This is an excerpt from a longer public forum on sleep deficit and health. Professor of Sleep Medicine, Susan Redline M/D. discusses school start times and whether schools should start later. Do current school start times force children to go to school at times when, according to their natural, biological rhythms, they should be asleep? Dr Redline says this problem leads to mood problems and poorer academic performance. Read full article
An academic paper released in 2012 suggested that teenagers may in fact need only just more than seven hours sleep to perform well in standardised tests. The article was not written by sleep researchers but by economics researchers who used statistical analysis to come up with this proposal. However the paediatric sleep community has refuted this suggestion. Read full article
It’s common for parents to worry about their teenagers getting enough sleep. Like adults, teenagers’ sleep requirements vary between individuals, depending on how well they function on a certain amount of sleep. But as a general guideline, most teenagers function well on about nine hours sleep per day, says Dr Sarah Blunden, founder of the Australian Centre for Education in Sleep and Director of the Paediatric Sleep Clinic in South Australia. This article covers how much sleep teenagers need and some tips to help them get more of it. Read full article
I have not had a good night’s sleep for close to five years. It’s pretty easy to work out why. I have three children under the age of five. I've had to deal with many different reasons for not getting sleep. Here are just some of them ... Tell me it gets better ... Read full article
Video - must watch. Not sure we'd like to be the parents of this baby through the night - but this is ultra cute. She's asleep, but not, and then awake laughing, but not ... Read full article
This book is about responsive parenting. It is about how babies thrive when parents are sensitive to their needs - during the day and the night. It looks at baby sleep and shows that babies wake up at night and need help to settle for many good reasons, as frustrating as this may be to their parents. Read full article
Driving home from a coaching appointment this morning I listened to Richard Fidler on ABC Local Radio, interviewing Paul Kelly, Australian songwriter and musician. Paul Kelly played a song I had not heard before called They Thought I Was Asleep...it brought back memories of all the times, as a child, I observed unspoken moments between my parents... Read full article
Just like your kids, my two sons are entirely different individuals in every possible way. One of them loves fish, the other doesn't. One likes jelly snakes, the other likes chocolate. OK, they both like chocolate. One of them loves every conceivable sporting activity, the other likes to read and draw. One of them had a dummy as baby, the other didn't. And likewise the bedtime companion. Read full article
