Behavioural sleep problems

In truth, behavioural sleep problems are far more common than medical ones.  Children aren’t born bad sleepers but they can be born a light sleeper which may be interpreted as a ‘bad’ sleeper,’ Blunden explains. ‘Sleep problems are hugely misunderstood and under diagnosed, yet manageable.
Blunden says toddlers need 12 to 14 hours sleep daily and primary school kids 10 to12. Research suggests without this sleep, children don’t function as well.  ‘They’re more irritable, aggressive, hyperactive, fidgety, and can’t concentrate or remember information, compromising learning. They get sick more and have an increased risk of accidents,’ Blunden says.

Any parent – or child who doesn’t want to sleep – can tell you there are many reasons for behavioural sleep problems such as, a child:

* not being able to fall asleep – because they don’t know how, don’t want to or are used to being put to sleep by parents
* being too excited or stimulated
* not wanting to sleep alone
* being sick, scared, anxious,
* feeling they are not spending enough time with their parents, which might be why they get up seeking attention.

Sorting out sleep problems

A conversation between parents and their child is usually a good place to start sorting out these problems.  Also making sure your child has a regular bedtime routine will help. A regular routine that includes dinner, bath, quiet time and bed seems to help children wind down and relax before bed. Children will usually settle better in a quiet and comfortable room.

Sleep experts recommend the following tips:

* Encourage your child to fall asleep on their own from age six months (put babies down when drowsy rather when already asleep)
* Use reward systems (star charts culminating in a lucky dip or favourite outing) to motivate preschool and school-age kids, especially if they are getting out of bed or coming into your bed at night.
* Talk to your child about any fears or anxieties that might be keeping them awake.
* Before bed, do relaxation, breathing or visualisation exercises (imagine a happy place they like such as the beach or park and help them ‘go there’).
* Install a hall or night light if your child is scared of the dark.
* Encourage relaxing activities such as reading, drawing, listening to quiet music in the hour before bed to help wind down.
* Turn off the television (keep TV out of the bedroom), computer, electronic games and other activities in the hour before bed.
* Avoid strenuous exercise in the few hours before bed but make sure your child gets plenty of exercise during the day.
* Ensure your child isn’t consuming caffeine and limit spicy or salty food which can cause thirsty children to wake.
* Get your child up at the same time every day.

If none of these tricks work, you should probably see a GP who can refer you to a medical specialist, sleep physician or psychologist to investigate why your child struggles with sleep and help you find a solution.

Hundreds of thousands of children are being misdiagnosed with food allergies because of unreliable tests sold online.

Youngsters are being put on unnecessary and restrictive diets, avoiding products containing egg, milk, fish and wheat, which can leave them malnourished.

The National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) UK, says doctors are often too quick to dismiss parents’ concerns over their child’s runny nose or tummy ache – which can be symptomatic of an allergy, reports the Daily Mail.

Unsure what to do, many parents then turn to so-called ‘alternative allergy tests’ sold by private firms online.

But these can provide inaccurate conclusions and have ‘dangerous’ consequences for children’s health.

Many of their techniques – which include analysing strands of hair to measure someone’s electrical activity or muscle strength when they are close to an allergen – misdiagnose allergies and intolerances in children.

Experts who helped draw up the guidelines say children can become malnourished if they are put on strict diets which avoid vital nutrients.

Dr Adam Fox, consultant paediatric allergist at Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital in London, who helped draw up the recommendations, said: “The NICE guidelines will say that there is no evidence for such approaches – and we think that is very helpful because parents are wasting time and money on them.

“They also often end up putting their children on very extensive restriction diets, which can leave them malnourished.”

