How Sleep Affects Babies, Children, and Teenagers

1. Introduction
2. Why Do We Need Different Sleep at Different Ages?
3. How Much Sleep Should a Teenager Get?
4. So Do We Actually Need More Sleep As We Age?
5. What You Can Do To Get Healthier Sleep?
6. Everyone is Different
7. Recap and Conclusion

Introduction

Everyone needs to sleep a certain number of hours, but these are hours vary depending on your age. For instance, a newborn baby definitely needs more sleep than a a high-school students. But how many more hours does a newborn baby need exactly? Depending on whatever age you or your child is, you will be most interested in understanding how much sleep is necessary between these different stages of development. As a baby is growing up, there are more biological factors that contribute to the different amounts of sleep needed. But, once this baby is a teenager, there become more environmental factors that contribute to how much sleep is needed. By understanding these different factors, you can learn how to improve your sleep or your child’s sleep.

Why Do We Need Different Sleep at Different Ages?

In order to understand why we need sleep at different ages, let’s start with the age group that needs the most sleep: babies. Newborn babies definitely need more sleep than at any other time in their lives. the following graph shows the average hours of sleep that a baby needs in its first year.

Source: http://www.babycentre.co.uk/a7645/how-much-sleep-does-your-baby-need

As you can you see, babies start off at with a whopping sixteen hours of average required sleep, and this number very quickly decreased throughout the months of the babies first year. Indeed, when we see the graphs for the average required sleep after this period until the age of five, we can see that this amount of average required sleep continues to drop off at a steady rate.

Source: http://www.babycentre.co.uk/a1051092/how-much-sleep-does-your-toddler-need

Source: http://www.babycentre.co.uk/a1022130/how-much-sleep-does-your-child-need

As you can may or may now know, when a baby first comes out of the womb, his or her’s eyes stay closed for an indefinite amount of time. The reason for this phenomenon is that the world we are living in is flooding the baby with a lot of sensory information. Because the baby did not have any light in the womb, the baby is not used to the sudden bright light that is prevalent in our world.

Thus, at this point in the baby’s life, almost every single sound and motion is a new experience which the baby needs to process. (2) But processing these experience require a significant amount of physical and mental energy. In order for the baby to successfully navigate this flooding of information, the baby needs to sleep in order to recharge its capabilities for understanding sensory information. As the baby grows older, the baby is more used to sensory information and needs less recharging time, or sleep.

How Much Sleep Should a Teenager Get?

As shown in the previous graphs, this amount of sensory information is better handled at later stages of a child’s development, thus prompting lower amounts of average required sleep time for a particular child. Now, this gradual decline or sleep time required eventually tapers off once the child enters adolescence. According to the National Sleep Foundation, a teenager should be getting between eight and ten hours of sleep every night. (3)

However, according to Dr. Dement’s book, many adolescents find increasing pressures to stay up late; these pressures include homework, part time jobs, the Internet, and increasing social activity. (1) (page 512) As you become a teenager, you need less sleep than before. There are different reasons why your need for sleep decreases as you get older. At this point, you are not subject to the stimuli explanation that is used for children. For instance, in our increasingly technologically advanced society, the increase in usage of cellphones and computers for teenagers increases every year, and such electronics usage contributes to a delay in child sleep time.

Also, in addition to these environmental factors which adversely affects a teenager’s sleep cycle, there are also several biological factors that contribute to the amount of sleep that a teenager gets. According to Robert Simpson, a sleep medicine specialist, “There’s a fairly precipitous decline in deep slow-wave sleep through the teen years into the early 20s.” (4) Slow-wave sleep is a characteristic of Stage III non-REM (NREM) sleep, and is considered the most restorative for a person’s health. As such, with aging, teenager’s regular sleep pattern will become less restorative naturally because of this inevitable deterioration.

Other sleep research has shown similar conclusions. A study from the Israel Deaconess Medical Center and University of Toronto researchers shows the significance of the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus, which is a cluster of neurons which regulates sleep patterns. (5) This study shows that the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus slowly dies off as one gets older, which makes it harder for individuals to fall asleep.

