TAMPA, Fla. — Summer vacation is winding down kids across the Tampa Bay area.
For single mom Erin McKinnon, getting her 8-year-old son Andrew ready for school can, at times, be difficult, especially when it comes to getting back on a sleep schedule.
“Depends on the camps and stuff, but we are not on schedule at all for school,” said McKinnon.
ABC Action News anchor James Tully spoke with Dr. Lara Wittine, a sleep expert with Advent Health. She said parents need to think proactively about closing the sleep gap in the next week.
Dr. Wittine suggests getting your kids to bed a little earlier each night and waking them up a little earlier too. But there are also other benefits of your child getting a good night's sleep.
“There’s very good data that after you get vaccinations and a get a good night of sleep, you boost your response and your anti-body response to that vaccination, so it will make you healthy and well prepared,” explained Dr. Wittine.
Wittine said grade school kids need an average of 9-12 hours of sleep a night, while teenagers need 8-10, and falling short can impact their ability to learn. Now there are two different stages of deep sleep Dr. Wittine focuses on, REM sleep and slow-wave sleep.
“When people are trying to learn facts, figures, dates, things like that, data-driven information slow wave sleep is critical for us to encode that into memory. Whereas for fine motor skills and gross motor skills it actually is REM,” said Dr. Wittine.
“It all sounds good, and that is the goal, but we’re in survival mode, and you just make the day-to-day work,” explained McKinnon.
Sleep deprivation is very real, and kids show it differently than adults would. Adults actually look sleepy when we are tired, but Dr. Wittine told James Tully kids do the opposite by self-stimulating and getting more hyper.
Studies show REM sleep is more common in the second half of the night. So when sleep is disrupted, it’s the second half that is affected most, which means motor skills would be impacted more often. Any another important note from Dr. Wittine, avoid any blue light from an iPad or TV, an hour before bedtime. That sends a message to the brain that it’s not time for sleep.