Children and Sleep Loss: Recent Research

This blog entry has several purposes. One is to highlight recent research on sleep loss and its effects. Another is to illustrate some of the research techniques used to document the effects of sleep loss.

A recent article in New York Magazine inspired this entry. Here's the link to that article. The article references survey research conducted by the National Sleep Foundation. Basically, children are sleeping less than they did 30 years ago. Very few (5%) high school seniors get eight hours sleep a night. The average sleep time for them is about six and a half hours. Here's a link to an article about this research.

Avi Sadeh, a researcher at Tel Aviv University, conducted a sleep study where he asked 4th and 6th graders to either sleep a little more or sleep a little less each night for three nights. The children were randomly assigned to either group.

Sadeh was worried that his treatment (which was about a half hour of more sleep or less sleep each night) would not be enough to detect. The dependent variable he used, a test of neurobiological functioning, detected large differences because of sleep loss. The sleepy sixth graders functioned worse than normal fourth graders. See: The effects of sleep restriction and extension on school-age children: What a difference an hour makes. Child Development, 74, 444-455. Sadeh need not have worried about his design. One hour made a big difference.

Much other research supports the relationship between sleep loss and academic problems. In response, some school districts are moving the start of the school day to a later time. Two school districts, one in Minnesota and one in Kentucky reported amazing results. In Minnesota, SAT scores went up. In Kentucky, driving accidents for teens went down.

Response to these data has not been what you might expect. Only a few school districts have started school later. Not many parents have made their children sleep more. The bottom line? We all need more sleep.