Another research study published in the Public Library of Science draws the same conclusion using evidence relating to melatonin levels. (6) According to the study, studies of adolescents and other young mammals showed an evident delay in the circadian clock. The study posits melatonin levels as an explanation, as stated: “ the melatonin rhythm was later in participants who were late- or post-pubertal compared to those who were pre- or early pubertal.”

So Do We Actually Need More Sleep As We Age?

It is a commonly held idea that individuals need less and less sleep as they continue aging. However, according to the numerous pieces of evidence in the last section suggesting that sleep becomes more difficult for individuals as they become teenagers, this idea is not true. Indeed, individuals experience more difficulties falling asleep as they age due to environmental and biological factors, but their sleep requirement generally stays constant. It is not that individuals need less sleep as they age; it is that individuals are prone to getting less sleep as they age.

In the following excerpt from an Australian Broadcasting Corporation article, David Hillman explains this misconception:

“But do you actually need less sleep as you get older?

No, says Professor David Hillman, chair of the Sleep Health Foundation, older adults need the same amount of sleep as young people.

“Adult sleep requirements are pretty stable from about the age of 20 on. Sleep does change as you get older, but the sleep requirements remain pretty constant once you’ve established that in your early 20s,” he says.” (7)

What You Can Do To Get Healthier Sleep?

       So if humans inevitably have a harder time sleeping while still needing a constant sleep requirement, there must be methods that make it easier to sleep. Regardless of your age, developing sleep hygiene, a term for proper sleeping habits, is an important skill to maintain sleep over the course of one’s life. There are many resources online (i.e. here and here) which describe good sleep hygiene. From Dr. Dement’s book, here are some quick tips:

1. Sleep with a quiet, dark, and secure environment
2. Only use your bedroom for sleeping.
3. Try to keep a regular sleep schedule.
4. Stay away from caffeine and alcohol in the hours before sleep
5. Have a nighttime ritual before going asleep.
6. Avoid heavy eating
7. Don’t go to bed hungry
8. Avoid heavy eating. (1) (page 166-168)

Also, remember the phrase, “Drowsiness is red alert.”

If you are ever in a situation when falling asleep is dangerous—for instance, while driving a car—the moment you start to feel drowsy, your situation is RED ALERT. Get out of harm’s way immediately and obtain sleep as soon as possible.

In addition, if you ever experience irregularities with your sleep, there is a high chance that you have some type of a sleep disorder. Many sleep disorders go undetected for months and even years because most individuals are not educated about sleep. If you are ever in this situation, please see a trained sleep specialist immediately. Many people believe that these sleep issues are just characteristics of getting older and cannot be fixed. All sleep-related issues can be dealt with and most often are fixable.

Everyone is Different

Regardless of the general trends which accompany sleep requirements from babies to adults, everybody is different.

Most people do need an average of about 8 hours of sleep every night in order to satisfy their biological. However, because this number varies from person to person, you should focus on your own personal sleep requirement.

“Fun fact: Researchers have found that individuals with the p.Tyr362His mutation in their BHLHE41 gene only need five hours of sleep per night on average.” (8)

Today, there are three known ways to determine one’s personal sleep requirement.

1. Laboratory Testing

Dr. Dement says that:

“Such an approach would require individuals to spend many days and nights in a sleep laboratory undergoing nocturnal polysomnography and daytime MSLT’s. the time required and the costs are simply prohibitive.” (1) (page 159)

2. Actigraphy

For this method, you wear a “wristwatch” motion sensor, like the following:

Over the course of several nights of sleep, the motion sensor will measure how much movement is in your non-dominant wrist. This movement can then be used to quantitatively determine the presence of sleep or wakefulness in an individual.

This method can be a bit pricy—so, if are on a budget or less concerned with high precision in knowing your personal sleep requirement, you should probably use the next method.

