The Importance of Sleep in the Early Years

Abstract

OpinionA 2014 study [1] highlights the fact that children who do not get sufficient sleep run a higher risk of becoming overweight or even obese within a year and also demonstrates a connection between maternal employment status and a child's weight over time.Children with full-time working mothers were seen to sleep fewer hours than their peers whose mothers worked less than 20 hours per week. Children of full time working mothers also tended to have higher BMIs at the second weigh-in. Results of the above study demonstrated that just 18% of pre-school aged children were getting 11-13 hours of sleep per night and were, on average, getting about 9.6 hours of sleep at night. The study has also shown that each extra hour of sleep at night that a child obtained was associated with a 6.8% decrease in their BMI at the second weigh-in. Other factors from research that have been found to be associated with shorter infant sleeping patterns include maternal depression during pregnancy, the introduction of solid foods before the age of 4 months and infant TV viewing [2].Lack of sleep (and irregular patterns of sleep) has also been associated with unhealthy weight levels and recent work utilising data obtained from the Millennium Cohort Study examined the effect of sleep schedules on the development of obesity throughout childhood [3].