4 ways to help your child get enough sleep

Laila Ali

A recent study by researchers from the University of Warwick in the United States revealed that children’s depression, anxiety, reckless behavior, and cognitive impairment are all related to the amount of sleep that young people get every night.

Sleep is an active process in which the brain is reorganized, and this makes it especially important for children whose brains develop and are quickly reorganized during the night.

In a research paper entitled "Sleeping duration, brain structure, and psychological and cognitive problems in children" published in the journal "Molecular Psychiatry", the authors examined data on 11,000 children between the ages of 9 and 11 years, to see if there was a relationship between the duration of sleep and the structure The brain.

The researchers found that the short sleep duration in children was linked to the appearance of problems of depression, anxiety, reckless behavior and poor cognitive performance. Moreover, the researchers found a clear correlation between the decrease in the size of some brain regions and the shorter sleep duration.

How many hours of sleep does your child need?
Professor Jianfeng Feng, from the Department of Computer Science at Warwick University, says the recommended amount of sleep for children from 6 to 12 years is 9-12 hours per day. However, sleep disturbances are common in children and adolescents around the world due to the increased obligations on their time, by school and homework completion, increased screen use time, and sports and social activities.

A previous study had shown that about 60% of teenagers in the United States get less than eight hours of sleep in the nights before school.

"Our results showed that the behavioral problems faced by children sleeping less than seven hours were 53% higher on average, and their cognitive awareness decreased 7.8% on average than children sleeping," Feng said. 11 hours a day. This highlights the importance of adequate sleep for both cognition and mental health in children. "

Professor Edmund Rolls of the Department of Computer Science at Warwick University also commented that "these are important links that have been identified between the length of sleep in children, the brain structure, and cognitive and mental health measures, but more research is needed to discover the underlying causes of these relationships" .

Adequate sleep
Harvard Medical School Editor Claire McCarthy says that children need to sleep, because the effects of denial of it can lead to lifelong problems at their behavioral, cognitive, and educational levels.

In her article on the Harvard Medical School website, McCarthy offers four ways in which you can help your child get enough sleep:

Make sleep a priority
Schedule homework, sports, and other activities, and schedule bedtime. Start from the time your child needs to wake up in the morning, then count the hours your child needs to sleep, and set a non-negotiable sleep time.

For teenagers and teens, this could lead to some controversy, and it could mean cutting back on some activities, finding ways to get homework done early, and pushing some fun activities - such as video games - to weekends.

Prepare to sleep
Starting a sleep routine early, as none of us can go directly from intense physical or mental activity to sleep. If the time for sleep is nine in the evening, this means that your child needs to stop doing anything between eight and eight and a half, so that he is physically ready to sleep at nine o'clock.

Close the screens
The blue light from the screens can wake the brain, and the child suffers from sleep difficulties. This is especially true of "small screens", such as phones or tablets, shutting down an hour before you want your child to sleep.

Phones should also be charged outside the bedroom, or at least keep them in a non-disturbing position, and if your child tells you that he needs his phone to wake him up in the morning, buy him an alarm.

Sleep routine
It is important to maintain the same sleep routine on weekends and holidays, while allowing an hour of late sleep if you are certain that your child can replace it by sleeping in the morning, and if you have a child that wakes up at dawn regardless of the time he went to bed, do not delay an hour His sleep. Changing our sleep times exhausts our bodies, and we all do a lot better when we keep fixed bedtime.

Remember also that children pay more attention to what we do than what we say, and if you make your sleep a priority, you will set a good example for your child, in addition to that sleep is important to you as much as it is important to your child.