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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, March 17, 2002

Kids with earlier bedtimes may handle stress better

By Marilyn Elias
USA Today

A study suggests that children who go to bed by 9 p.m. may perform better in school and sports than those that go to bed later.

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BARCELONA — Elementary school children who go to bed by 9 p.m. handle stress in a healthier way than their night-owl classmates and may outperform them on exams or the soccer field, suggests a study out today.

"As a working mother, I wish it weren't true," says Columbia University psychologist Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, the study leader. Employed parents often let their kids stay up later so they can spend time together on school nights.

Findings from the study will be reported here at the American Psychosomatic Society meeting by Brooks-Gunn and co-authors Laura Stroud and Vincent Capaldi of Brown University Medical School.

They gave 138 third-grade girls three stressful tasks during a few hours spent at their homes. The researchers measured initial levels of the stress hormone cortisol in saliva samples and rechecked cortisol after each task.

The girls' weeknight bedtimes correlated with their stress hormone response: Those going to bed early released more cortisol after the first stressful experience, but compared with girls kept up past 9 p.m., their stress hormones declined more steeply during the next two tasks. Kids with later bedtimes were more uncomfortable during the tasks than the children who got more sleep.

There's some evidence that the "rapid response and recovery" cortisol pattern of early-to-bed kids is healthier, Brooks-Gunn says. Prolonged output of cortisol can:

• Raise blood pressure and heart rate.
• Weaken immune response, so that colds and other viruses take hold more easily.
• Make it harder to concentrate when challenged.

The findings apply to boys as well as girls, Brooks-Gunn says.

It's possible, though, that children with strong cortisol responses can't fall asleep easily, so their high-stress hormone pattern may be the cause of late-night habits rather than a result of it, she adds.

The new study "is a marvelous step forward" in checking how kids' stress hormones relate to sleep, says pediatric sleep expert Stephen Sheldon of Northwestern University Medical School. He has found preliminary evidence of nervous system changes in sleep-deprived children.

Children's sleep needs vary, Sheldon says, "and the majority can handle mild degrees of sleep deprivation, but some do just terribly."

The findings "offer a clue" but not the last word for working parents, argues Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute in New York, a center for research on changing families and the workplace.

Inflexible work demands on parents or school homework may keep youngsters up late at times, "and then you're supposed to have a gigantic fight with your kid so he'll go to bed (at 9) when he doesn't want to, so you're both more stressed than ever?

"I hope this doesn't become another nail in the armor of poor, beleaguered working parents," Galinsky says.

Cranky children need more sleep

All children do best when they're well rested, but even siblings close in age may have different sleep requirements, says Stephen Sheldon, a pediatric sleep specialist at Northwestern University Medical School.

Some key signs may point to sleep deprivation, he says. Among them:

• School underachievement
• Daytime overactivity or restlessness
• Brief attention span
• Crankiness or mood changes