Bedtime is a Brain Booster

Life is tough. It’s tougher when you don’t have as much horsepower between your ears. The smarter your kids are, the better their life is going to be.

So it’s good to know there is a very easy thing you can do to give your kids a better brain: send them to bed. Early. Same time, every night. 

A big study1 looked at the home life of 10,000 kids, including their bedtimes. They were surveyed at age three, age five and age seven.   The clear result: those that had regular bedtimes did better in reading, maths and other skills as well.

I know, it can be hard to get our kids into bed, but start making it a habit now and hold the line. By the way, teenagers need lots of sleep too – about eight-and-a-half to nine-and-a-half hours every night. But the thing is, the bit of their brain that tells them they are sleepy and that they should go to bed isn’t working properly yet. Adults, like you, start feeling sleepy… probably about the time I started talking! No, adults start to feel sleepy at about ten o’clock but high-schoolers don’t feel that way until about one a.m. And if they are staring at bright screens on their phones or games, then that tricks their brain into thinking it’s still day time!   And then they have texts coming in at all hours, and they play video games that get them all pumped up, it’s no wonder that a study of teenagers showed that they only get seven and half hours sleep on average on a school night – two hours less than what most of them actually need. Teenagers are the most sleep deprived people around. It affects them. Missing two hours sleep makes you perform at the same level as someone with a blood-alcohol level of point-oh-five: it’s like they’re starting school after having a couple of beers for breakfast!  That means accidents and bad moods and, even if your kid’s got a top-class brain and good teachers, how can they do much learning if their brain is half asleep?  And research2 shows the same thing for teenagers as little kids – the kids who sleep more get better marks. And of course they aren’t as sleepy and not as depressed.

So shove your kids off to bed. Start giving them a count-down about an hour before you actually want them asleep, so they can finish what they are doing and do all the mucking around that they’ve got to do. Dimming the lights in the house works.  Show them how to wind down: start turning off the TV earlier and picking up a book instead. Take them a glass of warm milk – well people say that but I hate warm milk – but it’s okay with a bit of honey or something in it. And, of course, energy drinks, cola and coffee – that’s going to muck up their sleep so hide them.

Good luck and good sleeping . Not now! When you get home.

1Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, examined more than 10,000 children taking part in the Millennium Cohort Study – a long-term study of children born in Britain between September 2000 and January 2002.

2Amy R Wolfson, Mary A Carskadon: “Sleep Schedules and Daytime Functioning in Adolescents”,  Child Development, August 1998, Volume 69, Number 4, Pages 875-887.

With thanks from The Parenting Place.