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TV time linked to less sleep for kids
The more television children watch, the less total sleep they’re getting, according to a small Spanish study.
Researchers found that a nine-year-old who watched five hours of television a day, for example, slept an average one hour less a night than a nine-year-old who watched television for less than an hour and a half a day, lead author Marcella Marinelli, from the Center for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Barcelona, told Reuters Health.
The study team followed some 1,700 children for up to three years and found those who increased their TV time got even less sleep as they grew up.
This study really demonstrated that kids who watch a lot of television and continued to do so continued to have a trajectory of less sleep than they should have.
Marinelli and her colleagues write in JAMA Pediatrics that theirs is the first study to examine the relationship over the years between the amount of time toddlers and school-age children spend watching television and the amount they spend sleeping.
The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates the average child spends eight hours a day in front of a screen. AAP recommends that parents limit the kids’ daily screen time to one or two hours.
Preschool age children need a total of 11 to 12 hours of sleep a day and school-aged kids need at least 10 hours a day, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Median sleep times dropped by about two hours during the two-to-three year follow-up period for all age groups. But kids who increased their TV viewing during that period lost even more sleep time than the others – an average of 20 percent.
Children who reduced their viewing time during follow-up tended to get more sleep, but that result could have been due to chance, the researchers note.
Marinelli’s team did not look at what kinds of shows the children watched on television, what times of day they watched or where the TVs were located. Their study cannot prove that TV viewing caused the differences seen in sleep times or explain why that might be.
“Parents must control the use of television, especially in very young children and also the use of other devices, for example mobile phones,” she said.
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