Melatonin use soars among children, with unknown risks
colorado.edu
colorado.edu
Parenting is an extremely draining and time-consuming job. Many households can not afford to have a parent stay home to do the full-time job of running the house and overseeing that the children's needs are fulfilled.
I'm not surprised to see shortcuts like this rise in popularity, however reprehensible.
If we want to turn these kinds of trends around in the Western world, we need to start by focusing on fixing our broken culture, and allowing the average parent the time, financial security, and social connections to cultivate a meaningful, fulfilling life. You'll get an increase in children's well-being as a downstream effect for free.
Less focus on work, less financial distress, more social services, more volunteering, more community building, etc.
why focus on parents? People who became parents have supposedly already reached a baseline of stability and security (otherwise they wouldn't have the resources to have children). There are plenty others who are struggling without a partner (or children).
"Supposedly" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, as is your parenthetical note.
And we're focusing on parents because this article is about melatonin use in children.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Unfortunately, this disproportionately discourages the most responsible people, with the best long term planning, from reproducing.
(At least, among those who are financially struggling. You could also argue that those who can't get out of poverty don't deserve to reproduce (and many in those think tanks appear to share similar views), but (1) that's reprehensible and (2) it doesn't work anyway since there's always a subset that just doesn't care and reproduces anyway.)
Well, maybe the last one.
I get what you are trying to say, but we still live in better conditions than humanity has for 20,000 years. Like people were literally starving to death, or being beaten to death by their neighbouring tribe.
Lonelyness - perhaps. There definitely seems to be less community now, less support, etc. But is that really the issue?
Would a tribesman 3000 years ago have given melatonin to their children to get them to shut and sleep? Probably. Would they have taken cocaine before battle? Probably. Would the women have taken contraception if it was available? Probably. (I bring up contraception because people seem to complain about not having children because they don't have enough money - yet people were way poorer and had many children for all of history).
Frankly, I think most of these things people are doing now are probably done just because they are available and they make life more comfortable.
But life definitely isn't worse in many many ways than it was before. So just because you're overworked and underpaid isn't a satisfactory explanation.
That is irrelevant. The situations are completely different.
The U.S. social support structure for the lower and lower middle class doesn't exist. There are many kids whose only meal is the potentially free but terrible meal at school. Many moms have effectively the same if not worse healthcare as a tribeswoman during pregnancy due to lack of insurance and affordable access to healthcare and reduced social support.
Times are very rough for a lot of people out there. Your comment is frankly flippant and removed from reality.
They don’t have the same healthcare as tribeswomen during pregnancy, they have multiple times better chances of surviving.
You’re delusional. I know life is hard, but it’s just not as hard as anyone has had it before the 1800s.
Not having social security is not the hardest humanity has had it. Get real
The difference of availability of support between the lower class and even the upper middle class is staggering and probably the widest it ever has been in human history. That's the point. Take a look at child mortality rates. They are much higher for the lower class and are part of the reason why the U.S.' rate is so low compared to other countries.
If you're comparing the suffering of the lower and middle classes to any other time in the past 20,000 years, do you not understand how little that makes sense? Of course it's better if you set the bar so low. And again like I said, you really can't compare. The mental and emotional stress that people experience today is of a different nature that hasn't existed before.
> Not having social security is not the hardest humanity has had it. Get real
No one said that. And both the question and answer are immaterial to the discussion.
My point went completely over your head. That's why it doesn't make sense to you. The only lense you can see the world through is classes and oppression and inequality.
There are a few other ways to look at the world.
Ipads for children took off because it lets parents avoid parenting for hours a day. Melatonin took off because it lets parents avoid enforcing bedtime and sleep hygeine.
It's not about stress, most people are just lazy af and this is a quick fix. That's human nature.
(And to be clear I'm not saying it's some novel cultural failing. If iPads had been available in the 1400 toddlers would have had screen addiction in the 1400s. We're setting parents up to fail by giving them "solutions" and then expecting them to exert superhuman willpower to avoid using them as a crutch. But it's dumb to pretend that this is because parents are more overworked now than throughout history.)
