Skip the Sheep: Sleep Tips for Back to School

Sleep Tonight, Thrive Tomorrow Sleep deprivation. Droopy eyes at breakfast, the irresistible urge to roll over and snuggle back to sleep, mentally shaving items, compromising your day’s tasks, to make up for those additional delicious minutes of dream time. We’ve all experienced a sluggish morning, but for growing children and adolescents, it’s more than an annoyance to get out of bed without enough sleep, it’s detrimental to their health. With school just around the corner, it’s important your family focus on the benefits a healthy night’s sleep can provide. Help your kids sleep on a schedule. Here’s why. Your Child’s Brain on Sleep In the transitional years of late childhood and adolescence, your child’s brain benefits from plentiful NREM sleep—the deep sleep waves that cycle throughout the night as we sleep. While young children and babies need maximum hours of REM sleep to create neural pathways in their brain, NREM refines and individualizes the brain neurons developed in early life. Your Teen’s NREM Sleep Experience During mid to late childhood, the growing brain transitions from taking in a large amount of REM sleep, tipping the scales toward NREM as it reaches adolescence. Deep sleep increases as the brain’s neural network connectivity decreases, shifting from growing connections to shedding them, giving way to a more mature brain. NREM sleep is a key component for the transition into early adulthood. NREM coincides with the stage in an adolescent’s life where cognitive skills, reason, and critical thinking have more demand. The growing brain accepts new challenges in relation to the increase in NREM. The adolescent brain is typically less rational than an adults’ and has poorer decision-making skills. This can help explain the awkward transitions we sometimes see in adolescence. Developing a rational brain takes deep sleep. And lots of it. A […]

Click here to view full article