Children who stick to bedtime will be more successful

“Do you want to raise your children successfully?” Asks Bill Murphy JR, author of the book How to Raise Successful Kids. The answer is simple, although sometimes difficult to respect: “Give them a regular time to go to bed”.

It’s that bedtime can become a problem in any family, especially those with young children. But, says Murphy, science confirms it: Children who go to bed regularly at an early age end up with better math, reading and spatial awareness skills, which can lead to a cascade of positive outcomes.

The investigation, the details Inc., is based on the study of 11,000 7-year-old children in the UK. Researchers at the ESRC International Center for Lifecourse Studies in Society and Health in England correlated their performance on assessment tests with their sleep schedules in childhood, at 3, 5 and 7 years old, and found that the schedules irregularities were more common in 3 year olds. . As children got older, their sleep schedules became more consistent, but those whose sleep schedules remained unstable were more likely to do poorly on reading, math, and spatial awareness tests.

According to a statement from University College London, where its research center is located, In addition to just being tired, the researchers hypothesized that volatile bodily rhythms and sleep deprivation “undermine the plasticity of the brain and the ability to acquire and retain information.”

All of the children in this sleep study were part of the Millennium Cohort Study, which followed children born in the UK from 2000.

British birth cohorts, which are arguably the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in human history, and the source of the data investigated by researchers in this case. Since 1946, British researchers have followed more than 70,000 children since birth, noting everything from the amount their parents spent on nursery supplies to their birth, to their income and wealth at age 30.

“Of course, we have to take our old friend into account, correlation versus causation,” says the columnist. This is because, he warns, it’s very possible that children with irregular sleep schedules are more likely to share another common characteristic, or perhaps several, that causes them to perform worse in these assessments.

Perhaps children with irregular sleep schedules are also less likely to receive regular nutritious meals or have a clean, comfortable place to do their homework. Or maybe it’s that parents who insist on a regular bedtime are also likely to stress another factor we’ve seen lead to children’s success: getting them to do chores.

“None of this happens in a vacuum,” Murphy warns. Another study, this time from the University of Michigan found that among adults – doctors working in hospitals and willing to record their moods and sleep patterns – bedtime had a strong relationship with moods and moods, symptoms of depression.

Those who went to bed at the same time felt better and had fewer symptoms of depression.

With curiosity, It didn’t matter whether going to bed in the morning or trying to make up for the lack of sleep on the weekends. It was the structure of sleep patterns that predicted mood, as opposed to the amount or quality of sleep.

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