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Early
to bed, kids better handle stress
Apr. 29, 2002
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Cranky
children need more sleep
All children do best when they’re well rested,
but even siblings close in age may have different
sleep requirements, says Stephen Sheldon, a pediatric
sleep specialist at Northwestern University Medical
School.
Some key signs may point to sleep deprivation,
he says. Among them:
School underachievement
Daytime overactivity or restlessness
Brief attention span
Crankiness or mood changes
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By
MARILYN ELIAS
USA
Today
BARCELONA - Elementary school children who go
to bed by 9 p.m. handle stress in a healthier way than
their night-owl classmates and may outperform them on
exams or the soccer field, suggests a study out today.
“As
a working mother, I wish it weren’t true,” says Columbia
University psychologist Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, the study
leader. Employed parents often let their kids stay up
later so they can spend time together on school nights.
Findings from the study will be reported here at the
American Psychosomatic Society meeting by Brooks-Gunn
and co-authors Laura Stroud and Vincent Capaldi of Brown
University Medical School.
They gave 138 third-grade girls three stressful tasks
during a few hours spent at their homes. The researchers
measured initial levels of the stress hormone cortisol
in saliva samples and rechecked cortisol after each
task.
The girls’ weeknight bedtimes correlated with their
stress hormone response: Those going to bed early released
more cortisol after the first stressful experience,
but compared with girls kept up past 9 p.m., their stress
hormones declined more steeply during the next two tasks.
Kids with later bedtimes were more uncomfortable during
the tasks than the children who got more sleep.
There’s some evidence that the “rapid response and recovery”
cortisol pattern of early-to-bed kids is healthier,
Brooks-Gunn says. Prolonged output of cortisol can:
Raise blood pressure and heart rate.
Weaken immune response, so that colds and other viruses
take hold more easily.
Make it harder to concentrate when challenged.
The findings apply to boys as well as girls, Brooks-Gunn
says.
It’s possible, though, that children with strong cortisol
responses can’t fall asleep easily, so their high-stress
hormone pattern may be the cause of late-night habits
rather than a result of it, she adds.
The new study “is a marvelous step forward” in checking
how kids’ stress hormones relate to sleep, says pediatric
sleep expert Stephen Sheldon of Northwestern University
Medical School. He has found preliminary evidence of
nervous system changes in sleep-deprived children.
Children’s sleep needs vary, Sheldon says, “and the
majority can handle mild degrees of sleep deprivation,
but some do just terribly.”
The findings “offer a clue” but not the last word for
working parents, argues Ellen Galinsky, president of
the Families and Work Institute in New York, a center
for research on changing families and the workplace.
Inflexible work demands on parents or school homework
may keep youngsters up late at times, “and then you’re
supposed to have a gigantic fight with your kid so he’ll
go to bed (at 9) when he doesn’t want to, so you’re
both more stressed than ever?
“I
hope this doesn’t become another nail in the armor of
poor, beleaguered working parents,” Galinsky says.
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