REELING IN KIDS’ BEDTIMES
COVID-19 presents another back-to-school challenge
ATLANTA — Alicia Simpson’s daughter may be precocious, having skipped a grade, but Mom is worried that her 8-yearold is advancing too quickly in an unhealthy way.
Bradley, a rising fourth grader, used to be an earlyto-bed kid but has been going to bed later since COVID-19 upended her life. She is now getting nine or 10 hours of sleep when she used to get nearly a dozen.
Simpson is experiencing something that doctors, researchers and teachers say is a real trend, with potentially harmful consequences if parents fail to rein it in. In extreme cases, they are seeing kids going to bed nearly when they used to wake up.
Jordan Kohanim, a high school English teacher, said in the spring that her juniors were often groggy for her 10 a.m. videoconferences. Many told her they’d gone to bed at 4 a.m.
“I would say 70% of my kids said their sleep patterns went off the wall,” said Kohanim.
Body clocks take over
It’s not just high school students.
Bridget Edison teaches seventh-grade English and social studies in southwest Georgia. After schools closed in March, many of her 50 students started emailing her questions about their assignments later and later.
“In the beginning, I was pretty much on call around the clock,” she said. “I had to tell them, guys, I’m probably not going to respond to you at midnight.”
She worries about their brains adapting to the new pattern.
“What happened with coronavirus is every day became a weekend,” sleep expert Donn Posner said, “and everybody was allowed to sleep in their own preferred phase.”
For reasons as yet unclear to science, the natural bedtime for teens generally shifts later, and the pandemic has exacerbated that tendency by removing the guardrails on their lives.
That can be a good thing, since people sleep better when the timing suits their natural rhythms, said Posner, president of Sleepwell Consultants in Massachusetts and a founding member of the Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine.
However, he worries about the consequences of extreme unstructured behavior during the pandemic — of going to bed, and rising, too late or at inconsistent times for months on end. Some can suffer from chronic insomnia if they ignore their body clocks for too long, said Posner.
Poor sleep is associated with health risks, such as Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, obesity, dementia, depression and substance abuse. It can also undermine the body’s immune system.
Getting more shut-eye
Kids are not the only ones shifting later.
Jessica Harvin, another teacher, normally wakes around 4:30 a.m., but after the pandemic started, she pushed that to 8 a.m..
“I’ve kind of enjoyed the sleeping-in aspect,” she said.
Harvin appears to be part of a global trend among adults, and it’s not all bad. Adults seem to be sleeping both longer and with more regular bedtimes, new research shows.
One study, based on surveys of 435 adults in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, found that after their countries locked down, they started going to bed later on weekdays but not as late as they used to on weekends. It’s common to shift later on weekends, and reducing the differential is healthy.
The respondents also reported getting about a quarter-hour more shuteye. The paper from the University of Basel, publishing in the science journal Current Biology, concluded that the respondents, most of them higher wage earners, had more flexible schedules while working from home and were therefore freer to follow their natural sleep rhythms.
Another paper appearing in the same publication found something similar among young adults in the
United States. The study of 139 University of Colorado students found that their bedtimes shifted later by nearly an hour on weekdays but only a half-hour on weekends, so their bedtimes converged. The study, by researchers at CU and the University of Washington, also found that the students were sleeping an extra half-hour on weekdays and nearly as much on weekends.
Lead author Kenneth Wright has read the European study. He said that he was unaware of any emerging research showing children following a similar pattern, “but both of our studies show that adults, whether they’re older or younger, are timing their sleep later, so it’s likely.”
While the extra sleep and more consistent bedtimes are healthy developments, he said, many teens may be going to bed well after they should.
The professor of integrative physiology and director of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at CU said it takes years for medical issues to develop from later and inconsistent bedtimes. But he said a short-term trend could trigger substance abuse and other behavioral problems in some. He recommends exposing kids to bright light in the morning, a little earlier each day.
The role of video games
Wright said video games are a major cause of the late-night shift.
Until a century ago when the lightbulb was invented, humans fell asleep within several hours after the sun set and woke as it rose. Now tiny lightbulbs in screens blast eyeballs with high-frequency light that inhibits the body’s production of melatonin, a hormone that regulates sleep-wake cycles. Research shows that light has a bigger impact on kids.
Video games also saturate brains with adrenaline, exciting them before bed when they need to be calmed.
Marion Ross, 15, is among the many teens in the thrall of video games. The Macon, Georgia, youth plays Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto and NBA 2K remotely with his friends, sometimes until after sunrise.
He lives with his grandmother, Cheryl Thomas, who has been indulging him during the coronavirus lockdown. Normally, she’d have him in bed by 9 p.m. because he must wake in time for the 8:30 a.m. school bus. Now he sleeps past noon, sometimes until 2 p.m.
When school starts, she said, “That game is going to be taken away . ... Sometimes you’ve got to know when to be hard on them.”