People (on HN) keep insisting that I voluntarily start doing this extremely draining and time-consuming job for some reason.
the future belongs to kids, and their kids. if you're not having kids then you're tacitly agreeing to the future that they'll be creating.
That said, after extensive consultation w/our trusted pediatrician, he still struggled with sleep and thus in addition to the anxiety meds, he's also on sleep inducing medication and takes 10mg of melatonin every night. It's not a shortcut for...reasons; it appears to help him get the rest he needs. We strongly preferred a more traditional route that did not include medication, but when those other avenues failed, we had to do something and trusted our pediatrician to help--which she did.
Sleep deprivation, anxiety, and depression are REAL issues for kids today and there have been numerous studies which have shown this is an ever-increasing, world-wide issue, regardless of available parental support and avoidance of social media and other triggers.
Let's not over simplify this as you appear to be; it's not simple and it's dangerous to think it is.
The corpus of medical knowledge available to experts is profoundly more rigorous that two centuries ago but nonetheless remains extremely shallow. Inventing a new culture of health management is an unfathomably large human effort and we’ve barely started.
And on the practical scale, the corpus that exists is informed by population averages not individual responses. When a study determines that a diagnosis or treatment is effective or not, it’s almost never establishing such as a universal truth, but instead informing clinicians as to what may most reliably help some statistical share of their patients.
As all throughout history, and for at least the next few centuries, yielding all care insight to somebody else is deeply irresponsible. You need to include your own curiosity, determination, and judgment if you want to take optimal care of yourself and your family as individuals.
Hey, by all means, you go ahead and use whatever tools you have available to you to make determinations about your and your family's well-being, but I'm going to trust the opinions of those who work with and treat these sorts of issues day in and day out for decades and avoid the opinions of those I do not deem to have appropriate credibility.
It has been posted here before[1] that, 0.3mg of melatonin is the "best" dosage
Is it the easy solution? Yes. Does it work? Also yes. Do I worry about it? Absolutely, and I am open to suggestions for alternatives. Is it reprehensible? Not according to any doctor I have talked to, and maybe there are others like you up on your high horse, but none has said that to me before. But yes, let's fix all of society so I don't have to give my kids melatonin anymore. Great idea.
[ADDING MORE] My kids don't have ipads or phones. We limit their screen time much more than most. My guess is you don't have kids, or else you would realize that there is no perfect way to raise them, and you stop judging others for doing so the best way they can.
Two parents working four jobs between them is a tragedy of its own, that needs to be addressed, but it’s not the norm by any means. There aren’t even enough jobs for that.
What actually seems to missing for parents is insight into how to find wellness within what they have. Traditions that allowed for finding joy and contentment in modest lives with some discomfort have been supplanted by a fantasy that we should all have all the cool toys and do all the fun travel and never feel sad and that if we’re not receiving that life we should either feel ashamed or take a pill.
People are buying melatonin for their sleepless kids because they take pills for their own sleepless nights, and they have sleepless nights themselves because many of their parents forgot to teach them that it’s important to just chill the fuck out and quietly unwind without a lot of stimulation as evening comes on.
We do need social effort to rectify all this, but it starts with re-teaching people how to find ease and acceptance in their inevitably modest lives, an education that most can start to find by just looking backwards a few generations in their own family. Those lives didn’t embody aristocratic fantasies either, and included plenty of discomfort, but you don’t find the anxiety and chronic misery people feel crushed by now, nor the troubling and incorrect idea that all discomfort must have an easy remedy in the form of a pill or whatever.
Where is the scientific evidence for that claim?
To me it sounds like an un-rovably subjective rosy-tinted assumption of a idealized past, where Daddy always smiles because the depression mainly manifests away from home at the bar.
Much like how every aging generation in history seems to whine that "youth these days" don't have the manners they had when they were young.
