School Kids and Sleeping Issues

School can be a tough and challenging time for kids. From schoolwork to homework and endless tuitions, children can often become overwhelmed with everything and start developing an unhealthy schedule to cope up with the extreme workload and stress.

Schools nowadays tend to put a lot of pressure on kids to make them get good grades. Children are often overloaded with tasks, presentations, assignments, crafts, tests, and even mock tests where they are expected to perform their best. Sometimes more than one form of evaluation takes place in a single day. This means double work for students in a very short time.

Most children also have extracurricular classes outside the school curriculum like dance classes, gymnastics, martial arts, music, painting and drawing, swimming, sports, and so on. This further cramps up their schedule and leaves them with even less time to rest and recover between or after classes.

All these can result in children overworking themselves and developing an unhealthy lifestyle. Their study and work can often extend to late-night which leaves them with a minimal amount of sleep before going to school the next day and repeating the cycle. Sometimes children may even forcefully stay up at night to be able to complete their studies and preparations. Children who have morning school tend to develop bad sleeping habits because they end up staying up late at night and get a very little amount of sleep before they have to start getting ready for schools. Studies suggest that around 40% of primary school students develop sleep disorders due to insufficient sleep at night.

Sleep Disorders and sleep anxiety in children can be extremely detrimental to their health- both mental and physical. Sleeping problems in children are not uncommon which is quite evident from statistics and medical studies. While sleep deprivation can cause a lot of problems like fatigue, insomnia, lethargy, and so on, it can also make them unable to concentrate on studies. Sleep disorders when neglected or untreated can develop into bigger problems as they get older.

Let us see what can be the causes of sleep deprivation in children and how we can solve them:-

Overload of Studies

Children can quickly become burdened with excessive school and homework. This leads to a lot of anxiety and stress in children. Many students often stay up late and sacrifice sleep to cope with the burden of studies and have their work up to date with the rest of the class. Procrastination and laziness can make them delay studies which can pile up quickly and cause problems later. It is important to teach children to complete their studies on time so that they are up to date with classwork and do not have to overwork themselves later.

Bad Schedule and Inconsistent Timetable

Toddlers, children, and teenagers all like to live through their day on their whim. They tend to do things whenever they please instead of trying to maintain a proper schedule for their daily work. This again leads to the mismanagement of studies and insufficient sleep. Children sleeping issues can develop when they do not follow a daily timetable and leave studies to be done at the end of the day. Parents need to set up a strict timetable for their children and make sure they stick to it. A good timetable will ensure that the child is getting enough rest, play, and sleep between studies and extracurricular classes. It will also help them develop good lifestyle habits and teach them to be disciplined and punctual.

Read | Importance Of A Timetable In Student Life

Cramped Schedules

Many children are put into a host of extracurricular activities after school by their parents. While extracurricular activities can be beneficial to a child, too many of them may cramp up their schedule and cause loss of leisure time or rest time for children. Children need to have enough time between school, tuitions and miscellaneous classes to get time to recover and rest. A cramped schedule may lead to postponing homework and study time to the end of the day. This ends up taking away sleep time. It is good to help students discover their talents but it is also necessary to know when to regulate them. Try taking away extracurricular classes that your child is not interested in or is not very good at. Complete developing one skill set before moving to another. Don't make them do everything at once.

Screen time and Social Media

Children love having long screen times. Parents are often left complaining about the time their kids spend on the television or the internet. In younger children, television can become a bad addiction and cause a disturbance in their daily schedules. Too much screen time after school means postponing homework and cutting down sleep time in favour of tv shows and cartoons. In order children, social media takes up a lot of time which should be assigned to study and sleep. Social media and television can become an obsession and a bad habit in children if not controlled. Remember to limit screen time and assign only a healthy amount of screen time to children to make their schedules better. This will not only help them manage studies with screen time but also give them time to rest. Teach children not to use mobiles and digital devices after a certain time at night to let them have peaceful and sufficient sleep.