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Too Much TV Time Linked To Poorer Sleep In Kids

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For all the parents who’ve ever banged their heads against the wall wondering why their kids won’t sleep, a new study offers at least some partial clues. The research, out today in the journal Pediatrics, finds that the more TV kids watch, the less they tend to sleep. The connection is fairly intuitive – even adults can get wired staring at screens for too long. But the study adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that too much screen time in childhood is at least linked to, if not the cause of, poorer health, both physical and mental.

The researchers, from Massachusetts General Hospital for Children (MGHfC) and Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) followed 1,800 kids from infancy to the time they were almost 8 years old. The team asked their parents how much TV the kids watched when they were six months old, and then every year after. They also asked how much time the little ones spent in a room with a TV, and whether there was a TV in their bedrooms as they got older. How much sleep the kids got at night was the variable the researchers were interested in.

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Although the effect wasn’t huge, the more TV the kids watched, the less they slept. For every extra hour of TV the children took in, they tended to sleep about 7 minutes less per night on average. And this effect was stronger for boys than for girls. Having a TV in the bedroom – which almost a quarter of kids had by the time they were 7 years old – also had an effect on sleep duration, at least for minority children, who got about half an hour less night’s sleep than kids without a TV in their rooms.

There are a couple of possibilities as to why the TV-poor sleep connection exists. The first is that TV can be stimulating enough that it could “phase shift” (delay by a sleep cycle) the onset of sleep. Watching violent TV might also lead to interrupted sleep, since it might create worry or anxiety that could prevent a kid from getting back to sleep if awakened in the middle of the night.

This is certainly not the first study to call out the detrimental effects of screen time. The American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends limiting screen time to 1-2 hours per day. (For more on this, see here.)

Because of the connections between poor sleep and mental health issues, the results are certainly worth thinking about. Sleep deprivation in kids is linked to worse performance in school, along with depression, injury, and obesity, according to the authors. Even if TV time doesn't explain all of kids’ sleep problems, toning down on it a little bit might make a difference in their sleep quality, and perhaps in their well-being.

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