Archive for the 'Sleep & Children' Category

According to new study by Australian researchers, a lack of sleep can have a bad affect on the ability of children to both learn and interact at school.

The new study by researchers from the Centre for Community Child Health at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Melbourne, has revealed that nearly a quarter of children aged six and seven have poor sleeping habits, which has a major effect on their health, behaviour and learning ability.

The researchers said that almost 25% of six and seven year olds have trouble sleeping and those with the most persistent sleep issues suffer the most serious health, behavior and learning problems according to their parents and teachers.

According to the researchers, a lack of sleep affects concentration and how children interact with peers and teachers.

They say previous research had shown children are more likely to drop out of school if they had a poor early transition to formal education and if they have enough sleep children are able to make the transition and take on the workload while their brains are still growing and taking in a lot of information.

Read more information at News Medical

Did you notice your kid grinding teeth severely in sleep? This type of grinding teeth in sleep or during extreme stress conditions is commonly referred as bruxism.

If you are anxious about bruxism in your kid, then don’t need to be because this is the most common condition experienced by many children and it doesn’t cause any serious harm to your kid’s health.

However, teeth grinding is mainly caused when you experience severe stress or anxiety.

Usually, bruxism happens in sleep and often caused by abnormal biting or crooked teeth. Not only children, even adults can experience this sort of teeth grinding at sometime in their life.

How does bruxism affect your kid’s tooth health?

Normally, bruxism doesn’t cause any harm to your child’s teeth. Most of the bruxism cases usually go undetected without any adverse effects. But, at times, your kid can experience mild earache or morning headaches.

However, the grinding sound made by your kid can become most bothersome issue for you and also for your other family members.

If your kid is experiencing extreme levels of bruxism, it can lead to increased temperature sensitivity, chip teeth and also results in diminishing of tooth enamel.

Sleep-related breathing disorders (SRBD) are very common in children, occurring in up to 30 percent of children. SRBD ranges in severity from primary snoring to OSA.

In adults, SRBD is associated with hypertension and increased risk for cardiovascular disease. These findings highlight the importance of considering the long-term cardiovascular effects of any severity of SRBD in children

The 22nd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS) finds that all severities of SRBD in children are associated with elevated blood pressure during sleep compared with non-snoring control children.

The study focused on 88 children between seven and 13 years of age, including 68 referred for the assessment of SRBD and 20 non-snoring controls. Routine polysomnography, or an overnight sleep test, was performed, and mean arterial pressure was continuously recorded.

Children were divided into groups according to obstructive apnea/hypopnea index: control children, primary snoring, mild obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and moderate/severe OSA.

According to the results, compared with the non-snoring controls, SRBDs of any severity elevate the blood pressure of children during sleep.

It is important to make sure that your child gets enough sleep and sleeps well. The value of sleep can be measured by your child’s smiling face, happy nature and natural energy. A tired child may have development or behavior problems.

Different types of allergies can keep your children awake. These allergies cause itchy eyes, watery nose, and sneezing. When your child has these symptoms with allergies, their sleep is disturbed.

With disturbed sleep, their daily functioning such as performance in school, mood, energy, concentration and ability to think are affected.

One can affect with allergies from environment or from the food your child eats. Allergic rhinitis, a common child allergy, is an inflammation of nasal passages that occurs when your child’s body over reacts to an allergen such as pollen, dust mites, dander etc.

When swelling of nasal passages takes place, air flow is blocked, causing congestion. Nasal congestion can affect child’s sleep in many ways. Nasal congestion makes difficulty in breathing through nose.

Sleep problems are common among children. As a parent, you will always worry how to make your child sleep all the night. Some children have chronic sleep problems, which makes them, sleep deprived.

Some of the signs to identify child’s sleep problem

• If your child wakes up frequently during night
• If your child snores loudly or face difficulty in breathing while asleep
• If you spend too much time to help your child in falling asleep
• If your child’s mood, behavior and school performance varies
• If you are losing sleep due to your child’s sleeping patterns
• If your child begins to wet the bed

In REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, children wake up crying. You feel that they need help and attend your child. You try to help your child sleep by rocking, feeding, holding or lying down with your child. Therefore, this becomes a habit and your child depends on you to fall asleep.

According to the recent studies, it has been proved that the sleep duration or sleeping time will be less or shorter in the people on weekdays, in summer and on weekends.

Many disturbances which are created at this time will not encourage you to attain good sleep. So, the sleep duration will be less in these situations.

Sleep duration will also be less in children who don’t have younger siblings. According to the recent studies, the reason for it is found out i.e. the children who don’t have younger siblings will be suffering with the problem of loneliness or insecurity.

So they don’t attain proper sleep with loneliness or insecurity feeling. Even though they go to sleep, they will awake easily for the simple things like small sounds and small disturbances.

According to the recent studies it has been found out that the toddlers who have persistent sleep problems will be more injured when compared to others who don’t have any sleep problems.

Psychologists have concluded this phrase by making several researches on toddlers. According to their view, the toddlers who have persistent sleep problems wake-up more often in their sleep. Due to this disturbed sleep they will obtain non-consistent behavior.

This non consistent behavior will obtain in them due to lack of proper sleep. Lack of sleep make them to lose concentration on what they are going to do. With this, they will just become pickle minded fellows who will not concentrate completely on their task.

Sleep walking is also known as noctambulism or somnambulism. This problem is mostly seen in children who are aged between 4 to 8 years.

Mostly this problem of sleep walking appears to run in families. There are lots of chances to obtain this problem for your child if anyone of your family members has this problem.

The factors which cause the problem of sleep walking in children are:

• Fatigue or lack of sleep
• Due to fever or some other illness
• It can also be caused with the usage of certain medications which are not suitable for your child.
• Stress or some psychological problems
• Facing problems in getting uninterrupted or good sleep
• Some emotional problems can also lead to this problem

Sleep walking is not so serious and there is nothing to worry a lot regarding this. Most of the sleep walkers don’t perform this more often.

Yeah! Sometimes this can cause some hazardous problems when the child doesn’t realize what he/she is doing such as walking through the opening windows and down stairs.