 Children
who don't sleep through the night can run their parents
ragged. Joan Nash, a 42-year-old mother of two, says her
7-year-old son "has really only started sleeping well
in the past year and my 5-year-old daughter also frequently
wakes up in the middle of the night." Pediatricians and
family physicians often have to deal with frustrated parents
who've reached the end of their rope because of their
toddlers' poor sleeping habits. And it's not a problem
that kids can just outgrow. "What did I do wrong?" Joan
wonders. Researchers from the Sleep Disorders Centre in
Montreal may shed some light on the problem.
The Montreal group, headed by Evelyne
Touchette, studied 1,741 children recruited from the
Quebec Master Birth Registry, as part of the Quebec
Longitudinal Study of Child Development. The team used
questionnaires and interviews to gather data about child
sleep characteristics and night time parent-child interactions.
Reporting in the March issue of
the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine,
the researchers say that "23.5%, 7.2% and 10.3% of children
were sleeping less than six hours in a row at 5, 17
and 29 months of age, respectively." These children
averaged nearly 90 minutes less sleep per night, without
compensating by napping more during the day. One third
of children who slept poorly at five and 17 months of
age were still not sleeping for six consecutive hours
at 29 months — and neither were their parents.
WHAT
DOESN'T WORK
The team also found that as early as five months of
age, feeding a child in response to awakening was strongly
associated with poor sleep. Such disturbances are pretty
much unavoidable when breastfeeding since natural milk
is digested rapidly. Other means of comforting children,
including rocking or bringing kids into the parents'
beds, also cut down on sleep time. Interestingly, the
same factors continued to be associated with poor sleep
patterns at 17 and 29 months as did putting children
to bed after they fall asleep or staying with them until
they slept.
Early sleep problems can have far-reaching
effects on development. If sleep disturbances continue
into the early school years, daytime sleepiness can
lead to moodiness, behavioural problems and social impairments,
and may adversely affect academic performance.
The study findings support early
implementation of autonomous bedtime habits — a
strategy currently recommended by parenting courses
and nanny Jo Frost from the hit reality TV show Super
Nanny. The authors noted "among good sleepers, the
proportion of parental behaviours at bedtime that presume
the autonomy of the child toward sleep, such as putting
the child awake in bed, is very high across all ages."
Most children put to bed while
they are dozy, but still awake, develop appropriate
sleep-onset associations and have longer sustained sleep
periods than those who are not. But, as most parents
like Joan have found, some children may take a little
longer to get with the program.
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med Mar,
2005;159(3):242-9
|
