The Importance of Sleep

Children are over stimulated, overscheduled, and sleep deficient, but according to the National Sleep Foundation, 90 percent of American parents think their child is receiving enough sleep. It has been documented that children receive about one hour less sleep per night than they did 30 years ago. There are many reasons for lost sleep.


Overscheduling of activities, lax bedtimes, television, and guilt by parents who arrive home after dark and want time with their children are reluctant to set limits about bedtime. Using new technological and statistical tools, sleep scientists have been able to isolate and measure this impact of lost sleep.

Children’s brains are a work in progress until the age of 21, and most of that work is done while a child is asleep. This lost hour has an exponential impact on children that it doesn’t have on adults. Some scientists theorize that sleep deficiencies during the formative years can cause permanent changes in a child’s brain structure. Sleep disorders can impair a child’s IQ by as much as seven points which is the same as lead exposure.

Every sleep study done shows a connection between sleep and school grades. With the benefit of functional MRI scans, researchers are beginning to understand exactly the way sleep loss impairs a child’s brain. Tired children can’t remember what they just learned because neurons lose their plasticity rendering them incapable of forming the synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory.

Sleep loss debilitates the body’s ability to extract glucose from the blood stream causing children to become inattentive in class. One part of the brain suffers more than the rest. It is the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive function. Among executive functions are the orchestration of thoughts to fulfill a goal, the prediction of outcomes, and perceiving the consequences of actions.

So give your child’s brain a jump start and put them to bed early. If you need to wake your child in the morning, your child is not receiving adequate sleep.