Teachers Need Kids to Learn Their A, B, Zzzzzzzzzzzz’s
As a dedicated teacher, Jenny Dermody took it personally when her son fell behind in school. Though he tested in the gifted range, Kevin acted spacey and didn’t work well independently.
Then one morning Dermody found Kevin, now 11, curled up on the shower floor with water pelting him. He was fast asleep.
It took Dermody months to make the connection. But little by little, she began to suspect restless sleep at night was hindering Kevin’s learning and behavior at school.
Research suggests she could be right. And initial findings are fueling a movement to make the value of sleep as crucial a part of children’s health and science instruction as the venerable food pyramid.
A recent survey by the National Sleep Foundation found that nearly half of all children younger than 13 complain of being tired during the day. And other studies indicate their teachers can tell.
While tired adults yawn and nod, children who get less than the recommended nine or 10 hours a night may tend to the other extreme, bouncing around, unable to concentrate, losing interest quickly--behaving as if they had attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders.
Across the nation, sleep scholars are just now starting to delve into links between lack of sleep and learning and behavior problems in elementary school-age children. Studies of tonsillectomy candidates--many of whom don’t sleep well because their breathing is hampered by enlarged tonsils--are providing some of the most provocative results.
“Our society has changed a lot in the last 30 to 40 years in terms of what we value, and one of the things we’ve undervalued is sleep,” said Mary Carskadon, director of Brown University’s Sleep and Chronobiology lab, who has been studying sleep for two decades. (Chronobiology is the study of biological activity in relation to time.)
“Families many times have forgotten how to look at behavior and take sleep into account,” she said. “They see their child’s behaviors changing and never seem to be able to put it together with what’s happening at night.”
Teachers Get No Lessons on Sleep Disorders
Most pediatricians receive very little instruction in sleep and sleep disorders. One sleep researcher studied the 2,200-page basic pediatric text and found that only 17 paragraphs touched on the subject.
Teachers get none.
They are never told, for instance, the very direct ways in which lack of sleep at night can keep kids from remembering what they’ve been taught during the day.
Think of the brain as a cluttered desk with some enviable automatic functions. During sleep, it takes the absence of new clutter as its cue to sort and file, sort and file. That process is essential for memory formation, according to sleep researchers. If the brain can’t rest long and deeply enough to move information from temporary to long-term memory, the information is lost.
Lack of rest wreaks havoc on repetitive skills that form the core of elementary-level learning--such as phonics or math drills or naming all 50 state capitals. Sleep specialists believe as much as half of new information gleaned during the day can be lost by lack of sleep that night.
Some educators are trying to teach children themselves why sleep is important, and one of the most promising efforts is being coordinated through a partnership with NASA.
Sleep is both crucial and difficult for astronauts because normal night and day cycles are disrupted in space. Out of research about how that affects their performance grew the “Sleep and Daily Rhythms” activity guide for teachers, complete with experiments such as observing the way a plant closes with darkness.
In inner-city Houston, where the NASA sleep curriculum was field-tested last year, teacher Yolanda Adams learned a lot about her third-graders by asking them to chart their sleep cycles.
Many of the children, who are about 8 years old, routinely slipped under the sheets after 10 p.m. Several watched the Fox-TV sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle” until 10:30 p.m. A few were latchkey kids who had no one to nag them about bedtime, and some reported their sleep was interrupted by noise and violence both in their apartment complexes and in their neighborhoods.
When she asked them to write down how they felt at various times of the day, she got an education.
“They would say, ‘I was tired today, I just couldn’t listen, Ms. Adams,’ ” she said. “One kid said, ‘All I could think of was lunch because I needed a break.’ ”
The curriculum is designed to fit into existing state science standards--if you have to teach about the needs of organisms, why not do so through children’s need for sleep, reasoned the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, based at Houston’s Baylor University, which worked on the material.
Nationwide distribution of the guides began this spring to several test states. California was not among them, so the curriculum has not yet been considered here.
Can’t Legislate More Dream Time for Kids
But for many young children, lack of sleep is related to hard-to-alter variables of life in a fast-paced society where sleep is considered more luxury than necessity.
Our mothers’ best advice may have been “Get to bed!” but legislating more sleep for kids is difficult. Even the most celebrated effort--scheduling classes for teenagers later to match their changing biorhythms--has been thwarted by cost problems and conflicts with busing and sports schedules since it was begun in 1996.
This, despite evidence that some promising improvements in test scores and discipline resulted. A few years ago, test scores on the SAT college entrance exams in Edina, Minn., for instance, jumped more than 100 points after the morning bell was delayed an hour.
As for families, evenings may be the only time children have with their working parents, who tend to be less authoritarian than their own parents were about issues such as bedtime.
