Will children really become dumber and fatter if they don't get enough sleep?

I have never understood how some people can wake up refreshed at dawn. To me, this ability is more powerful than being able to write poetry or play the erhu. I have hated alarm clocks since I was a child. My elementary school and my home are on the same street, and it takes less than seven minutes to walk there, but I am still late almost every day.

One of my most vivid memories from elementary school (so vivid because it happened so many times) is that I was already late for school before I even stepped out of the house. I would run down Dazhi Street, looking at my watch and praying: God, please let me realize that I am actually dreaming! It only takes a little over 20 minutes to walk to school, but I was often late and had to ask my mother to drive me to school. In high school, I could never catch the bus, and I had to take a taxi to school from time to time. I don’t know how much money I lost. Being on time is not the problem, but getting up early is the source of sin. If I have a date with a normal human time, I will usually be on time or early, and I will never deliberately make people wait. What I fear most is those people who are gifted and ready to go before the cockcrows at dawn. They cannot understand my pain and often stubbornly believe that not being able to get up early is the best indicator of laziness. A few years ago, I had a boss who was such a person. He goes to bed at 8pm and gets up at 4am. He is already waiting for everyone to show up at the company before 6:30am. He wants to have a meeting with me at 7am. If you tell him that it is too early to get up, he will immediately give you a deep and discriminatory look, saying "early risers are losers, I am so disappointed in you, your future is bleak".

One hour of sleep equals two years

A few years ago, Dr. Sadeh of Tel Aviv University in Israel conducted a famous sleep experiment on 77 elementary school students. Dr. Sadeh's research team randomly divided the fourth and sixth graders into two groups. The first group of elementary school students went home and went to bed one hour earlier for three consecutive days, while the other group went to bed one hour later for three consecutive days. The research team gave each elementary school student a sleep activity detector like a watch so that they could accurately record the actual length of sleep of the children. The detector records showed that the children in the early bed group slept an average of 30 minutes more, and the children in the late bed group slept an average of 31 minutes less. So the difference in the amount of sleep between the two groups was about one hour per day. Three days later, the researchers gave each child a neurobiological function test (this computer test uses part of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, which can effectively predict students' academic performance and concentration). The results showed that the impact of a one-hour sleep difference was greater than the impact of two years of academic development. The sixth graders who went to bed one hour later actually regressed to the level of fourth graders in terms of intelligence performance. That is to say, when a child loses one hour of sleep, it is equivalent to regressing two years in academic intelligence development and maturity. Dr. Sadeh's experimental conclusion is the same as that of many other sleep researchers: a small difference in sleep can lead to a huge change in academic intelligence. Seeing this, I am so proud that my tail is up. Hehehehehe.

Worse than lead poisoning

Dr. LeBourgeois of Brown University studied preschoolers. Most parents let their children go to bed a little later and get up a little later on weekends. Although these children go to bed later, their sleep time does not decrease, so parents do not think it is a big deal. However, Dr. LeBourgeois found in the experiment that if children go to bed one hour later on weekends, their average IQ will drop by seven points. Insufficient or abnormal sleep for children has a more terrible impact on intelligence than lead poisoning. This is more obvious among high school students. Dr. Wahlstrom of the University of Minnesota found in a sleep survey report of more than 7,000 high school students that students who get A sleep an average of 15 minutes more per day than students who get B, and students who get B sleep an average of 15 minutes more per day than students who get C. Dr. Carskadon of Brown University also obtained exactly the same results in a survey of more than 3,000 high school students in Rhode Island. The book then uses a lot of space to explain from the perspective of brain cell development and medicine how sleep helps children grow their intelligence, the differences between children and adults in their brain activity during sleep, why not sleeping will make children stupid, and how physiological changes during puberty can cause high school students to have poor sleep quality. I feel tired just thinking about it, so readers who are interested can flip through the book themselves.

