|
 Consistent childcare arrangements - even complicated ones - didn’t
seem to affect young children’s nighttime sleep. But when the
pattern changed over time, toddlers didn’t sleep as well, study
leader Jen-Hao Chen told Reuters Health in an email.
“The first three to five years of life are critical for children’s
development of a single, consolidated sleep,” said Chen, a
researcher at Howard University in Washington, DC.
As reported in Sleep Health, online August 10, Chen analyzed data
from a large Australian study of more than 3,400 children whose
mothers answered survey questions when the children were nine months
old and again when they were two-and-a-half years old.
The questions covered childcare experiences such as time spent in
childcare centers, time with relatives and time with non-relatives,
as well as use of multiple childcare settings.
Among children who attended childcare in both infancy and
toddlerhood, sleep did not appear to be affected by childcare
arrangements - as long as the same childcare configuration was
maintained.
Children with complicated care arrangements were not at higher risk
for shorter nighttime sleep duration, difficulty falling sleep,
restless sleep, or waking up during the night compared to children
with single arrangements during infancy and toddlerhood.
However, if childcare configuration changed - for example, from a
single arrangement to multiple arrangements, or vice versa - then
the children slept less during the night than children who didn’t
use childcare, said Chen.
Chen said he hopes the findings increase parents’ awareness of how
their selection of childcare arrangements may have implications for
children’s sleep patterns.
“Parents consider many issues such as costs, infrastructure,
location, quality of childcare setting when choosing childcare. How
childcare settings handle napping and sleep, however, is often not
(considered) an important issue,” he said.
Parents may want to learn more about how nap and sleep activities
are practiced in various childcare settings, Chen added. Then they
can select a combination of childcare settings with minimal
influence on children’s nighttime sleep.
[to top of second column] |
Dr. Iqbal Rashid, a pediatric sleep specialist from the David Geffen
School of Medicine at UCLA in Los Angeles who was not involved in
the study, said the report provides “good longitudinal data from a
national representative sample of complex childcare experience.”
However, said Rashid, it’s difficult to know why the kids had
trouble falling asleep. The study can’t rule out other possible
reasons such as problems at home.
“They could have a pet in the house that wasn't sleeping . . . was
the child co-sleeping with the parents? The home environment . . .
did the parents have smoking in the house or other things that sort
of influence the child's sleep? That’s a very subjective assessment
to make,” he told Reuters Health by phone.
As for helping kids get to sleep, Rashid said there’s no ‘one size
fits all,’ but it’s important to have a consistent bedtime and
reduce screen time before bed.
Rashid added that a simple routine such as a simple changing and
feeding before bed is important for babies so that they learn to
soothe themselves to sleep.
“That is the most important thing because every child, everybody
wakes up multiple times at night and if they do wake up they should
be able to soothe themselves back to sleep,” he said.
If babies are comfortable sleeping at the very beginning of the
night, when they do wake up in the middle of the night they know how
to fall asleep over again, said Rashid.
“But if the mother is rocking the child, singing them songs and
stuff like that, then whenever the child wakes up in the middle of
the night then the child would need the same associations to fall
asleep again, he said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2vLKZZC
Sleep Health 2017.
[© 2017 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2017 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
