SLJ Catches Up with Po Bronson on the Importance of Kids and Sleep
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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 11/28/2007
Po Bronson is a Bay Area-based magazine journalist and the author of five books, but these days he's researching what he calls "counter-intuitive findings from the science of parenting." In a New York Magazine story last February, Bronson reported on research that says praising children for their intelligence actually harms academic accomplishment. In October Bronson followed that up with disturbing revelations about sleep, kids, and learning.
You cite various studies that say kids aren’t getting enough sleep. But you make a deeper point...
Kids get at least an hour’s less sleep than they did three decades ago. The modern lifestyle trends rob them of sleep and turn that hour over to something else, possibly productive, possibly entertainment time. So what is a [parental] obsession in the [baby] years becomes huge neglect once they hit elementary school. It isn’t whether teens are getting sleep, it’s about our responsibility as parents and what we value and what we invest their time in doing. We’re the ones who govern their sleep. Sleep matters to your kid and to you.
The study from Tel Aviv was especially eye-opening.
Avi Sadeh at Tel Aviv University took fourth and sixth graders, randomly divided them, and told one group, "Sleep a little more," and the other group, "Sleep a little less." He did this just for three nights straight. As a result, these kids were wearing an actigraph, which is like a wristwatch device that can tell when they’re lying in bed perfectly still, sleeping, versus rolling around in bed, or up or watching TV. [Researchers] were able to determine that the kids that slept more got about 30 minutes more sleep. [Kids sleeping fewer hours got 31 minutes less.] There was just one hour’s difference between the two groups. After three nights they came to school and were given a computerized version of the Wexler Intelligence Scale for children, an extremely strong predictor of achievement scores but also of how a teacher will rate a child’s ability to pay attention and emotionally regulate themselves in class. [Sadeh] found a dramatic difference--just from this single hour’s difference, a gap so great it was actually larger than the gap fourth graders [versus] sixth graders would normally [display.] It led Sadeh to conclude that an hour’s difference in sleep is equivalent to or greater than two years of cognitive maturation.
What about the study from Minneapolis?
The other way of doing this science is just looking in the real world at the correlations between how much sleep kids get and their grades. [Researchers] looked at Minnesota's high school population—7,000 kids—and found this remarkable pattern, where "A" students averaged 15 more minutes a night than the "B" students, who averaged 11 more minutes than the "C's".[who averaged 10 minutes more than the "D's"]. That’s less than an hour’s sleep difference between the "A’s and the "D’s and suggests to you that over time small sleep differences can have large consequences.
You also talk about how one school in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina changed its start time from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. and saw its average SAT score jump.
What Edina revealed is that their "A" students were still "A" students—struggling and hanging in there and still getting good grades. But when you put them up against the standardized achievement test, it’s not about your grade on a curve anymore, it’s about you against the whole country. And they let them sleep more and saw that their best students shot up the most. In effect, the best students, though they were "A" students, had been hampered the most because they were doing all the extra credit homework, taking the AP classes, doing extracurriculars. They’re driven. And if their cognitive performance was hurt the most, what we’re seeing is that they have emotional consequences even though they can hang in there with their grades.
Can you give us a snapshot of the studies linking sleep deprivation to obesity?
It spins the mind to hear that the key to staying thin is to do the most sedentary thing humanly possible. But this is exactly what scientists are finding. It started coming out of research about sleep apnea. There are five hormones regulated by sleep that affect how the body stores and burns fat; they’re all deregulated by even a small [loss of] of sleep. They cause the body to think it’s starving and to crave munchies and to store fat. Right now, for children in America, the Center for Disease Control says obesity has tripled in the last 30 years, and by 2010 half of all kids will be at least at risk of being obese. What've they found is that for every hour of sleep lost, that difference increases the rate of obesity 80 percent. At the elementary school ages, they see the difference between kids who get 10 hours' sleep, and kids who get eight hours' sleep—a 300 percent difference in the rate of obesity.
You have a son and daughter, ages six and three. Are you making them go to bed earlier?
My daughter gets an hour-and-a-half nap at school, plus she’s sleeping about ten hours, 15 minutes at night. My son was getting about ten hours and 15 minutes at night. My kids haven’t been cheating at sleep, but I do notice that I wake them up in the morning rather than their waking up on their own on school days. Sleep scientists actually say that a sign of sleep deprivation is waking up to an alarm clock at all. If something had to wake you up, your body actually wanted to be asleep. And what this article has attuned me to is how every 15 minutes counts. So [I] actually believe that in that last hour of the day, when I’m reading with them, cuddling with them, getting their jammies on, brushing their teeth, goofing off, that actually how I navigate that last hour of the day is a crucial decision. If I can make the cold, harsh call and say "15 minutes to bed earlier," I often see the benefits the next day. It’s made me fine-tune it, so I’ve been really careful about navigating the last hour of the day and trying to get them 15 minutes to a half hour or more.
