I had insomnia as a child. My vivid imagination was partly to blame (ghostly tales on That’s Incredible! were the primary culprit), but even the faintest sounds and light kept sleep at bay. My nighttime struggles even included monthly bouts with what my family came to call “Dizzy Dreams”: Two nights in a row, I’d wake up with the sensation of being shaken, and it would continue on and off until morning, resulting in several episodes of vomiting and little to no sleep for my father (who usually got up to check on me).
At least I learned early on that if I had to puke, make a beeline for the bathroom.
My older daughter has begun to struggle with insomnia herself. While I don’t expect to find her holding her head with both hands, pleading, “Make it stop, make it stop!” – she’s far less high-strung than I was – I can sense her panic when she creeps downstairs and announces that she can’t sleep. She’s not stalling. She’s not trying to finagle her way into a later bedtime. She genuinely wants to fall asleep and simply can’t shut off her brain long enough for it to relax. Which, as I remember well, simply gets her more wound up and pushes her further from sleep.
While Kyle is often the kinder, gentler parent in our household, soothing Tacy’s nighttime frustrations has naturally fallen to me. Kyle has always been one of those sleepers who falls asleep seconds after his head hits the pillow, whereas I still take several minutes – and a bit of effort to relax – to fall asleep. That, plus my own childhood experiences, make it much easier for me to relate to her struggles.
Unfortunately, reading the second chapter in NurtureShock – “The Lost Hour” – hasn’t helped me relax:
“The surprise is not merely that sleep matters – but how much it matters, demonstrably, not just to academic performance and emotional stability, but to phenomena that we assumed to be entirely unrelated, such as the international obesity epidemic and the rise of ADHD.”
The study results presented in this book are astounding. Even averaging as little as fifteen minutes more sleep can make an appreciable difference in the grades of high school students; for elementary school age students, the difference is even more dramatic: “The performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the gap between a normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader. Which is another way of saying that a slightly sleepy sixth-grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader.”
Jokes about the maturity of middle school students aside, that’s a tremendous difference in how well-spent a school day might be.
Furthermore, these results have been replicated many times over, with different aged students in different parts of the country. It’s not an isolated phenomenon, confined to the constraints of a single study.
NurtureShock goes on to explain why sleep is so crucial for kids:
“Kids’ sleep is qualitatively different than grownups’ sleep because children spend more than 40% of their asleep time in the slow-wave stage (which is ten times the proportion that older adults spend). This is why a good night’s sleep is so important for long-term learning of vocabulary words, times tables, historical dates, and all other factual minutiae.”
Interestingly (and sadly), “sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy memories just fine.” This is because of the different brain locations that process different types of memories; when kids are sleep-deprived, the good memories aren’t as readily integrated.
Think of how much more fondly I would remember my childhood if only I had slept better!
It’s hard to keep my daughter’s frustration from infecting me when at ten o’clock she asks to lie on the sofa and read a book – especially when I relish my quiet evenings as a time to recharge myself. She wants to sleep; I want her to sleep. But both of us know that we can’t force sleep to come.
So I turn the lamp on low and tuck her blanket around her, remembering how I read for hours as a child myself – both as a means to beckon sleep and to fight off Dizzy Dreams. When she pops up, I gently tell her to lie back down. When she flops and fidgets, I remind her to lie still. And when she finally drifts off, I breathe a sigh of relief.
Of course I care about how carefully she pays attention in school and how well she learns what’s taught. Of course I want her to be emotionally stable and to recall happy childhood memories.
But most of all, I hope she rests easily and wakes feeling strong, as if she can take on any challenges that her peers, teachers, or even us, her parents, might throw at her.
Do your older children sleep well? Did you sleep well as a child?
I had a lot of trouble sleeping and was always coming up with new tricks for falling asleep (counting by threes, listening to certain music, reading certain soothing books). I have trouble now, too: my husband falls immediately to sleep and I’m lying awake wondering how to get from HERE to THERE. My first and third children also have trouble getting to sleep, especially my first: I have a lot of sympathy for him because he’ll feel so tired but not be able to sleep. My second, fourth, and fifth all take after their dad.
I usually fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. I have kids who seem to need a LOT of sleep but they’re still a little young to know what their nighttime challenges will be.
Holden, age 4, wakes up with night terrors every couple nights. As parents, we backed away from him wearing undies at night to encourage better sleep for the past couple months.
Oh this sounds like every night in my house. My daughter just fights bedtime. I think they are so excited about life and have such passion sleep is not a priority. I am hoping this is something she will out- grow but I am not sure anymore.
That research is astounding. I also had trouble falling asleep and I remember doing what Swistle did, coming up with tricks like counting to 300. My daughter now sleeps very well, but my son takes a very long time to wind down. I hope things improve by the time he’s in school, but I do worry that won’t happen.
For all the pain Q caused me, she’s a great sleeper now. As is Drew, though the going down takes a bit of time.
I used to sleep like a rock, but since having kids.
All this research tells me is that it’s no wonder I’m dumb anymore. I NEED MORE SLEEP!
I’m really enjoying your blog. Hope you get through this with your daughter. Don’t fret too much about her development though: my hubby never slept much as a child (apparently that’s an understatement!) And he is as bright as can be and a university professor now (though he does still have sleeping trouble).
Thank you… I’ve posted something similar on my blog. Kids Need Sleep! My parents did not get that AT ALL and I was horrible insomniac as a child who grew up to be an insomniac adult. Before my first child even entered the world I was reading books on how to help him sleep. I DO think it’s important to have good sleep habits, and I don’t care if all my AP friends hate me for it.
Thankfully my two boys are now sleep-all-nighters. The first one was very easy, but the second one struggled a little more. Still, by a certain age he was asleep by 7:30 every night and stayed down for 12 hours. I cannot tell you how many things I get done in those 12 hours (and no, sleeping is not usually one of them, because I remain an imsomniac myself – though I’ve been trying out Hylands Calms Forte recently and that’s actually been helping a lot.)
I still struggle with insomnia, and it has been a recurring theme for me since infancy. My mom remembers I didn’t sleep much as a baby either. It stinks. I’m not sure if I’ve passed it on to my kids. They do a lot of messing around before they fall asleep at night. I hope that they are just regular kids and not insomniacs at this point.
I am a horrible insomniac. Always have been. I have issues with light and any sound, but mostly, I just can’t turn my brain off. I used to try reading, but I can stay up all night and read. I just have to try and stay still and hope I eventually fall asleep.
Luckily both of my girls can and do sleep easily.
My husband and I are tyrants when it comes to sleep. My boyz NEED their sleep and all 3 are great sleepers.
What amazes me is how many parents are so lackadaisical about their childrens’ sleep. I can’t tell you the number of children we interact with whose behavior issues are, I feel, largely a result of sleep deprivation.
I seriously need to do a blog post on this b/c my family is totally in the minority when it comes to keeping a regular bedtime schedule. Most families we know don’t. It’s crazy!
I was a terrible sleeper until I got REALLY sick at 13 months old and then I couldn’t get enough sleep.
Then about 14/15 I stopped sleeping for days at a time and then would crash. This pattern continued til college. Now it’s slightly better that the days on end without sleep are less often. They still suck when they happen. The problem isn’t sleeping itself, it’s getting TO sleep. My brain just doesn’t want to shut off sometimes.
I have always had nightmares and nightterrors (yes still).
I fully agree that much of the behavior problems that we’re seeing these days are due to inadequate sleep.