When your child isn’t sleeping enough, they will likely show signs. This is exactly what happens during "the witching hour", which refers to that time in the evening when our children get tired and start to be defiant, hyperactive, and/or crabby.
When children aren’t getting enough sleep, you may see more witching hour in your child than not. Signs your child isn’t sleeping enough are:
In fact, there is an increasing body of evidence from studies that children with chronic sleep problems can be misdiagnosed with ADHD (Shur-Fen Gau 2006). Another important thing is to try and establish a baseline of behavior and performance for your child: what is normal and what is uncharacteristic.
If your child’s behavior/performance is erratic from day to day, or if they are uncharacteristically defiant/crabby/sleepy, look at their sleep schedule.
Children need significantly more sleep than adults. As children get younger, they need more sleep. Below is a guideline for how sleep children need [Sleep Foundation]. Note that there is a recommended number, but all children are different and may have different sleep needs that fall outside the recommended number so a minimum and maximum amount are listed as well:
What’s important is to try and establish what amount of sleep allows your child to perform best.
A recent study on sleep and screens conclusively showed that children who watched more TV and had TV in their bedrooms “displayed significantly shorter sleep duration and worse sleep”, and were inclined to nap longer. Importantly, the study showed that the extra napping did not offset these negative impacts.
The study looked at 470 children between 33 and 71 months over the course of 16 days, measuring their sleep with actigraphy watches. Caregivers reported on children’s TV use. Important findings are:
If you are concerned that your child isn’t getting enough sleep, then look at their screen time.
Analyzing your child’s screen time means answering questions like:
Some tips to limit screen time are:
There are other things, such as sleep disorders, that can cause sleep deprivation in children such as:
If you live in Alaska and your child seems to be suffering from sleep deprivation and is not getting much screen time, please access this free online sleep test to get in touch with us.