Donna's Dispatch

November 2007 

A message from Donna Bernard

Superintendent of Schools

 

Greetings,

 

Are you feeling tired?  Are you getting confused or forgetting things?

Do you know someone who acts like they’re tired?

 

Students today are demonstrating the fact that they, too, are not well rested. Sure, we remember being tired when we went to school, but not like today’s students.  It has been documented in a handful of major studies that children, from elementary school through high school, get about an hour less sleep each night than they did 30 years ago.  

 

There are many causes for this lost hour of sleep. Over scheduling of activities, burdensome homework, lax bedtimes, televisions and cell phones in the bedroom all contribute. So does guilt; home from work after dark, parents want time with their children and are reluctant to order them to bed. All these reasons converge on one simple twist of convenient ignorance: Until now, we could overlook the lost hour because we never really knew its true cost to children.

 

Dr. Avi Sadeh of Tel Aviv University is one of the authorities in the field.  He and his team of researchers conducted a test on children’s neurobiological functioning.  The performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the normal gap between a fourth-grader and a sixth-grader. This is another way of saying that a slightly sleepy sixth-grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader. “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to the loss of two years of cognitive maturation and development,” Sadeh explains. Sadeh’s findings are consistent with other researchers’ work, all of which points to the large academic consequences of small sleep differences. 

 

In addition, Dr. Paul Suratt of the University of Virginia studied the impact of sleep problems on vocabulary-test scores of elementary-school students. He found a seven-point reduction in scores. Seven points, Suratt notes, is significant: “Sleep disorders can impair children’s I.Q.’s as much as lead exposure.”

 

With the benefit of functional MRI scans, researchers are now starting to understand exactly how sleep loss impairs a child’s brain. Tired children can’t remember what they just learned.  The sleep-research community considers the evidence irrefutable.

 

Dr. Matthew Walker of UC Berkeley is an expert in how the brain processes information during sleep.  The sleep deprived brain tends to remember more negative than positive.  In one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81 percent of the words with a negative connotation, like cancer. But they could remember only 41 percent of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like sunshine or basket.  “We have an incendiary situation today,” Walker remarks, “where the intensity of learning that kids are going through is so much greater, yet the amount of sleep they get to process that learning is so much less. If these linear trends continue, the rubber band will soon snap.”

 

The University of Pennsylvania’s David Dinges did an experiment to demonstrate how sleep loss is cumulative, and how easily our judgment can be fooled by sleep deprivation. Nevertheless, it’s easy to read his research and think, “I would suffer, but not that bad. I would be the exception.” We’ve coped on too-little sleep for years and managed to get by. But when it comes to a child’s developing brain, is just getting by enough?

 

So, in closing… get some rest!  And get those children you know to bed – early! 

Thanks, as always, for caring about our young people.

 

Donna

 

(Source of sleep information:  October 15, 2007 New Yorker Magazine)