With children and teens heading back to school after the Christmas and New Year breaks, it is a good time to prioritise sleep. Moving back to a regular sleep routine, particularly after spending the night watching movies, going to friends’ houses, or having sleepovers, and then sleeping later the next morning, is important.
Scientists have long recommended that children ages 6 to 12 get at least nine hours of sleep each day. They recognised that getting enough sleep during childhood can benefit developing brains, thus helping to improve attention, academic performance, and stress reduction.
In a study, a research team led by Dr Ze Wang of the University of Maryland wanted to understand how less sleep might affect a child’s brain, and they concluded that pre-teens who slept less than nine hours daily had differences in brain structure and more problems with mood and thinking compared to those who got sufficient sleep.
The study has enrolled nearly 12,000 volunteers, ages 9 or 10, from research sites across the country. Participants’ health, brain structure and function, and other factors will be followed for a decade as they move from adolescence into young adulthood.
Participants were assessed and followed over a two-year period. Results appeared in Lancet Child and Adolescent Health on July 29, 2022.
The researchers found that children in the insufficient sleep group at the start of the study had more mental health and behavioural challenges than those who got sufficient sleep. These included impulsivity, stress, depression, anxiety, aggressive behaviour, and thinking problems.
The children with insufficient sleep also had impaired cognitive functions such as decision-making, conflict-solving, working memory, and learning. Differences between the groups persisted at the two-year follow-up.
Brain imaging at the start of the study and two years later showed differences in brain structure and function in the insufficient sleep group compared to the sufficient sleep group. The findings suggest that sleep affects learning and behaviour through specific brain changes.
Professor Adebola Orimadegun, the Director of the Institute of Child Health at the University of Ibadan, stated in a reaction that sleep is therapeutic and a natural condition that makes the body recover from stress.
“A child that has been very active since morning, moving around, playing rough, and all that needs to break the day to allow the tissues and organs that have been put to work to recover. A child who does not sleep well will suffer what we call excessive daytime sleepiness during the day, and that kind of child cannot be alert in the classroom. Definitely, directly or indirectly, it is going to affect the child’s learning.
Moreover, Dr Femi Adebayo, a consultant psychiatrist with a special interest in sleep medicine at Royal Cornhill Hospital in Scotland, UK, added that a lot of adolescents also do not sleep enough for different reasons.
He declared that there is robust scientific evidence suggesting a link between the total quantity of sleep and the distribution of that sleep and brain development.
According to Dr Adebayo, “It is known that adolescents have different body clocks, and so they both need greater sleep than say older people. But they also need that sleep at specific times, and often the regular school schedule interferes with that rhythm.
“Unfortunately for a lot of adolescents, their school commitments essentially interfere with the time they should be sleeping, and you can get distortions of that rhythm. Inadequate sleep is just as potentially harmful as a reduction in the total length of sleep.
“There are implications for physical health, mental health, or social well-being in the quality of sleep that all of us have, but especially in adolescence because their brains are growing faster during that period. Sleep is a phase of life for the laying down of memory, the repair of body tissues, converting short-term memory to long-term memory, and so on.”
Dr Adebayo declared that healthy sleep really is sleep that is of sufficient quantity and quality to perform the primary functions of sleep, which are to provide rest for the brain and other vital structures and to preserve memory.
“But that sleep is also best in the dark hours because that is the peak period for melatonin secretion, which is really one of the important hormones in regulating sleep,” he added.
He, however, suggested a review of school opening times for adolescents and children to meet their sleep requirements.
According to him, “I think there should be serious thought given to the adjustment of school hours. I don’t know how practical that might be because parents also have to go out to work. But the school time, the way it works currently, is probably not the best for the sleep requirements of children, especially older children and adolescents.
“It may be prudent to consider splitting the school day or starting later so that they can actually have the opportunity to sleep longer, especially during the nighttime hours when their hormonal functions indicate that they should be sleeping.”
Moreover, Professor Orimadegun added,” So if the child does not get that enough at night or during the day, there’s no way the child can be as active as somebody who has enough sleep. Advocates are pushing for a siesta because the night hour, which is under the control of adults, really may not provide sufficient time for them to sleep.”
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