(reviews of the most popular actigraphy devices can be found here)

3. Personal Testing

There are several mobile phone applications which can track your sleep quality. These applications are placed on your bed during your sleep, and they track your movement in bed throughout the night. Although it is an advantage that these applications require little effort from an individual, one disadvantage is the debated effectiveness of such applications.

The following are the most popular sleep applications:

Lark

Source: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lark.meadowlark2

Website

For iPhone

Zeo

Source: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.myzeo.android

For iPhone

For Android

Sleep Cycle

Source: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.northcube.sleepcycle

Website

For iPhone

For Android

Finally, if you do not have a cell phone or you find the applications to be ineffective, you can manually find your personal sleep requirement. The steps are as follows:

1. Step one: Select initial bedtime and set a wake up alarm about 10-15 minutes after your target sleep time.
   1. For example, if you want to sleep eight hours, try to sleep at midnight and set an alarm for 8:15AM.
   1. Ask yourself if you fell asleep at midnight promptly.
      1. If no, sleep time may be too early.
      2. If sleep onset happens quickly but you feel groggy in the morning, you have a lot sleep debt.
2. Step two: Pay attention to tendency for sleepiness in non-stimulating, sedentary situations during the day.
   1. If there are periods of daytime sleepiness, the time in bed should be extended by 30 or 60 minutes.
   2. Seek out boredom and see if you fall asleep when you are not very engaged.
   3. If you are having difficulty falling asleep, you might be sleeping too much.
      1. Just try to calibrate yourself.

An important note:

For any method, you should only try to determine your personal sleep requirement when you are able to maintain a regular schedule for two weeks.

Recap and Conclusion

By now, you should understand that every person requires different amounts of sleep at different points in their lives. As a baby slowly matures into a toddler and then adolescence, sleep is an issue of physical development. Babies need to reset their bodies as their senses are flooded; they begin sensory and motor development. Afterwards, toddlers and children need to develop their immune systems and physically grow. Other than puberty, this is the most important period of growth for children. And, finally, adolescent teenagers enter puberty, their most rapid period growth. Teenagers need sleep because most hormones are released during the night. After these very distinct periods of biological development, teenagers slowly transition into adults, and their sleep cycles start to stabilize.

It is absolutely important for a parent to emphasize sleep from an early age in order to allow a child to grow to his or her potential. Likewise, emphasis on sleep should continue throughout a child’s life, even after they become a teenager. We understand that adults do not require less sleep as they age, as they instead become more liable to decreased sleep because of various environmental and biological factors. Moreover, it is essential for anyone at any age to develop habits for good sleep hygiene. Proper sleep hygiene will support a child’s growth and also lead to a more healthy adult life.

And, because every individual is unique, it is important for one to determine their personal sleep requirement. Doing so can involve technology such as actigraphy devices or phone applications, or it be as simple as manually keeping track of one’s life.

       For parents, be aware that should be both encouraging better sleep habits in your child or children as well as yourself. Don’t be resigned with sleeping less and feeling groggy. And, if you know anyone who is experience difficulties sleeping, recommend seeing a sleep specialist.

       For teenagers, although you might be overly busy with homework or social commitments, try your best to get a good night’s sleep. You are in an important stage of growth that only happens once in your life. Instead of staying up late to do things, imagine wake up early to do the same things. And try your best not to be in front of an electronic screen within two hours of bedtime.

       For educators, if you happen to be reading this, please advocate that school days start later. There is a lot of research (like this and this) which show that this change improves a child’s ability to learn as their health, along with a myriad of other benefits.

Sources:

1. Dement, William, and Rafael Pelayo. Dement’s Sleep & Dreams. Stanford: Stanford U, 2014. Print.

2. http://www.in.pampers.com/why-babies-need-more-sleep-than-adults

3. http://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-topics/teens-and-sleep

4. http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/adult-sleep-needs-and-habits

5. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/20/elderly-sleep-less-neurons_n_5692504.html

6. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0112199

7. http://www.abc.net.au/health/talkinghealth/factbuster/stories/2013/11/14/3890794.htm

8. http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-discover-why-thrive-less-sleep-others-163712171.html

 

SNOW!!!

