Readers of this blog know how strongly I feel about sleep. I just came across another reason to get kids to bed early.
A recent study from The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health wanted to determine whether preschool-aged children with earlier bedtimes had a lower risk for adolescent obesity and whether this risk reduction is modified by maternal sensitivity.
They began this study in 1995 by asking mother of kids born in 1991 about the child’s typical weekday bedtime, and observed the mother-child interaction to assess maternal sensitivity. There were 977 kids in the study who had an average age of 4.7 years.
At a mean age of 15 years, height and weight were measured and adolescent obesity defined as a sex-specific body-mass-index-for-age ≥95th percentile of the US reference.
Results of the study showed that one-quarter of preschool-aged children had early bedtimes (8:00 p.m. or earlier), one-half had bedtimes after 8:00 p.m. but by 9:00 p.m., and one-quarter had late bedtimes (after 9:00 p.m.). The prevalence of adolescent obesity was 10%, 16%, and 23%, respectively, across early to late bedtime groups.
They concluded that, “Preschool-aged children with early weekday bedtimes were one-half as likely as children with late bedtimes to be obese as adolescents. Bedtimes are a modifiable routine that may help to prevent obesity.
I’m not surprised to see that. Many other studies show that adults who do not get enough sleep eat more the next day. Chronic sleep deprivation results in obesity. The need to begin obesity prevention early, before children are overweight, is well-established. In a study of younger children (3-8 years of age at baseline and followed for half a decade), later bedtimes were associated with higher body mass index (BMI) and risk for overweight. Another prospective study of adolescents found later bedtimes predicted increases in BMI in adulthood that were not explained by sleep duration.
Kids who do not get enough sleep generally do not do as well academically as those who are well rested, have more behavioral issues, are more aggressive and are more likely to have ADHD and be on stimulant meds.
Every parent know how grouchy kids get the day after a “sleep” over, regardless of the child’s age. I prefer to call these get-togethers “wakes,” and discourage them as much as possible. My wife Mary, calls them “disease incubators” as the few times we permitted our kids to “sleep over” they came home with strep throat, colds or GI symptoms, or got sick a day later.
On a quite different front, they also referenced studies that showed that bedtimes have a greater impact on children’s sleep duration than do wake times, are more modifiable than wake times, and thus, are the likely behavioral target of clinicians and parents. This flies in the face of recommendations by the AAP and psychologist who desire to start school at a later time so teens can get more rest. Teens do have a built in biological clock which has them on a 25-26 hour cycle similar to, but opposite of, senior citizens whose bio-clocks gradually put them (us perhaps) on to a 23 or 22 hour day. But, starting school an hour late for teens would really work for only a few weeks at most, because their clocks would soon adjust to the new get-up time by keeping them awake later at night so the sensible thing would be to start school an hour later ever month and by the time school is out, in the spring, they could start school about the time the rest of the world is going to bed. More babel from psych!
While everybody knows teens need more sleep than they are getting and few of them like to get up early. My thought is to get their TVs, computers, cell phones, video games, and all other media out of their rooms and in the habit of early bed time form first grade on. And be a parent who enforces bedtime and not one who is glued to his/her own electronic media until early in the morning.
Finally, remember the words of Benjamin Franklin: Early to be and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. That holds for women and kids too.
There are many other conclusions in this great article and one more which agrees with my philosophy: “…parents create the routines that allow children to obtain sufficient sleep to meet their physiologic needs.”
To read the complete study click here,
The Journal of Pediatrics 2016j
