Word: childhood
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Every new parent knows how difficult it can be to get a fussy baby to sleep, but new research suggests that a parent's best efforts may only be exacerbating the problem - and that inadequate sleep in childhood can have long-lasting health effects. "It is very hard to let your child cry it out when they are toddlers," says Dr. Elsie Taveras of Harvard Medical School, referring to parents' tendency to pick up their children or bring them into the family bed to help them sleep. "But if you approach it differently - 'I am not even going to start...
That point is central to a new study by Valérie Simard of Hôpital de Sacré-Coeur in Montréal, which examines the link between parents' bedtime behavior and sleep disturbances in children during infancy and early childhood. Simard administered yearly questionnaires to 987 parents, whose children were 5 months old at the start of the study. She found that certain "maladaptive" parental habits - such as the mother staying with the child until he or she fell asleep, or the parent giving a child food or drink upon nighttime awakening - appeared to develop in response...
...benefits of adequate sleep in infancy and childhood extend far beyond any single night of rest. According to a burgeoning body of research, children who don't sleep enough may be at risk for health problems later in life. Two additional reports, also appearing in the current issue of Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, suggest that children's sleeplessness may be associated with an increased risk of being overweight and having emotional and behavioral difficulties in adolescence and adulthood...
...study of 915 children from 6 months to age 3, Harvard's Taveras found that infants who slept fewer than 12 hours per day - including naps - were nearly twice as likely as their peers to be overweight by age 3, potentially laying the foundation for childhood obesity. The risk for obesity was exacerbated by TV watching: 17% of children who slept fewer than 12 hours per night and watched two or more hours of television a day before age 2 were obese by age 3, compared with 9% of the study participants overall. "This is a perfect storm. Not sleeping...
These findings are the latest in a growing field of study dedicated to understanding how sleep affects health, particularly in childhood. Increasingly, research suggests that long-term sleep-related problems may start as early as infancy, and that both pediatricians and parents need to do more to ensure that children develop healthy sleeping habits. "The most important message is that there's a lot we can do to prevent problems from starting - in sleep," says Taveras. "Parents and pediatricians should keep in mind that children have to develop the capacity to regulate their own sleep early in life and self...