Too Young To Be So
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America is an overworked and under-slept
nation, and parents are among the most sleep-deprived segment of the
population. We Americans spend more hours working than residents of any
industrialized nation. In order to keep up with the demands of work, of keeping
the house going, spending time with the kids and taking a moment for ourselves,
we steal time from sleep.
It starts with childbirth. Raising an
infant is exhausting. On average, a parent of a new baby loses 400 to 750 hours
of sleep during the first year! But the need for parental intervention
doesn’t disappear the first year. A third of children ages one to four
require some form of nighttime ministration.
Chronically sleep-deprived, parents are at
risk of thinking that tiredness is a normal condition of life. But it’s
not. Even small decrements from the eight-hour standard for adults can impair
performance in the following days. Memory, learning, coordination,
concentration, mood, ability to tolerate stress -- all are affected by sleep
loss. But as bad as sleep deprivation is for adults, it’s an unfair burden
to foist on kids, whose growth and learning -- and thus capacity for future
performance -- hinges on adequate sleep.
Unfortunately, says Cornell University
psychologist James B. Maas, Ph.D., young parents know nothing about the rules
for good sleep. As a result, many kids today are struggling just to keep their
eyes open. They’re not just falling asleep on the school bus, they’re
having trouble keeping on task inside the classroom. When they’re not in a
stupor they’re acting up and acting out... and often mistakenly diagnosed
as having attention deficit disorder (ADD) and given stimulants.
Dr. Maas wants to set the record straight
and let parents know that kids today need much more sleep than they are
currently getting.
- High school and college kids
average 6.1 hours of sleep a night when they need 9.25 hours to be fully alert
all day long the next day.
- Kids are swilling stimulants like
coffee and colas -- and sometimes amphetamines -- to keep themselves awake.
- Behavioral problems among kids in
middle school and high school significantly disappear when kids get more sleep.
- Lack of sleep magnifies the effect
of alcohol, with alarming results. One drink on five and a half hours sleep,
reports Dr. Maas, has the same effect as six drinks on eight hours of sleep.
“You have a young population learning to drive and experimenting with
alcohol, a deadly combo. The greatest killer of teenagers is car accidents
largely exacerbated by sleepiness.”
- Sleep is critical to academic
performance. It is also essential for performance on the athletic field, and
for mood.
- The sleep deprivation of
today’s students is exacerbated by so-called yo-yo scheduling -- going to
bed late during the week, but going to bed even later on the weekends. Lack of
sleep on weekends delays the nightly secretion of melatonin, the sleep hormone.
As a result, kids are “walking zombies” in the school corridors on
Mondays.
“Their bodies are in the
classroom but their brains are jet-lagged, somewhere in London, and they never
left home.” The delay in hormone secretion also keeps them from going to
bed on time the next day, even though they are vastly sleep-deprived.
- Motor skills are improved about 20
percent with sleep of adequate duration. Between the sixth and the eighth hour
of sleep, the brain acts on calcium molecules, preserving motor skills newly
acquired through practice.
- When the schools in a community
adopt later start times, allowing kids to get more sleep, behavioral problems
plummet and performance in the classroom and on the playing field improves.
You watch what your kids eat so
why not make sure they get enough sleep?
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Hara Estroff Marano is Editor-At-Large of
Psychology Today magazine and Editor-In-Chief of Psychology Today's
Blues Buster, a newsletter about depression. An award-winning writer on
human behavior, Haras articles have appeared in publications including the
New York Times, Smithsonian, Family Circle and The
Ladies Home Journal. She lives in New York City. |
