Want your child to get adequate sleep? Go strict and enforce bed time rules

Getting proper amount of sleep every night as well as quality of sleep is very important especially for children. Insufficient sleep or sleep deprivation can adversely affect their cognitive skills as well as cause problems with their memory skills and concentration. According to a new study, the answer to the above problem is easy. The researchers say that you should fix a strict bedtime routine for children to help them get adequate sleep which is critical to good physical and mental health.

The new study reveals that children of those parents who actively and regularly enforce bedtime rules get sufficient sleep. Lack of proper sleep can lead to a variety of health issues such as poor attention leading to bad grades and poor social interaction. Apart from this, the children may become irritable and even depressed if sleep deprivation has been very severe.

We have much debated on how much sleep is just enough for us, but how much sleep is actually required has not been much talked about. According to study released by the National Sleep Foundation (NSF), a non-profit organization that helps promote healthy sleep, sleep requirements of people of different age groups were mentioned. According to them, children between the age of 3 and 5 require at least 10 to 13 hours of sleep while slightly older children, between the ages of 6 and 13 years require 9 to 11 hours of sleep. Adequate sleep for teenagers aged between 14 and 17 would be for 8 to 10 hours and for those above 18, anything between 7 to 9 hours is good enough.

The study was conducted by using self-reported data from parents with at least 1 child less than 18 years of age. About 94% of parents said that they told their child to go to bed at a fixed time while just over 84% said they enforced bed time rules strictly. Parents who strictly enforced the bed time rules were almost 59% more likely to help their child get adequate sleep on weekdays, as observed by the researchers.

Their study revealed to the researchers that though the actual number of children between 5 and 9 years who are getting sleep and meeting the sleep  guidelines has increased, but between the ages of 10 to 17 , the number of children getting sufficient sleep has declined. Moreover, 15 year old children had the greatest disparity between week day and weekend sleep, around 38.3% lesser children sleeping adequately on weekends as compared to the weekdays.