Children's screen time has little effect on sleep, says study
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
(Also if anyone is building sleep apps/tech I'm looking for work)
We're having a neurologist appointment coming up because of it, but I can't shake the feeling we're just the worst parents. :/
We've taken away all screens from him a month ago, but he won't stop waking up at night, trying to breastfeed as much as possible and not falling asleep before 1 AM.
I suppose with a neurologist in the picture, none of the usual things are suspicious though.
We also tried gas drops, as we noticed sometimes he just burped and went back to sleep after half an hour of extreme crankiness.
So no, 2 years is not necessarily too much.
Also, advice like this underestimate how frustrating and sucking boring killing all joy strict routine can be for parents. You may decide that sleep is not worth it.
Plus there are hard to determine health issues with small ones. Sometime a kid can't sleep and then you figure it is certain food before night or something of the sort.
1. Sufficient exercise.
2. Calm, non-screen activity before (reading for 30 mins)
3. Good environment (dark, quiet/constant background noise, good temp)
4. Not moving at all when trying to fall asleep.
And if you can’t fall asleep, get out of bed and do something else (nothing involving bright lights) but saying in bed while you can’t sleep breaks the accociative behaviour of bed being for sleep. Don’t watch TV in bed. Don’t eat in bed. Your bed is for sleep and sex. If you still struggle to fall back asleep you can try creative free form writing. Sounds like sudo science but it’s proven to work. Get up. Get a pen and paper and write down a narrative. What ever comes into your mind for 30mins, or, until you feel sleepy. Then go back to bed. Often we fail to fall asleep because we are thinking about work, our partners, friends, a cute dog we saw. Creative writing is a technique used by sleep experts for chronic sleep disorders and has shown its self to work in multiple studies. Sleep.io is great if you really struggle with sleep. It’s a CBT based programme to hell yok sleep and it genuinely works.
It doesn't seem like a huge problem that teens are getting ~30 minutes less sleep per nights because of technology. Staring at screens is now a major part of our lives and that probably won't change any time soon. I do think we need to consider what time class starts for teenagers who need a solid 8-9 hours of sleep per night. When I was in High School, a 7 am start time required me to be awake at 5 am, which probably contributed to how miserable I felt as a teen.
In my region they've shifted school start times later to accommodate teens who have late after-school activities. The problem with this logic is that the younger the child, the more sleep they need. The shift for our local teenagers resulted in even earlier start time for elementary and middle school aged kids. Bus schedules also shifted which required me to wake my young kids even earlier (5:30 AM). Thankfully my work is flexible enough that I can drive them, which gives them an extra 30-45 min of time each morning - other parents not so lucky.
Our teen definitely needs much more than his younger sibling. But it seems to be more individual based on my very low n observations, the eldest needed more sleep when he was the age his younger sibling is.
I'd expect there to be a sex-based characteristic to sleep needs to?
Two more in case you need some more:
https://www.webmd.com/parenting/guide/sleep-children#1
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-sleep-guidelines-for-babies...
Many people assume a lot of things that when investigated turn out to be false.
Often assertions don't match their backing: for example you said " The problem with this logic is that the younger the child, the more sleep they need."
However that's not what your first study says. It gives broad ranges, so it concedes that younger children can need less sleep than older children, it's not tied in a simple way to age.
You perhaps meant "on average", which is quite reasonable, and having the source you based you statement on can lead one to assume you were being brief rather than errant.
FWIW those sources look like you quickly googled it; and so weren't really relying on any particular sources.
TL;DR your source supports my observation and contradicts your claim as written.
Make your schedule malleable for your kids and within a few days you'll pretty much know exactly how much sleep they need.
For my kids the trouble is "when" they want this sleep. My oldest goes to bed "early" and rises early. My youngest could stay up until 2-3 AM and sleep until noon (as she did this summer).
You can see both the min and max of all ranges go down with age.
I'm not sure how you could have derived your conclusion based on these results. Are you saying because ranges overlap they aren't valid or shouldn't be used as a guide?
