We all know the importance of sleep in a child's life and growth process, but just how important is it? In a recent Wondertime magazine article, Dr. Jack Maypole discusses what happens when children are sleep-deprived. Among other things, Dr. Maypole also gives us many eye-opening (pardon the pun) facts in this informative article.
For instance:
• 75% of parents who would change something about their kids' sleep habits if they could.
•69% of children ages 10 and under who experience sleep problems at least a few nights a week.
•47% of school-age kids get the recommended hours of sleep each night.
Dr. Maypole writes that children ages 1 to 12 should be getting a minimum of 10 to 12 hours of sleep each night. However, the number of children who actually get that much is quite low, which is alarming considering lack of sufficient sleep can affect child's school performance, mood and even their weight.
Dr. Maypole also discusses the importance of bedtime routines, the condition known as Obstructive Sleep Apnea and gives tips on how to make bedtime a more sleepy experience and tells us, "My apologies if all this has left you feeling worn out. The idea isn't to make you lose sleep worrying about your child's sleep. It's to remind you that thinking about sleep is as important as thinking about what you feed your child. I hope these ideas can help everyone, as my kids would say, chillax."
What is your child's bedtime like? Do you feel your child gets enough sleep?
For more information and to read the entire article, visit Wondertime's Web site.
Our daughter is a nightowl, always has been.
When she was a baby, it was great for us, because when she went down for the night, she stayed down until we got up the next morning (she slept through the night at 4 weeks!).
However, now that she has to be somewhere in the morning, it is not so great. Her Montessori teachers definitely notice that she is not a morning person (it takes her a while to become herself...).
It is hard getting her to sleep at the right time at night, and it is hard to get her to wake up the next morning. Weekends, she insists on sleeping in.
She gets enough sleep when she is allowed to sleep the hours her body naturally wants to sleep. Unfortunately, these don't coincide with our society's "early to bed, early to rise" culture.
Our son, on the other hand, is a morning lark (well, most days).
This makes me wonder how many of these sleep problems are related to our culture's unfortunate insistence on rigidly sticking to such a timetable?
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