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Home > Portable Practical Pediatrics > Have You Optimized Your Children’s Sleep? (Pedcast)


	Podcast:		Portable Practical Pediatrics
	Episode:		Have You Optimized Your Children’s Sleep? (Pedcast)
	Category:		Kids & family
	Duration:		00:15:57
	Publish Date:		2020-01-15 19:49:12
	Description:		Photo by Angela Ferguson, Pixabay Images If you want healthy smart children, and who doesn't, it is vital, imperative, crucial, fundamental, even axiomatic that you ensure that they get the recommended amount and quality of sleep that they need. Do you know what promotes the best sleep in your children? Well, stay tuned to find out in this important installment of Portable Practical Pediatrics. Musical Introduction A True Life Story Recently, I was asked to speak to a group of parents of “at risk children” who had come to a family education evening to talk about how to maximize their children’s performance in school. We talked about the research that has been discussed on this blog many times. Specifically, I wanted to stress the factors that parents have control of that have been shown to improve a child’s academic achievement; -Enforcing a regular healthy bedtime and keeping TV’s and electronics out of a child’s bedroom. Limiting entertainment screen time being part of that. -Getting an adequate amount of physical activity and unstructured play during the day. -Having a diet rich with unprocessed foods -Ensuring that every child is getting an adequate amount of sleep something that has been found by investigators to often be lacking in at risk children. Well, the night this event occurred was actually the second time I had spoken at this church and talked about this topic. I thought my first talk with this group of parents had gone pretty well but I had no idea of how well. At the onset of my this visit with these parents, an amazing thing happened. Before we got into the talk, an older gentleman raised his hand and told me he had a testimonial to share. That’s what he called it, a “testimonial”. He told the audience and me that he and his wife were raising their grandson who was currently in 4th grade and not doing very well academically. He said that he and his wife had decided, after hearing my first talk, to try getting their grandson a structured regular bedtime, free of screens and junk food to see what would happen. Specifically, they wanted to get him to bed early enough for him to get up the next morning without a fight. That was their goal. To do this, they completely restructured his bedtime: they removed the TV from his room and cut off screen time after 7pm. They insisted that he was to eat all of his food at dinner and was to get nothing no more after that. Bedtime was set at 8pm and enforced. Lights out and time to sleep. After doing all of this, they said the transition was nothing short of miraculous. He almost immediately stopped fighting about getting ready for school in the morning and actually woke up in the morning on his own. He also stopped fighting about going to sleep. And the best thing is that his grades showed an immediate improvement. Whereas he had been struggling to keep up in school, now he was getting good grades! They said even his personality was more pleasant. They attributed all of this great stuff to him having a regular bedtime and adequate sleep. They had no idea that not having a structured bedtime, letting him play video games late into the evening, eating junk food at night, and falling asleep in front of screens was so detrimental to him. Needless to say, this family's story had a big impact on everyone in the audience, including me! Why is Sleep So Important? But don't just take my word for it, listen to what a panel of 13 sleep pediatric specialists at the American Academy of Sleep Specialists who carried out an extensive literature review on the issue of childhood sleep have to say about the issue. "Healthy sleep requires adequate duration, appropriate timing, good quality, regularity, and the absence of disturbances and disorders. Sleep duration is a frequently investigated sleep measure in relation to health outcomes. Many studies have shown that adequate sleep duration is associated with better attention,
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