Sleep Patterns Linked to Skills in Preschoolers

In the western world, it's customary for small children, especially of preschool age, to have strict bedtime hours, which their parents enforce. According to a new series of scientific data, it would appear that this habit has numerous advantages for the small ones, including improved reading, language and math skills. It could be that getting sufficient sleep each night is linked to the brain becoming better fit to process and store new data, and also to form new, strong neural connections.

The correlation was found to be holding true not necessarily for those with a fixed bedtime alone. The science team behind the investigation says that all children who get adequate amounts of sleep, regardless of the hours when they go to bed, tend to have higher scores than their peers on most, if not all, development assessment test. The conclusions of this research were presented today, June 7, at the SLEEP 2010 conference, held in San Antonio, Texas. This is the 24th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC.

“Getting parents to set bedtime routines can be an important way to make a significant impact on children's emergent literacy and language skills. Pediatricians can easily promote regular bedtimes with parents and children, behaviors which in turn lead to healthy sleep,” explains Erika Gaylor, PhD, the lead author of the investigation. She holds an appointment as an early childhood policy researcher at the Menlo Park, California-based independent, nonprofit research institute SRI International, e! Science News reports. The datasets the team used for this work were collected from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort, which looked at development patterns of 8,000 children, when the young ones turned 4 years old.

“This is by far the largest study of its kind to date. Previous studies have included up to 500 children in this age group. It's fortunate to have this rich dataset available for analysis,” Gaylor says. The new study also confirmed previous findings, reported last year in the August issue of the journal Sleep Medicine, which showed that children without a clearly-set bedtime generally tend to get less sleep than their peers who go to bed at a designated time. This held true even if those without schedule went to sleep earlier on some nights, and later in others.