Play Hard - Sleep Well

Sophie Ramsey, Consumer Reports:

It makes sense, after all, that kids will be more tired and ready for sleep if they've been physically active during the day. Now researchers have done a large study published in the medical journal Archives of Disease in Children to put these parental observations to the test.

The study included 519 healthy 7-year-olds from New Zealand, who each wore a device called an actigraph for 24 hours. An actigraph records movement, providing an objective measure of a child's activity level and sleep time. Parents also noted when their child went to bed, which allowed researchers to calculate how long after bedtime children actually fell asleep.

The researchers found a wide variation in how quickly children fell asleep, with some taking as little as 13 minutes and others needing more than 40 minutes after going to bed. Within this range, there was a close relationship between the onset of sleep and daytime activity. On average, children took an extra three minutes to fall asleep for every hour they weren't moving about. Also, the children who fell asleep faster slept longer overall.

Thank heavens ours runs around like a nut all the live-long day.


Via Boing Boing, Via Consumer Reports, via Archives of Disease In Children.