Ahhh! Today was supposed to be a day filled with studying and productivity, but those ideas got derailed with the arrival of snow!

So the day started out normally: woke up at 11, got some breakfast, and did some homework. However, at about 1 P.M., which is when Ali was selling falafels (which are amazing), the first snowflakes started drifting through the air. However, the fall of snow soon increased exponentially, and, before I knew it, the entire was covered by a white blanket of snow.

So this obviously put a huge dent in my plans to get work done, so I decided to just check out the pandemonium on lower campus. Because there are quite a number of people from tropical climates and other non-snowbearing regions, it was a first time for some people. Seeing their reactions to the falling snow was priceless. Living in Illinois and Canada for the memorable parts of my life, I always took snow as annual rite. It was something that always happened around the end of the year, and it was always a time of holly and fun. This is the reason that it’s so memorable to see others who haven’t experienced snow before. Surely, they have heard of snow, so the experience must have been surreal. To have heard about this mystical element of our natural world and to have only seen it or heard about it and never experience it must have been agonizing. But surely the rejoice at seeing it must have been worth the wait. 🙂

Anyhow, so I went down to lower campus to see everyone frolicking, people playing frisbee, and snow angels being formed. After a while, I went back upstairs and hung out with Maria and Karen for the majority of the afternoon. I did quite a bit of math because my exam is tomorrow. After dinner, Yvette came over and we tried to make cupcakes/muffins, but the ovens were being used so we had to postpone our plans. After this, I dozed off for a good two hours and woke up at check…

At check, I was told about the annual Kozzy-Kili tradition with the first snowfall. So, in the history of our UWC, Kozzy used to be located where Kili was vice-versa; now, obviously, their position is switched. And, in order to celebrate this relationship between Kozzy and Kili, the first snowfall of the year triggers debauchery and tradition  idiocy.

Anyways, at around 9:55 P.M., all of Kozzy made their way down to Kili to start the tradition. I, myself, was wearing flips-flops, jeans, and a sweater; and it was absolutely freezing outside. It’s safe to say that the trek down to Kili was troublesome enough. So, when we got to Kili, Kili had already started running to the field, and that was when we had to hide all of our clothes in case Kili decided to hide our clothes. I decided to hide my clothes in the cabinets, which, in retrospect, was a very stupid move because it’s probably one of the most obvious places one can hide his/her stuff. So, anyhow, we started making our way to the side door of Kili, where we saw Kili coming back into their dorm. We ran across the entire field with only our boxers, and it was freezing. While we were running, Denali came out and attempted to tackle and throw snowballs at us. Luckily, I escaped their clutches, made two snow angels in the snow, and ran back to Kili with my feet on the verge of falling off. Once we were in Kili, we all took showers in their first-floor bathrooms to warm-up, and, upon leaving the bathroom, found out that our clothes had been stolen from us. It took a long time for me to find all of my apparel because my stuff was scattered among the various hiding places. I first found my sweater, and then one flip-flop, and then the other flip-flop, and finally my T-shirt, pants, and towel.

We had a nice moment of camaraderie in Kili’s dayroom before heading upstairs. While heading upstairs, a lot of things happened. Daiki (Japan, 14′) told me that this was the first time that he “felt death.” I could empathize as I legitimately worried about getting frostbite while I was sprinting through the cold. As soon as we made our way to the stairs, our group of Kozzy boys were ambushed by Denali, and I got hit in the head with a snowball. 😦

So we got back up, warmed up, and then chilled before getting to work. I reviewed a little math before getting to sleep. Alright, finals are tomorrow, and I have to go asleep.

Blackout!

So today was the day of the apparently the best party of the year, but I’ll start fro the beginning. The day started off very slow as I woke up, had breakfast, and did homework for the vast majority of the day. I’m happy because I finally finished the math questions that Judy assigned as review. Hmm… some highlights in chronology before the party, because that seems to be the main event of the day.

