We don’t normally run with the same theme over consecutive blog posts, but further to last Friday’s post about the importance of sleep in children we want to share with you something that was published in an article in The Sydney Morning Herald.
Firstly, the article states that it’s difficult to tell the difference between a child who is over-tired and a child who has a behaviour disorder. We find that quite shocking.
Secondly, the article mentions that mobile phones and text messaging could be (at least partly) to blame for our children not getting enough sleep.
Unlike a telephone conversation which is live, immediate, and over when the phone is put down, text messages are delayed – you send a message and then wait for the response. Whilst this isn’t a problem (necessarily) during the day, a study of 13 year olds in the US found that 45% of them used their phones after 3 am.
That’s a lot of children staying awake at night waiting to receive a text message.
Maybe we should insist that when it’s ‘lights off’, it’s also ‘phones off’.
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