If you're watching television to help you fall asleep, prepare for a rude awakening. Having Leno or Letterman in the bedroom can actually keep you from getting the sleep you need. And if your child is watching Batman for the hundredth time at 12 a.m., you need to get up and turn that television off, if not remove it altogether. The tantrum you'll endure is a small price to pay to prevent a sleep situation that can become a parent's nightmare.
Experts took an extensive look at the relation between children's viewing habits and the quality of their sleep, which. They recommend that health care practitioners should question parents about their children's viewing habits when diagnosing, treating, and screening for health disorders.
Although parents surveyed closely monitored what their children watched on TV and for how long, the study found that having a television set in the bedroom directly affected the child's quality of sleep, although the majority of parents felt that television had a negligible, if any, effect on their children's sleep. Television viewing at bedtime, and overall heavy television viewing, caused children to resist going to bed, to have trouble falling asleep, and to sleep less than the recommended eight hours. TV watching habits, such as falling asleep in front of the television, seemed to cause sleep disturbances in 25 percent of children with behavioral sleep disorders.
The experts found that television might serve to displace sleep time, thus shortening sleep duration to unacceptable limits. "The time spent by the child in television viewing may substitute for other less sedentary and/or less passive activities (like playing outside, engaging in sports activities), resulting in poor-quality sleep."
In addition to time spent watching television, the content of programming may have an effect on children's sleep patterns. Those horror movies may not be innocent, scary fun after all. Children tend to have difficulty falling asleep and experience nightmares if they have watched violent or otherwise disturbing programming, especially before bedtime. Most parents were aware of the potential harm that violent programming could do, and did not allow their children to watch many inappropriate programs.
Regardless of the content of programs, children's sleep is most deeply affected by having a television in the bedroom and using it as a sleep aid. Well-meaning (or tired!) parents may contribute to this problem by using the television as a tranquilizer, a way to avoid bedtime struggles, or a way to help the child fall asleep. This belief indirectly contributes to greater sleep disturbances and increased resistance at bedtime. In addition, although television viewing doesn't directly affect daytime sleepiness in children, it does contribute because of late nights and less physical activity during the day. The experts concluded that children's television viewing and increased sleepiness may become more entwined as the child grows older and bring about entrenched sleep habits that are not only unhealthy but difficult to change.
The National Sleep Foundation's 2000 Omnibus on Sleep in America poll seems to support these recommendations. Children who have grown up watching television are more likely to stay up late watching television as adults, which accounts in part for their significant sleepiness during the day, according to NSF findings.
Now, you may not be ready to banish Dave and Jay from your bedroom. But think about this while you're tossing and turning: Your child deserves a healthy sleep. And if you hear noises in your child's bedroom late at night, you may want to change "Lights out" to "TV off!"
In some cases, late-night TV can actually pay off. Ask William Shatner, best known for playing Captain Kirk on the original "Star Trek" series. Even actors have problems sleeping sometimes.
While watching late-night programming ("Star Trek," perhaps), the ever-energetic actor/director/writer and spokesman for Priceline.com got the inspiration for his best-selling Tekwar novels that spawned two television movies and a TV series that is showing in syndication on the Sci-Fi channel. The books and series revolve around an ex-cop turned private investigator who solves mysteries in the year 2045. Most of the cop's cases are directly connected with a virtual-reality drug called Tek, which allows users to live certain fantasies that they select. Shatner also produced a computer game based on the novels. All of this information is on his web site, http://www.williamshatner.com, of course.
In an interview with c|Net's Susan Stellin, Shatner explained, "I wanted to write a science fiction story, and I knew cops, so I placed a cop in the future, in essence. And I took from the fact that I watched television to go to sleep a lot--the soporific of television. I expanded television into a drug that could be placed into your head. So that's how I got Tek [the drug]."
However, the actor doesn't approve of television addiction, or obsession with the Internet and computer games: "The danger is that we become enamored with the abstract and forget that life is really touchy-feely."
And of course, we forget that we have to sleep. But in this case, staying up late made Shatner's notion of writing sci-fi more than a dream. He's probably sleeping all the way to the bank.