How Does Sleep Affect Children

Sleep and Children

Have you ever noticed how happy you feel after waking up from a nap? Just catching up on sleep, and getting a full eight hours the night before is one of the best things for the body. Sleep is important to everyone but most importantly it is crucial for children when they are developing, to get enough sleep.The majority of the brain develops from birth to the age of 6.This means that the child’s brain needs adequate time and energy to have neurons connect and transfer information to develop the first parts of the brain. The development of the executive functioning is also important, which also occurs between 1 and 6 years of age. Having a healthy brain development is not only good for the child’s future years of maturing,
Joseph Buckhalt of Auburn University did a research study to find out how sleep affects kids academically. The kids wore an actigraph when they went to bed, which measures quality and sleep duration, the parents were also told to keep a journal of the times their kids went to sleep and what times they woke up. When they came into school they were to report to a specific classroom where there were other sleep measures and cognitive tests done. The results showed the kids that had less sleep throughout the week had significantly lower scores on the cognitive tests and sleep measures. Another study done by Dr. Avi Sadeh of Tel Aviv University, he gave 77 fourth graders and sixth graders random instructions on either to go to be 30 minutes early or 30 minutes late for three days. Dr. Avi also used actigraphs to measure sleep on the kids. His findings were very similar to that of Buckhalts, although they seem more disturbing. The gap between the sixth graders tests and the fourth graders suggest that a very tired and sleepy sixth grader performs about as well as a well rested fourth grader. Only an hour of sleep affected a child essentially of losing two years of