Amy Williams
Journalist | Mom of Two
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How many hours of sleep do your kids get every night?
If we are honest, this simple question can be difficult for many of us to answer. As any parent can tell you, this number easily varies every night depending on our schedules, sickness, or parenting styles. However, knowing the amount of slumber our sons and daughters get is important, because research is telling us that our kids are increasingly becoming sleep deprived.
A lack of rest in children involves more than unsightly puffy eyes, it can also harm our kids’ physically and emotionally. If left unchecked, this deprivation can be severe enough to interfere with their daily activities and hinder their ability to learn. Data is showing that over 87 percent of our teenagers are not getting the recommended eight hours of shut eye every night. To add further insult to injury, 69 percent of our younger children regularly “experience at least one or more sleep problems” during any given week.
In response to this emerging slumberless epidemic, we might spend hours creating ideal sleep environments or perfecting bedtime routines with hopes of lulling our little ones to dreamland early. After all, we want the best for our kids. Unfortunately, all of this work and planning might be wasted, because one simple item in our houses could be derailing all of our best efforts.
The surprising culprit? Technology.
In the past we may have worried about how screentime affects our children, ranging from infants to young adults. We studied the ins-and-outs of popular social media apps, online predators, oversharing, and cyberbullying. Hours have been spent teaching our boys and girls social media etiquette and ways to protect themselves digitally. Afterall, it was the loving thing to do. Unbeknownst to many of us, we may have been overlooking our devices’ abilities when it comes to disrupting our children’s sleep patterns.
This is alarming, because it is almost inevitable that our kids will beg and clamor to play our Smartphones or tablets at some point in the day. In fact, studies from the Kaiser Foundation unearthed that children and teens regularly consume four to five times the amount of recommended technology everyday! When you read numbers like those, it is easy for images of teens bent over cell phones to immediately come to mind. However, researchers have also discovered that 90 percent of today’s children will possess a moderate ability to navigate tablets and other digital technology by the time they are two years old.
As our devices become more prevalent in our lives, we owe it to our sons and daughters to understand the far reaching consequences those glowing screens can have. Thankfully the following infographic helps us understand the impact our child’s screen time has on their quality of sleep:
About Amy Williams
Amy Williams is a free-lance journalist based in Southern California and mother of two. As a parent, she enjoys spreading the word on positive parenting techniques in the digital age and raising awareness on issues like cyberbullying and online safety. Follow Amy on Twitter here.
View all posts by Amy Williams here.
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8 Comments on “Is This Culprit Negatively Affecting Your Child’s Sleep?”
We have one hour of a quiet time sans technology for one hour before bedtime each of us adheres to in our family.
Such an informative and great post to read. Enough sleep for all of us is important and much needed.
It’s nice to see the assurance that we are doing it right :)
When my son was little I didn’t have to worry about this. I do feel that kids today sometimes are watching too much TV. Just read to them a couple of books,before bed time,to settle down,before going to bed! Kids today are also into using so many electronic devices!!
All electronic are put away and turned off an hour before bedtime in the house; the older kid makes his own decisions (as he has to study late some nights), but he is fully aware of what electronics do to human brain and physiology. I know that we have zero electronics in my bedroom; even the lights from the equipment affects how well I sleep.
We have a routine after dinner,bath,light snack and story time.The kids only use TV and tablet on the weekends unless there is a holiday ! Sleep is very important for a productive day!
We play outside as much as possible .
we have actually just started to realize the tv and tablet has not being doing us and our girls any favors when it gets close to bed time. we now take the tablet away from our oldest and tv is off an hour before it is bed time. we make sure to read books and chase each other around, now that the nicer weather is here we go for a walk or play in the back yard