On top of that, a child’s main nighttime stall used to be one last glass of water. Today, reams of homework are followed by computers, video games and, of course, television.
A recent study by Brown University of TV viewing habits of more than 1,000 young schoolchildren found a correlation between the amount of television watched and daytime sleepiness observed by teachers. A quarter of the children surveyed had a television in their bedrooms--an element that was found to be the most powerful predictor of difficulty sleeping.
Beverly Hills pediatrician Peter Waldstein, a self-avowed sleep fanatic, admonishes parents not to cave in to nightly battles with children about going to sleep.
“Kids want structure, even though you don’t think so,” he said. “They crave it.”
Ritalin Was Not the Answer for Kevin
When Jenny Dermody thought Kevin might have attention deficit disorder, she tried Ritalin, the stimulant most often prescribed for that problem. But it seemed to make no difference.
“We tried all the predictable things,” said Dermody, a Valencia middle-school teacher.
Now Dermody makes sure Kevin gets plenty of sleep and, because he’s still struggling to concentrate, she is pressuring her health maintenance organization to give Kevin a sleep test.
She’s also spreading the word about sleep’s significance at teachers’ conferences and community centers around California. There, she meets teachers who tell her about first-graders up past midnight watching horror flicks, and parents of boys, such as Tyrell Walter, who go to school groggy.
“I’d try not to fall asleep in the classroom, but I’d be soooo tired,” said the Westchester 10-year-old, describing what it feels like to battle the sandman day after day. “I’d try my best to pay attention, but I couldn’t focus on what the teacher was saying. When I’d read out loud, I’d get real tired and start dropping my voice. . . . I used to be slow at my work, too. I wouldn’t finish when all of the other kids finish. I’d be writing reeeeeal slow.”
Tyrell is among the lucky. His sleep deprivation was corrected by a tonsillectomy, which improved his nighttime breathing. It also produced a miraculous sharpening of focus that just about everyone has noticed, including him.
Children who have their tonsils out may hold the most promise for evaluating the effects of sleep on children, sleep researchers believe. They provide an ideal test group because the exact moment their sleep improved is known.
One recent study through Tulane University followed 297 first-graders with poor grades. It found 54 of them had enlarged tonsils and adenoids that were affecting their sleep. By second grade, overall mean grades improved for the 24 who had tonsillectomies, but not for the others.
While 30 years ago many children had their tonsils out before reaching puberty, the victory of antibiotics over strep throat has made the operation rarer. Only about five of every 1,000 children younger than 15 now have the operation annually, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
But in perhaps as many as one-fifth of children, enlarged tonsils can trigger at least mild sleep apnea--a halt in breathing that may lead to snoring and disturbed sleep, regardless of how much time they spend in bed.
The UCLA School of Medicine’s Dr. Nina Shapiro, who performs tonsillectomies, became convinced of a link to learning and behavior through parents’ testimonials following surgery.
After she removed tonsils from children who were snoring or gasping during sleep, Shapiro said, parents would say: “This is a completely different child.”
“It was as instant as it could be,” she said.
That’s just how Tyrell Walter and his dad, Harold, describe it. For several years, Tyrell snored all night--so loudly that Harold had to close his bedroom door to get some rest himself--then arose every morning with a hanging head and red-rimmed eyes.
Ultimately, a sleep test confirmed he was waking himself up as often as 50 times an hour.
Tyrell had his tonsils out this spring and, within two weeks, the snoring had stopped. He began waking up each morning feeling alert and refreshed. His teacher commented on how much faster he completed his work. Even in Little League, his dad notices he runs faster, jumps higher and fields better.
“I thank God I was able to catch this,” Harold Walter said. “I thought he was just a slow-moving, slow-natured kid. He’s so sound now. He’s 100%.”
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Bedtime on School Nights
More than half of youths ages 10 to 18 go to bed after 10p.m. on weeknights, with 38% of 17-and 18-year-olds hitting the sack after 11. Experts say lack of rest can play havoc with skills that form the core of learning.
Age: 17-18
Percentage of respondents
10 to 10:59 p.m.: 39%
11 p.m. or Later: 38%
Total: 77%
*
Age: 15-16
Percentage of respondents
10 to 10:59 p.m.: 35%
11 p.m. or Later: 22%
Total: 57%
*
Age: 13-14
Percentage of respondents
10 to 10:59 p.m.: 32%
11 p.m. or Later: 18%
Total: 50%
Age: 10-10
Percentage of respondents
10 to 10:59 p.m.: 20%
11 p.m. or Later: 15%
Total: 35%
*
Age Total
Percentage of respondents
10 to 10:59 p.m.: 30%
11 p.m. or Later: 21%
Total: 51%
*
Source: National Sleep Foundation, 2000
