Everyone knows that sleep is critical for growing children and their mental and physical health. Regular, high-quality sleep habits help children consolidate memory and learn better. A lack of sleep contributes to childhood depression, anxiety and even risk of suicide, along with physical health problems, including risk of injury. The challenge is making sure kids log those valuable zzz’s.
There are three main components of high-quality sleep for children. First, they need enough total hours – sleep duration. Sleep quality is important, too – sleeping soundly during the night with few disruptions or awakenings. And, finally, there’s sleep timing – essentially, a consistent schedule, with bedtime and risetime about the same across the whole week.
Even when you know how important good sleep is, it’s easy for sleep duration, quality and timing to get knocked off track. It can happen for infrequent reasons, such as the pleasant chaos of a ...
