Search

Home > Portable Practical Pediatrics > Are Your Children’s Brains Getting the Sleep They Need? (Pedcast)
Podcast: Portable Practical Pediatrics
Episode:

Are Your Children’s Brains Getting the Sleep They Need? (Pedcast)
Category: Kids & family
Duration: 00:11:00
Publish Date: 2020-10-31 00:36:52
Description:   Who would have thought a generation ago that lack of sleep would be a huge health issue for children? I certainly didn’t but the reality is that many children today struggle with insomnia. Stay tuned and I will tell you how you can avoid much of the insomnia trouble plaguing American children. Photo compliments of Pixabay Musical Intro   Modern Life and Your Children’s Sleep It feels like the world is speeding up sometimes, doesn’t it? Change is coming at you and your family at a blistering pace. Chances are high that compared to your childhood, your children are spending far less time outdoors, hanging out with friends less, and participating in way more structured activities than you did.  They are also engaged with far more technology like video games, entertainment media, and internet-based activities. For many, modern American childhood is changing the quality and quantity of children’s sleep. In fact, the average amount of sleep that children get every night has been steadily decreasing over the past twenty years. And that is a health crisis! As you are about to see, good quality sleep is absolutely fundamental to raising healthy children. As a parent, you just have to get bedtime right for your children. So, in today’s pedcast, we are talking about sleep and its importance to your children.   The purpose of sleep You may be wondering why is sleep so important? It may seem like not much is going on in your children’s brains and bodies while they lay motionless, but in actuality, a lot is happening biologically. Good sleep is your children's gateway to health and well-being.  We now know that the process of sleeping isn't at all random but rather a carefully regulated process controlled by a complex symphony of hormones and physiologic changes. As your children sleep, their respiratory and metabolic rates slow, their body temperature falls relieving a lot of the stress of their daytime life. This gives their bodies time to repair damaged cells and muscles, grow new tissues, help their brains to store short and long-term memories, remove waste products from various organs including their brains, rebuild energy stores, among many other functions.  Getting good quality sleep is as important to good health for your children as feeding them good quality food, providing them exercise, or having them breath clean air.     What are the consequences of poor sleep in children? As I just told you, on average, today’s children are getting less and less sleep. And there are bad consequences to this. Insufficient sleep has been shown to cause cognitive impairment, poor and immature behavior, increased behavioral problems, ADHD like behavior, increased susceptibility to illness, and slower growth. Additionally, insufficient and poor-quality sleep has been correlated with increasing obesity among children.  Just one hour of sleep deprivation a night makes a child function at a full grade level below their age. Think of the consequences for a child who has any one of these conditions- tragic but possibly prevented by good sleep nightly.   How Can You Promote Healthy Sleep in Your Children? OK Doc Smo, you have convinced me that sleep is really important for my children so what can we do to make sure your family gets it right? Good question. The answer is to make sleep a priority by adopting what experts call good “sleep hygiene”- you know, the stuff your grandmother thought was important. Grandma knew that, for a child, getting good quality sleep is just as important as brushing their teeth or washing behind their ears.  Good sleep hygiene refers to the time tested cumulative best practices for maximizing a child's sleep, something we should all be prioritizing.  In fact, a recent cross cultural study studied sleep across the globe and consistently found that poor sleep hygiene negatively impacted behavior and cognitive function in children from Tokyo to Texas.   With all that,
Total Play: 0