For example, there's melatonin in both human and cow milk (more in evening milk, because infants don't have a day night cycle yet, and giving rise to the belief that smells like an urban legend that the old timey advice to drink warm milk if you can't sleep originally came from drinking night time milk fresh from the cow for the melatonin).
Also, you know what causes us to make less melatonin? Light. Blue light especially. Is it equally reprehensible to allow children to exist in houses with led light bulbs, which affects their bodies just as much as a pill?
It seems likely to me that the addition of a small amount of melatonin to replace that lost due to nighttime lights is a reasonable parenting decision. Of course there's uncertainty, but there's uncertainty about everything, can we please stop freaking out as much as we do, as easily as we do?
It does help with actually physically getting me to sleep, but to be honest I can't really say it's good quality sleep. The feeling is almost 1:1 comparable to my usual bad days where I don't fall asleep until 6/7 and wake up 2 hours later, just extremely groggy and with a lot of mental fog, so I've stopped taking it altogether. This article is kinda worrying to me, can't even imagine what kinda weirdness external melatonin could be doing to a young mind if even tiny doses has such a strong effect on me, and I was a psychonaut in my younger party days.
There's a reasonable degree of evidence that all the commercially-available doses are too high, even 1mg. Cutting it way, way down may give the benefits without so many negatives.
My wife though can take the same dose, same routine, and report similar symptoms to you. I wonder if her body technically doesn't need the additional melatonin but mine does.
"Results show that melatonin content...with the actual content ranging from 83 percent less to 478 percent more than the concentration declared on the label."
https://aasm.org/study-finds-that-melatonin-content-of-suppl...
wait, you can buy OTC seratonin? that seems wild given the seratonin syndrome risks.
edit: it looks like it's indirectly via 5-HTP [1].
[1]: https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-794/5-htp
Among children ages 5 to 9, 18.5% had been given melatonin in the previous 30 days. For preteens ages 10 to 13, that number rose to 19.4%. Nearly 6% of preschoolers ages 1 to 4 had used melatonin in the previous month."
I dont want to devalue your experience. But this experimentation is usually not "(placebo) controlled" and not "double blind".
You could! Take a randomly selected real-or-placebo, that's marked as such but you do not know at the time. See if you can feel the difference, not your experience, repeat. Then look at your results. According to placebo science the results may shock you.
I hope you're sleeping well now regardless. Lack of good sleep is like slow torture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_and_efficacy_of_homeo...
"The proposed mechanisms for homeopathy are precluded from having any effect by the laws of physics and physical chemistry.[18] The extreme dilutions used in homeopathic preparations usually leave not one molecule of the original substance in the final product."
It remains a multi-billion dollar industry.
Whether melatonin is closer to medicine or nonsense can't be solved with anecdotes.
I admitted my comment is an anecdote, but that doesn't cancel out the voluminous research and study done on melatonin. We know that melatonin is a hormone that is involved with regulating sleep cycles. I'm not sure what evidence you're looking for but internet trolls love to move goalposts anywhere they want to. Yes, millions of people use melatonin effectively every single night. You can call that an anecdote, but you've provided no evidence that melatonin does not do what it's being used for. All evidence and study points to one thing: melatonin helps people sleep. Just go google it yourself, don't have a pointless conversation about anecdotes.
Supplements don't always work like the natural thing they're meant to supplement. Humans are really bad at knowing how inputs affect their health, and it's difficult to go through the long and laborious process of elimination to verify the cause if you've already convinced yourself of something. Self-reporting is notoriously unreliable for this and other reasons.
All available evidence does point to melatonin being an effective sleep aid. It is known to regulate sleep cycles, and it does so effectively for millions of people every night. It's no mystery or placebo. You can say it is all you want, but you've provided no evidence at all to support your feelings. And homeopathy has nothing at all to do with melatonin consumption as a sleep aid.
The burden of proof is on you. Proof might exist, but I'm not convinced you have it. Otherwise, you'd lead with it instead of an anecdote.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...
