a bedtime, even if it is 11:30.

3.  If your child wakes up, seems confused, and appears to still be ‘asleep,’ do not touch or talk to the child.  Hand him a blankie of some kind and he will go back to sleep.

4.  Remove clocks and light sources from bedrooms.  Turn off electronics, especially those with lights on them.

On a personal note, I’ve noticed that this past year, with my husband out of work, our family has slept more than ever before and we’ve hardly been sick at all.  If the above reasons don’t convince you, perhaps the prospect of having healthier kids will!

Question:  What practical steps can you put in place to help your children get that magical extra hour of sleep each night?