• Got some awesome chocolate from Ravi for Castle Tours. I really love this CAS.
• Hung out with Yvette for a while. We were going to make some muffins, but that fell through. 😦
• Went to visit Nathan and Shobhit for quite a bit before dinner.
• Played some solid basketball for a hourish after dinner. Had a lot of fun, and I’m glad I didn’t injure my ankle any more because it’s been bothering me a lot.
• Scanned a lot of notes for Yvette.

So anyhow, I have never actually been to an entire party, so this was quite different. I promised Nadim and some people that I would at least attend, and I was there for at least two hours, which was a lot more than I expected. Because I am not a huge party person, I would normally show up for a while and leave, but I decided to give this one a chance. At certain points, people threw “champagne” (I think it was probably sparkling cider) on everyone, which was quite messy because people had to clean up the spills. All in all, I thoughts the songs were pretty well chosen and that the DJ’s did a very good job with everything. I had a lot of fun, which was something I didn’t expect. After the party, I came upstairs and basically loafed around for a while before I went asleep.

To end this post, I will echo something that is posted on the wall of one of my dearest friends, Nadim.

Keep calm and party on.

It’s Friday! Friday!

Today was a rather relaxing day because I had no tests or assessments due. I could have actually woken up at about 12:00 and gotten an extra 4 hours of sleep, but I forgot that I didn’t have Economics this morning. My first code is G, which is free for me; my next code is Economics, which, as said before, was optional; after that is TOK, which is a second-year class; and after that is F-code, which is always canceled on Fridays. During this vast amount of free time, I decided to hang out in Kili for a while before going to English class. And guess what? My English class could have also been a free code because I was only there for 15 minutes. Ahh…

But yeah, I went to the post-office and then came back for chemistry, which is always fun. 🙂

After class, I slept until 5, woke up and did some homework, and then went back to bed until check. After check was where it became very interesting. I hung out with Zoe and Maria for the vast majority of the time, and it was a very eye-opening conversation. I mean…I learned a lot of things that I normally wouldn’t have known. Haha, it was a very fun time as well, and I hung out with Maria for a while after Zoe left and then fell asleep. It was kind of strange because Kozzy was virtually empty for half of the night because everyone was either playing soccer in the fieldhouse or just watching Eurovision.

The Penultimate Weekday!

Alright, so what happened today? First, I woke up a bit late and got down for Physics. There wasn’t much work today as we just took time answering more practice questions in preparation for our exam next week. After Physics, I went back to my room before coming down to Chemistry. In Chemistry, we spent the vast majority of the class practicing lighting a Bunsen burner. I am sad to say that I didn’t know how to do so before today, but I am glad that I do now how to light it (in two ways too!). After demonstrating my competency with the Bunsen burner, I learned about redox-reactions for about 10 minutes before heading off to my next class. In Spanish, John mainly checked everyone’s notebooks before giving us the material to review for the exam.

Ahh, so my day was basically over at this point. I had a free code, but Shobhit came over to my room to get his journal, and we ended up playing a chess game that last for an hour (and I sadly lost the game 😦 ). Anyways, I went to Math and we just went over some questions that people had. So that’s it for the school-day.

After classes, I went to Wilderness, and we merely filled out a reflection form on the Wilderness experience for the first semester. In retrospect, I did feel like I learned a lot about the procedure for taking care of the injured in both the front-country and the back-country. In any situation that arises in the future, I will be able to help at a moment’s notice because of this training, and that is something I am glad for: another way to help others.

When Wilderness ended, I went to visit some people in Chum before heading to my room and working on math for the remainder of the time before 7 P.M. Because I have not been getting a lot of exercise recently, I decided to go to the Basketball OPA, which wasn’t that bad. Although it seems like the drills are the same everytime, the activity is still very fun and I hope to continue going next semester. One thing that I have to mention is that I did sprain my ankle while going down to the fieldhouse, and I have no idea if I’m going to be playing the first year/second year basketball game tomorrow. Anyhow, I later played with Orhun, Shobhit, Uhunoma, Otto W, and YeDan for a bit after check. After most of the people left, I played with YeDan and then with Jenish until I went back upstairs to do Math for the rest of the day. Anyhow, I need to get sleep, so hasta luego. 😀

Iranian talk!