"Research shows that a supplement may help people with insomnia fall asleep slightly faster and may have bigger benefits for those with delayed sleep phase syndrome—falling asleep very late and waking up late the next day."
I'm sure you'll try to move the goalposts anywhere you want before you accept that melatonin does in fact put people to sleep.
>> All available evidence does point to melatonin being an effective sleep aid.
What evidence?
>> "It is known to regulate sleep cycles"
Anecdotally, as best as you've demonstrated. This is not, as you claimed, "voluminous research and study done on melatonin."
If we're going with your silly metaphor, you moved the goal posts.
Anecdotes are not "voluminous research and study done on melatonin." A blog with no standards is not "voluminous research and study done on melatonin."
Show the "voluminous research and study done on melatonin" that you claimed exists or go away. I've made no claims to support. I've only asked you to back your own statements up.
Again, the burden of proof is on you.
You're seriously trying to say Johns Hopkins Medical Center is just some rando blog to try to prove your pointless point? You're either clueless or a really bad troll.
>What evidence?
Yeah, where's your evidence that it doesn't work?? Crickets.
>Anecdotally, as best as you've demonstrated. This is not, as you claimed, "voluminous research and study done on melatonin."
"It is known to regulate sleep cycles" is not anecdotal. This has been known science for quite a long time, no doubt before you were born, kiddo.
>Again, the burden of proof is on you.
I've provided proof, from a reputable medical source. You've provided nothing but your feels.
PUT UP OR SHUT UP. Without any proof from you, this conversation is really over.
I hope you have the day you deserve.
The burden of proof is now on you, so you lose by default since you've provided nothing to back up your claims. And that's the end of this stupid, pointless "conversation".
What evidence is lacking exactly?
https://www.narconon.org/drug-information/cocaine-circa-1860...
Anecdotal evidence is not a substitute for pharmacology research, controlled medical trials.
But, you know, sure. Why not. Of course people did these studies because with positive results you’ll get published and it’s a bit of a softball, since it’s like, exactly what must be the result given the situation:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33417003/
Results: Of 2642 papers, 23 RCTs met inclusion criteria. Our results indicated that melatonin had significant effect on sleep quality as assessed by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) (WMD: - 1.24; 95% CI - 1.77, - 0.71, p = 0.000).
Conclusion: We found that the treatment with exogenous melatonin has positive effects on sleep quality as assessed by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) in adult.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31982807/
Conclusions: Melatonin was an effective and tolerable drug in the short-term treatment of sleep onset insomnia in children and adolescents.
Etc
There’s no controversy whether it works or not. The only controversy is on chronic supplementation, which is entirely fair.
I think we should do little placebo trials at home. Not double blind, obviously. But still the risks are known (none, except character damage maybe).
https://youtu.be/h2aWYjSA1Jc?si=w6_YgZKQq65YyatP https://www.sleepfoundation.org/bedroom-environment/blue-lig...
And the same, in reverse, applies to workspaces/schools with not enough natural light (or a good simulation thereof).
Can you give some suggestions?
The main thing is that there are non-visual receptors in our eyes that are used for determining the level of "daylight", and they are most sensitive to light around 480nm [1]. To give the right signals, you want to match daylight's intensity in this part of the spectrum at day, but gradually decrease it to zero in the late evening.
You can look for lightbulbs or LED strips that come with a quantified measure of melanopic vs standard lux (it's sadly not common), or you can look for light sources that come with a graph of the emitted spectrum (a requirement for the new EU energy efficiency label!) and make an educated guess.
Generally, 1800 K or colder(/"warmer") LEDs will have little of the melanopic component, using "monochromatic" orange LEDs is also an option (both dimmed appropriately).
[1] See graph here: https://www.thelightreviewonline.com/explainer-melanopic-lux...
Why can’t we sleep? Because we keep an on-demand world-class carnival in our houses, and light them up super-bright at night. If you describe what we do and how we live, the cause of the overwhelming majority of sleep issues in our society is obvious. It’d be very surprising if that way of living didn’t cause widespread sleep issues.