Not only dementia but also obesity

More than 85% of high schools in the United States start classes before 8:15 a.m., and about 35% of schools require students to arrive at school before 7:30 a.m. Because the research conclusions of these sleep scholars are too shocking, several high school districts in the United States have decided to postpone the school start time. The most famous of these is the Edina High School District in Minnesota. The school postponed the start time from 7:30 a.m. to after 8:30 a.m. and found that the change in sleep volume had the greatest impact on good students. The average SAT academic test (math/verbal) scores of the top 10% of students in the district increased rapidly from 683/605 to 736/761 in one year. In other words, an extra hour of sleep allows good students to improve their math scores by 7.8% and their verbal scores by 26%. However, due to stupid reasons such as the difficulty of bus scheduling, teachers wanting to go to work before traffic jams, and team coaches wanting students to leave school early to practice, the vast majority of schools still insist on maintaining the original inhumane school hours. It seems that these students are destined to continue to be stupid, and the future of the United States is hopeless. In addition, everyone knows that the obesity problem among American teenagers is getting worse. Although the federal government spends more than one billion dollars every year to improve nutrition education in schools, the money is spent like throwing meat buns at dogs, and it is useless. Many so-called scholars and experts blame the obesity problem on television or video, because children nowadays spend too much time in front of the TV, so they have no time to run around and exercise.

Dr. Vandewater of the University of Texas at Austin believes that this is a bullshit conclusion with no scientific basis at all. She analyzed more than 8,000 household surveys since 1968 and found that fat children do not watch more TV than thin children. Thin children also love watching TV and playing video games. There is absolutely no statistical correlation between obesity and electronic media consumption. Nutrition and exercise are not the main causes of children's obesity. Readers are probably thinking: No way, is it caused by sleeping?

That's right! Many sleep scientists have conducted surveys and analyses that point out that children who sleep less are usually fatter than those who sleep more. Due to the evolution of world trends, not only in the United States, but also in all parts of the world, children sleep less than children 30 years ago, and children around the world are also much fatter than children 30 years ago. A study conducted on first-grade students in Japanese elementary schools, a study conducted on kindergarten children in Canada, and a study conducted on third-grade boys in Australia all pointed out that the obesity rate of children who sleep less than eight hours is 300 times higher than that of children who sleep ten hours. In addition, a study conducted in Houston public schools in the United States also pointed out that for every hour less sleep, the obesity rate of junior high and high school students increases by 80%. Due to the shocking data of experimental research analysis, the Centers for Disease Control of the United States Department of Health has now officially recommended that American junior high and high schools delay the arrival time of students (even if it has nothing to do with obesity, it is really inhumane to require them to arrive at school after 7 o'clock). But do you remember the high school days when we stayed up late to hang out on BBS sites? Now that the Internet and mobile phones have developed to this level, it would be strange if high school students don't stay up late. I think there is no hope for the children.

The book talks about a lot of medical evidences of children getting fat if they don’t get enough sleep from the perspective of brain development, hormones, sleep activity and fat cells. I don’t know how to translate it into Chinese, and it hurts brain cells, so I’ll skip it. However, one of the main reasons why children get fat if they don’t get enough sleep is that their slow-wave activity period during sleep exceeds 40% (the slow-wave activity period during sleep is when the brain, growth hormones and cells are communicating with each other to do homework). Adults only have about 4% of the slow-wave period every night. So if you are an old man who can buy tickets to watch restricted movies, I’m sorry, you are hopeless. Don’t go to make up for ten hours of sleep stupidly. It’s more practical to eat less and exercise more.

Being fat is not without reason

When I read this, I looked up and said to Paul happily: "Look, there was a reason why I was late every day when I was a child. No wonder I was so smart when I was a child." Paul: "You were late not because you slept a lot, but because you slept very late every day."

It was a wake-up call, leaving me speechless. It was true, I have been a night owl since I was a child. In primary and secondary school, I would hide under the quilt and read novels every night. In high school, it was even worse, I would hang up the BBS every night and never go to sleep.

Paul immediately announced excitedly: No wonder you were so fat when you were a kid! A bucket of cold water poured over my head. Damn, I was discovered! Let's let the kids at home sleep a lot.