So today was a rather eventful day. But, as usual, I got off to a very slow start this morning. In Economics, our class finished everything for the semester, so I just have to review for the final.next week. In Math, we reviewed questions and had the rest of time to work on whatever we wanted. Finally, we get to English, the last class of the day. We talked about the requirements and strategies for an essay exam.

After lunch, I chilled in my room with Shobhit and Nathan for a while before I headed off to Yearbook. It was the last time this CAS would meet this semester, and I got quite a bit of work done in this class although my trial version of InDesign had run up. After Yearbook, I went to get a package and the Welcome Center, and then I went to the Wilderness classroom for a meeting for the next semester. The meeting was very informational and there was really no instruction. One interesting observation is that there are five Kozzy boys in training for Wilderness; whereas, there are no second years in Kozzy who are Wilderness leaders.

After Wilderness training, I went back up to my room to drop some stuff off, but then I went back down to board the bus to Sante Fe. For some backstory, a while back, Naomi sent out an email inviting students to sign up for a talk that was to occur in Sante Fe. The talk would center around issues regarding Iran and the Middle East.

So we departed for Sante Fe at around 5:30 and arrive a little past 8. On the way, we stopped by J.K.’s New York Pizza in Las Vegas for some yummy pizza obviously. In addition, I looked at some Economics for a while but soon fell asleep.

As for the talk, I have generally positive thoughts about it. The talk started out with an interesting introduction and also ended with a very informative conclusion. Oh! I might mention that that people who presented were Hamid Dabashi and David Barsamian, two very knowledgeable authorities on Iran.

Anyhow, the talk was chock full of information, so I will try my best to highlight the points that i thought were important.

• The idea of free space within Iran. Apparently, the free space is supposed to give a voice to others, but I had no idea if this idea of “free space” was something concrete or abstract. The idea expanded to three groups: student activists, women-rights activists, and also labor unions. These three forces were supposed to combat the government from controlling the dissemination of false information and from ruling with an iron fist.
• The dialogue between the arts and the political climate of Iran and the Middle East. It was so strange to see this relationship because one does not normally associate art with politics. According to Dabashi, the film and photography of Iranian citizens has made it impossible to magnify on a certain figure in Iran to target; whereas, in Afghanistan, the media zeroed in on Osama Bin Laden; and, in Iraq, the media target Saddam Hussein. As one of our Annual Conference themes is the Arts, it was very interesting to see how huge a difference this field has made.
• To incorporate some aforementioned elements, Dabashi also talked about how our current generation can help prevent the dissemination of false information. With the help of media and the Internet, student activists in America can contact those in the Middle East and form a relationship that seeks to provide the truth to each respective region.
• Dabashi also talked about education, capital, and the nuclear monitoring around Iran. For education, it was weird to learn that the women who entered Iranian universities primarily focused on the hard sciences, the exact opposite of what occurs in the Western universities. For capital, there was a circular relationship between it and labor; capital chases cheap labor and labor chases capital. For Dabashi, this relationship had to be taken into account when discussing Iran; in other words, this fact offered a general framework to think of society in Iran. And for nuclear monitoring,  I learned that Iran was the only country in its region to have suspect to heavy nuclear monitoring, while its neighbors are all suspected nuclear powers in their own right.

I probably forgot some points, but those were the most important things I gleamed from the talk. After the talk, I chilled in the lobby for a while before departing back to campus. I talked to Shobhit on the way back and reflected a little bit on our experience at UWC. When we got back to UWC, I immediately went and got food because the pizza was not enough. Anyhow, I didn’t do that much work and decided to just call it a night early. 🙂