> researchers analyzed 25 melatonin gummy products and found that 22 contained different amounts of melatonin than the label indicated. One had more than three times the amount on the label. One had none at all. In addition, some melatonin supplements have been found to contain other concerning substances, such as serotonin
It's almost as if humanity, with US often leading the way, wants to destroy itself. Well, or maybe somewhat more precise: one part of humanity is super selfish and only cares about power/money, and drags a large part of the rest with them.
1. Stop allowing your child to have _any_ form of caffeine. No Coke, no chocolate, not even decaf tea.
2. Make sure they get at least moderate exercise, every day.
3. Take away the screens at least an hour before their bedtime, and stick with the same bedtime every day.
If you haven't done the above steps, and you have instead let the drug pushers that design the checkout lines at Target convince you to keep giving your child this stuff, you are an unfit and harmful parent.
EDIT: To add another thought, I also had the blessing/good luck of a father who, noticing my difficulties getting to sleep gave me the sage advice of "don't worry about it. Grab a book, do some drawing, worst case scenario, you don't get up for school tomorrow. The world is not ending." How much stress to do we put on ourselves by our expectation of sleep and the perceived consequences of having a bad day the next day. Our life does not operate via step functions. It is continuous, and no one bad day can ruin the next unless you let it.
The doses you can buy in the drugstore are wild. I'm an adult and I take 0.5mg and it works great. You can't even buy 0.5mg where I live, so I buy the 1mg tablets and break them in half.
Also, no HN thread about melatonin would be complete without a link to gwern's writeup, so here it is https://gwern.net/melatonin
So adults have been slamming melatonin like crazy for decades. Now kids are taking tons of it.
Seems like we really should be trying to figure out if this is harmful or not. Seems kind of important.
I use it myself and have looked many times for solid research showing harm (or lack thereof) and see very little, which is kind of surprising to me. I use it to treat insomnia which is otherwise kind of stubborn. Yes I've tried no blue light, earplugs, turning off lights in the home, exercise...
Edit: this is one of the only articles I could find. Very basic stuff.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26692007/
This just shows that there's nothing obviously alarming. The effect of long term use especially on younger developing brains is what needs to be studied.
> The older the child, the greater the dosage, with preschoolers taking anywhere from 0.25 to 2 mg and preteens taking up to 10 mg.
Those are extraordinarily high doses. I tried it for sleep in my 20s and 2 mg knocked me out and left me feeling groggy when I woke up. I can't even imagine how much habituation a child needs in order for a 10 mg dose to be necessary.
Children in general are growing, and need more sleep than adults. I don't know that it particularly matters how this sleep is distributed. I do know that my preschool had a naptime, and that I occasionally nodded off as an older kid on the school bus. I think extending naptimes from pre-school into later school years is an idea worth investigating.
I wish it were that simple for everyone.
I have been a child though, and have had a younger sibling.
And I certainly know, beyond any doubt at all, that 20 to 30 years ago parents weren't dosing their children with sleeping pills. At least not almost 1 in 5. This does not have to happen.
Is there reasonably solid evidence for this?
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha...
Parenting always looks like one of those “why don’t you just” things - the answers are so obvious and these parents are just idiots. Except, every human that has ever existed has had parents. Is every descendant a bunch of idiots that just needed someone to tell them “why don’t you just?”