We also don't need to run a scientific study to know that "if the kids are cranky it's likely because they are hungry or thirsty", "it is highly likely that the kid is lying about the fire-breathing goat breaking into the house and breaking the lamp", or "most kids like to eat candy". Again, plenty of interesting science to be done about the reasons for those things, but science does not require us to be that skeptical.
There's a scientific reason for this, too, which is that whatever study you might be interested in conducting on these matters, "the common experience of humanity" has already run a study a billion times larger, and with more statistical power than you could dream of putting into a study. If humanity is wrong about those things, your study is just going to make some of the same errors. It is not productive to run a scientific study with orders of magnitude less statistical power than the data we already all possess.
(And before you go "but what if they're wrong"... I covered that already in the term "statistical power". We are not obligated by science to pretend that nothing not produced in a study has a statistical power of zero. That's a modern perversion of the idea, and causes some serious philosophical bootstrapping problems if you take the idea seriously.)
Or at least that's the argument made in the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
According to Wikipedia "A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon." The same article also states that "In common usage in the 21st century, a hypothesis refers to a provisional idea whose merit requires evaluation". Thus what I called "hypothesis" is indeed one by Wikipedia's usage.
I also quoted the sentence "For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it." (my emphasis) in order to point out that what pbhjpbhj called "hypothesis" seems to be normally called "scientific hypothesis".
1. Its clearly testable whether or not the phase of the circadian rhythm of humans shifts with age.
2. Having a range of circadian rhythm phases in your pack is useful for a 24-hour watch by definition, but in order for it to have been an evolutionary factor, watches that take advantage of this would have to actually happen in the wild. Finding wild packs of humans is a tall order, but if #1 holds for other primates or even other pack mammals, you could measure to what extent packs operate their 24-hour watch with different age groups at different times of the day.
3. The final price needed is to show that having a more alert watch gives a better survival rate. That seems self-evident, but it could also be tested by monitoring wild packs of humans or other primates.
Erm. No.
If you look at modern primitive groups of people, you don't sleep all night. You wake up several times throughout the night and are, generally, considerably lighter sleepers.
Some people in 'civilized' societies still do this. I wake up a handful of times a night, the vast majority of the time, and always have. It's not a medical issue, I'm getting quality sleep and I'm back asleep in a couple of minutes tops.
Same goes for a lot of career soldiers/warriors throughout history including modern times, they can be out cold in a couple of minutes any time of the day with minimal effort and can be fully functional within seconds of being woken up.
Eight hours of school cut into my programming and computer time, so I had to make it up by staying up until midnight as a teen.
Maybe I'm completely wrong, but it certainly wouldn't have helped me. At my very worst (around 19 or 20) I had a hard time waking up to attend classes at 1:30pm... Which makes sense given that I was going to sleep at 5~6am (CS, Warcraft III, etc.) and I'm a big sleeper (still need a solid 8 to 8:30 hours per night at 35).
Then what about on June 1st? Sunrise is at 6:20 AM and sunset is at 9:07 PM.
Plus irony: And it is also completely different for adult programmers who totally need to work evenings (never ever mornings) and night to be crunch effective unlike administration adults who are morning people.
My body immediately shifted to what I already knew: going to bed at 5-6 am, waking up at 1-2pm (I roughly sleep 8.5 hours, sometimes 9).
Never felt more rested.
I now wake up at 10 am. It's ok, but I always feel SO rested when I sleep until I needed. Just having an alarm SET puts me on a bad path, even if I have 10 hours.
I know economic studies can be kind of gross, and should always be taken with a grain of salt, but Dubner is pretty good at finding really gross flaws in papers (or at least is really good at pointing out potential problems in a study's methods).
http://freakonomics.com/2015/07/16/the-economics-of-sleep-pa...
>GIBSON: We find that permanently increasing sleep by an hour per week for everybody in a city, increases the wages in that location by about 4.5 percent.
