Dal researcher seeks "better nights" on eve of World Sleep Day

With World Sleep Day around the corner Dalhousie researcher Dr. Penny Corkum is encouraging us to think about sleep as an important part of our health cycle. She's the leader of a team of researchers from across Canada who have set out to develop web-based tools for children struggling with behavioural sleep problems. Tools that will help parents and their children have better nights and, in turn, better days.

Key Points:

Dr. Penny Corkum and her students have launched a study that involves restricting or extending the sleep of typically-developing children by an hour each night to assess how it might limit their daytime function. The result was that even after three nights, the team could find evidence for impairment: changes in attention, emotional regulation, more behavioural challenges. Those results are similar to studies for adults.
For children who are having trouble sleeping, the best thing parents can do is to adopt strategies that ease children away from dependencies like parental accompaniment, media devices, etc. and towards self-reliance when falling asleep. It's also crucial that sleep be prioritized as part of the daily routine – a message of particular importance to university students, because of the relationship between sleep and learning.
Some key strategies parents can adopt include: having a consistent bedtime; making sure that children have a dark room; that they avoid television, computers or mobile devices just before bed; and that they be given an opportunity to fall asleep on their own.
World Sleep Day is Friday, March 16.

Pull Quotes:

"We need to think of sleep as part of a triangle of health, equal in importance to healthy eating and an active lifestyle." - Dr. Penny Corkum, associate professor in Dalhousie’s Department of Psychology.
"A lot of people think of sleep as a time when nothing happens, because we’re ‘offline.' But lots of things are happening: memories are being consolidated, learning happens, hormones are being released. It’s not active from a conscious perspective, but it’s like the processing that happens offline in a computer – it’s needed to run the machine efficiently." - Dr. Penny Corkum, associate professor in Dalhousie’s Department of Psychology.
"Parents tend to do things that work and make sense to them in the short term – things like getting into bed with your child to help them get to sleep. In the short term, everyone gets to sleep quicker, but these can lead to problems with the child being able to fall asleep on their own in the long term." - Dr. Aimee Coulombe, postdoctoral fellow

Images:

Sleep 1
Postdoc Aimee Coulombe (l) and Dr. Penny Corkum (r)
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Videos:


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