Irregular bedtimes may impair a child’s cognitive function, says study

Parents! Are you ready? Great! Because here’s another study to make you completely paranoid about all the things conspiring to harm your child.

Yesterday we learned that placing your baby on his or her back to offset the danger of Sudden Death Infant Syndrome can lead to positional plagiocephaly, or flat spots on a child’s developing skull that, in the worst case scenario, can even affect a child’s facial features.

But make sure she’s still sleeping enough – and on time, parents, because today we learned that children who entertain irregular bedtimes and disrupted sleeping patterns may have lower IQs than their clockwork-sleeper peers.

According the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), a massive study that observed 19,000 children in the United Kingdom born between 2000 and 2001, young’uns who resisted bedtime or failed to get an adequate, regular amount of sleep, demonstrated some impaired intellectual development.

“Sleep is the price we pay for plasticity on the prior day and the investment needed to allow learning fresh the next day,” the authors write.

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“Therefore, reduced or disrupted sleep, especially if it occurs at key times in development, could have important impacts on health throughout life."

Researchers observed more than 11,000 children for this particular component of the study. They conducted surveys and visited homes when the selected children were three, five, and seven years old.

They found that three-year-olds were the most likely to have irregular bedtimes with a rate of one in five.

That gap narrowed by the time the children turned seven, when more than 50 per cent of the children observed went to bed between 7:30 and 8 p.m.

According to the Economic Times, the researchers found that the three-year-olds showed the greatest impact when it came to sleep deprivation and disruptions to their natural body cycle, an impact that could be observed in poorer math, reading and spatial awareness skills.

As the children got older, the results changed, however. Five-year-old girls and seven-year-old boys with irregular bedtimes did not show the same cognitive impairment, leading the research team to consider that three-year-olds may be particularly vulnerable to anything that interferes with their mental development.

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Global News offers some helpful tips for parents trying to corral their energetic offspring into a healthier sleep pattern.

Children between the ages of one and three should be getting anywhere between 12 to 14 hours of sleep per 24-hour cycle. By the time they’re one-and-a-half-years-old, the Sleep Foundation recommends that children pare down to one nap a day that lasts up to three hours.

To make sure these naps don’t interfere with night sleep, try to schedule them as far from the child’s regular bedtime as possible.

Also, make sure children know when bedtime occurs and that their conditions are as similar to their regular sleep environment as possible.

Of course, there will always be children who are chronically bad sleepers. Or nocturnal creatures who march to the tick of a different clock. And they end up becoming perfectly fine, intelligent human beings. As with any study, this one should be applied with the critical faculties of someone who has just had a terrific night’s rest.