Without doubt making teenagers get up early to study has a detrimental affect of their learning and it's only our arcane societal norms around sleep that continue to compound this problem.
There have been many links between increased blue light and reduced REM/restful sleep
The only decent study I know of about blue light and sleep, was done before the LEDs in phones/tablets/kindles even existed. Which means they were using more traditional light sources that were likely putting out an order of magnitude more luminosity.
Everything that suggests tablets/phones/kindles interferes with sleep are woo-woo blogs trying to affiliate link sell you orange safety glasses and similar nonsense.
If these devices ARE affecting sleep, it's likely the level of mental stimulation they are providing and the fact that when most people get into bed, they don't shut their mind off and instead start thinking about how Sally post pictures of her 13th fancy meal in her 13th country this month and how John's abs pop way more than theirs and it's just not fair because they count their macros and train and train and just can't get abs like that or they're mad that SniperLulz127 fragged them 4 times this evening in Overwatch Fortress 7 Call of Defeated Zombies.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25535358
This shouldn't be suprising or controversial -- compare the color fo your idoor light to the color of the outdoor light at different times of day.
As a parent of a 2.5yo toddler, I'm not restricting screen time to my son at all, because I want him to get used to them: screens and computers will inevitably be in his life. But I also make sure to play board games with him, read books and let him have actual play time outside in the park with other kids.
Screens could be causing sleeplessness, or it could be that sitting bored without anything to keep your attention is the key to getting to sleep more easily.
And that's important to think about, as without that information, people might try to solve sleep issues by listening to podcasts, which if the root cause isn't the screen, might not help much.
Because you weren't wondering if Sally posted her latest mirror selfie or if John had replied to your comment on his sportsball statement or if that person you're interested in liked your last status post.
Sure, that's partially the fault of devices but it's mostly just not having the ability to silence your mind when you get in bed. A lot of people get in bed then immediately start thinking about their day or tomorrow instead of, you know, going to sleep. A lot of this is simply a byproduct of having fast-paced, give it to me now, I can stream 1523412 television shows and movies, oh my god if I sleep for 6 hours it'll take forever to scroll through the 731 Instagram accounts I follow's new posts tomorrow and just not knowing how to shut that chatter off in your mind.
Some people can shut it off, some people can't and shouldn't use tech within an hour or two of bed, some people should largely abandon such technology period.
Just because a parent counts their kid as asleep because they're in their room with the lights off doesn't mean they actually are. From personal observation, I randomly see phone screens floating around in the dark while I'm getting up to go to the restroom in the middle of the night all the time.
Parents are also less likely to report in ways that make their kids out to be addicts, or themselves out to be bad parents. And there may be a correlation between excessive digital-lives for youths and neglectful parenting. Not to mention that "teens" are generally one of the hardest demographics to study because it's pretty much impossible to get a good control group as it's essentially their first time exercising freedom from control in general.
And yeah, 8.5 hours average for teens seems like prima facie BS. Kids wouldn't be "jet-lagged" if they slept that much. I think I was sleeping between 5-7 hours a night depending on how late I was up with friends or on the net when I was a teen (early thirties now).
I'm not saying one way or another as to whether or not screen time for youth is a problem or should be a topic of concern, but this article seems like nonsense.
https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(18)31384-2/fulltext...
How do they publish things like this with a straight face? This is not tied to the reality that I'm experiencing--you? We don't need peer-reviewed studies to tell us things that are easy to study empirically.
Please run an experiment on yourself and make up your mind.
Certainly in terms of short-term variations in quantity of screen time having little effect, and much smaller than other factors, on sleep time it matches my current experience with my son. Not that I give that experience much weight in general predictions.
> We don't need peer-reviewed studies to tell us things that are easy to study empirically.
I think you've confused “empirically” with “anecdotally”. N=1 testing has, in the best case, very large error bars in predicting broad population generalities. (And , in most cases, makes it very hard to isolate confounding factors.)
Since the seventies nearsightedness has become an epedemic because we are reading more and more.
So it does not only apply to screen time but more general: reading time.