Transform Your Nursery Into a Dark Cave Before Bed
With young children, bedtime routines usually include an accurate checklist: Put on your pajamas, brush your teeth, read stories, ask for water, pack up, realize that Bunny is missing, madly looking for Bunny in the house, refuel again, saying wait! I have to use the pot , refuel and kiss goodnight. And then, in the end, the light will finally come out.
But it may be too late, new research suggests.
It turns out that children’s eyes are slightly different from adults – they let in more light. Exposure to bright light before bed can have a stronger effect on them, knocking out their circadian systems. What parents can do: Dim the lights in your child’s room an hour before bed.
The New York Times published a study by the University of Colorado Boulder Sleep and Development Laboratory. Before going to bed, the researchers asked the preschoolers to play at the light table to get a “light stimulus.” They found that melatonin was suppressed by almost 90 percent in response to one hour of bright light before bed, and that the effects of exposure to light continued even after the light table was turned off. As we know, poor sleep in children can lead to mood swings, behavioral problems and cognitive problems, not to mention distress for everyone around them, and problems can persist into adulthood.
Parents can control the amount of light their children expose before bed. There are several ways to do this:
Turn off all bright overhead lights and use dimmers an hour before bed. “Dimmed light allows melatonin to grow naturally,” Lamiz D. Akasem, lead author of the study, told the New York Times . If you have smart lighting, you can set it to dim at a specific time every night.
Don’t forget about the lighting behind the children’s bedroom. Children often make “curtains” – they jump out of bed to ask for more water, complain that their left leg is cold, ask if it’s already morning, or whatever. The researchers advise making sure the rooms they might enter are not overly lit.
If you need to use a night light, make sure it shines low, near the floor. Dr. Judith Owens, director of sleep medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, told the NYT that “you don’t want anything to shine in your eyes.”
Use a warm reading lamp for storytelling at night. Blue light is bad for sleep , but yellow light like this one can help protect melatonin production.
Avoid screens. The researchers found that infants and toddlers who spend more time on touchscreen devices such as smartphones and tablets sleep less at night . Traditional screens like televisions and video games have also been linked to sleep problems in children. Parents can make their child’s bedroom – and especially the bed – a tech-free zone.
“To help children fall asleep, go out” | The newspaper “New York Times