When you become a parent you’re faced with impossible situations regularly. You feed your kids, get them to bed, they’ve got school at some scientifically proven harmful early hour, all the lights are automated for circadian lighting, you do a quiet story time, everything is peaceful, but your kid hasn’t slept more than a few hours a night for two weeks. They’re hysterical, you’re at your wits end, because you also haven’t slept, or really done any of the million grown up chores that happen once your kids fall asleep and if you don’t pay the bills soon your utilities will be cut off and then evicted - not for want of money but for want of time not consumed by your insomniac crazed child. You are doom scrolling parenting forums with parents posting horror stories of their life melting down and begging for advice. Throughout the forums are smug parents saying “yeah man, did that. Melatonin. Just saying, by the way it’s the hormone all vertebrate animals secrete to induce sleep since animals began.” But you really don’t want to be drugging your kids, and you remember posting on HN a bunch of “why don’t you just” threads before you had kids and feel the need to be intellectually consistent. Surely if you turn the lights down 10% 30 minutes earlier this won’t happen tomorrow?? Maybe the story you read is too over stimulating? Maybe they just need to run for five hours tomorrow at the park?? What else did I tell people to do???
Every time you are getting ready for bed at 4am after consoling your weeping child shrieking “why can’t I sleep daddy???” until they suddenly switch off like a light at 3:30am, three hours before they have to wake up for their absurd school start time designed to stunt intellectual development out of malice by school administrators that wish they had studied a different subject, you can’t help but see your bottle of melatonin.
Finally you can’t take it and you go to the pediatrician. They look at you like you’re dense. “Have you tried melatonin? It’s perfectly safe in moderation and can help reset a sleep cycle that’s been disrupted.” You shift uncomfortably and stammer something about drugging kids and hollowly repeat some “why don’t you just” advice you posted on HN a few years before your first child. The doctor shrugs and says “lack of sleep will clearly harm you and your child, and melatonin is a fundamental hormone in the sleep cycle of all animals - it is safe. Relax.”
Dejected and exhausted, feeling like a hypocrite, you get the smallest dose gummy you can find at the store. With a deep shame for destroying your child’s life, you mutter something about medicine and give it to your kid before you brush teeth. They’re shaking with fear about the upcoming struggle to sleep, but you guys go through the motions you know won’t work and you grind your teeth waiting for the struggle to finally break you. Then half way through the story, you hear it. A slight snore. You fold the book and rest your burning eyes. You consider revisiting all those threads you posted, maybe deleting the posts or adding edits apologizing. But you’re just too tired right now. The warmth of the bed, the blessed peace is too inviting. The next thing you know, you wake up fully clothed in their bed late for school.
Listen, you should NEVER judge a parent that hasn’t been convicted by a jury of their peers. There is nothing in life harder, and no one who hasn’t lived it can ever understand it. That’s not an insult or telling you to shut up or your opinion is wrong. But it’s a frame of reference so different from all other human experience that it’s impossible to judge from outside.
Often I find it's not even just nonparents, but also parents who have lucked out by having their methods work on their kids, so assume that's all it must take, and why can't other parents just do this list of things that worked for them, so are obviously universally applicable to every child.
/rant, after having spent yet another day exhausted by my weird-sleep-habits 2 y.o.
What I have read is people talking about optimizing their child rearing for their jobs (and other things). This is bass-awkward. You optimize, as much as you can, for the child. Because everything you are doing while they are a child is done DURING THEIR FRICKING FORMATIVE YEARS!!
Don't drug your kids people. It's pretty simple.
You make it sound like some easy accident of scheduling, but it's not: As kids get older there are documented and measurable physiological changes--especially in melatonin release--telling their bodies to stay up later.
From what I understand you should not use it for longer than 1-4 weeks presumably because you will screw up your body’s melatonin cycle even more than the insomnia has already.
Any chemical in the body that ends with -onin, in my experience, tends to be extremely pervasive with a complicated series of effects and should probably not be trifled with.
I will be very curious how these studies pan out. Hopefully I'm just flat out wrong.
Try that today and you'll end up in jail with your kids in a foster home.
... and don't want to deal with parenting, so they shove whatever drug to change their natural behavior, despite not knowing the consequences.
This is why all sleeping pills should be controlled drugs.
If kids can't drink alcohol, why can they take those drugs if its the best interest of their parents?
Stopped taking my phone into bed with me. Now I sleep like a baby.
When there are relatively simple sociological fixes to these new problems.
It is therefore only applied to things you don't want to do.