Insufficient sleep harms children’s mental health
DEAR parents, if you want your child to be mentally fit, Read on. Inadequate night-time sleep alters several aspects of children’s emotional health, warn researchers.
For the study, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the research team studied 53 children in the 7-11 age group over more than a week. The children completed an in-lab emotional assessment twice, once after a night of healthy sleep and again after two nights where their sleep was restricted.
“After sleep restriction, we observed changes in the way children experience, regulate and express their emotions,” said study lead author Candice Alfano, Professor at the University of Houston in the US.
The multi-method assessment had children view a range of pictures and movie clips eliciting positive and negative emotions while the researchers recorded how children responded.
In addition to subjective ratings of emotion, researchers collected data on respiratory sinus arrhythmias (a non-invasive index of cardiaclinked emotion regulation) and objective facial expressions.
“Studies based on subjective reports of emotion are critically important, but they don’t tell us much about the specific mechanisms through which insufficient sleep elevates children’s psychiatric risk,” Alfano explained.
The experience and expression of positive emotions is essential for healthy social interactions and effective coping.
“Our findings might explain why children who sleep less on average have more peer-related problems,” the study authors said.
The researchers also found that children with greater pre-existing anxiety symptoms showed the most dramatic alterations in emotional response after sleep restriction.
“These results emphasise a potential need to prioritise healthy sleep habits in emotionally vulnerable children,” they said.