Newly-born children learn while they are sleeping — for at
least 16-18 hours a day, a new study shows. The study could lead to identifying those at risk for developmental disorders such as autism and dyslexia. “We found a basic form of learning in sleeping newborns, a type of learning that may not be seen in sleeping adults,” said Dana Byrd, research affiliate in psychology at University of Florida, who collaborated with a team of scientists. The findings give valuable information about how it is that newborns are able to learn so quickly from the world when they sleep for 16 to 18 hours a day, Byrd said. “Sleeping newborns are better learners, better ‘data sponges’ than we knew,” she said. Byrd and colleagues tested the learning abilities of sleeping newborns by repeating tones that were followed by a gentle puff of air to the eyelids. After about 20 minutes, most of the babies squeezed their eyelids together when the tone was sounded without the puff of air. “This methodology opens up research areas into potentially detecting high risk populations, those who show abnormalities in the neural (brain cell) systems underlying
this form of learning,” she said. “These would include siblings of individuals with autism and dyslexia,” Byrd said, according to a University of Florida release. The findings were published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Children who lived near major highways or railroad intersections have higher diagnoses of asthma, says a new study.

Mayo Clinic researchers used this study to show how neighbourhood environment is a risk factor in understanding the development of paediatric asthma.

“Using nearest propensity score, children who lived in census tracts facing the intersection with major highways or railways had about 40 to 70 percent increased risk of developing childhood asthma,” says Young Juhn, Mayo Clinic’s Department of Community Paediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

“What this tells us is that clinicians need to be concerned about neighbourhood environment beyond home environment to understand the individual asthma case,” adds Juhn.

Researchers studied 3,970 people born between 1976 and 1979. Of the 1,947 subjects living in census tracts that faced intersections, 6.4 percent developed asthma, while 4.5 percent of those living in census tracts not facing intersections developed asthma.

Juhn and his colleagues are currently conducting research that looks at the influence of neighbourhood environment on other disease outcomes, says a Mayo Clinic release.

The study appeared in a recent edition of The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

Significant advances in neonatal intensive care have led to increased survival rates of children born at less than 26 weeks of gestation known as “extremely preterm children” — but a new study reveals that they are more likely to have psychiatric disorders.

An 11-year follow-up study of 219 extremely preterm children discovered that almost one quarter of such children had a psychiatric disorder at 11 years of age.

The most frequent psychiatric conditions were Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (12 percent), emotional disorders (nine percent), and Autism Spectrum Disorders (eight percent).

The investigation also reports a three-fold overall greater risk of subsequent mental health problems in those children born prematurely.

This is the first study to systematically investigate the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in a contemporary population of extremely preterm survivors, says a release of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

The data were collected as part of the EPICure Study which followed up extremely preterm children born in the UK and Ireland at one year, two-and-half years, six-eight years, and 10-11 years.

The EPICure study, established in 1995, was intended to determine the chances of survival and subsequent health of survivors.

These findings are slated for publication in the May issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

London: According to a study held by child experts, long period of crying can damage developing brains, leading to learning difficulties later in life.

“A baby who is left crying for long enough will eventually stop, but not because he has learned to go to sleep happily alone, but because he is exhausted and has despaired of getting help,” dailymail.co.uk quoted an expert.

Ms Leach, author of the 1977 book Your Baby And Child: From Birth To Age Five said, “It is not an opinion but a fact that it’s potentially damaging to leave babies to cry. Now we know that, why risk it?”

Long periods of crying produced so much cortisol that it could damage a baby’s brain.

“That doesn’t mean that a baby should never cry, or that parents should worry when she does. All babies cry, some more than others. It’s not the crying that is bad for babies – but crying that gets no response.” she added.

Studies have suggested that up to 50 per cent of parents have problems with their child’s sleeping patterns, often leading to marital problems.

Scientists and clinical investigators worldwide suggest that a woman should keep herself away from alcohol during pregnancy and concentrate on having a healthy prenatal care and include good nutritious diet, adequate exercise with appropriate amount of rest for a healthy child birth.

Children who suffer from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder or FASD is at least six times more likely to suffer from epilepsy in their later stage, indicates a study. These children are also likely to suffer at least one seizure during their lifetime.

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) may cause permanent birth defects caused by drinking alcohol during pregnancy. A link between alcohol consumption during pregnancy and rates of drinking alcohol, drug abuse, depression and even stroke and Parkinson’s disease has been indicated in the previous research studies.

According to neuroscientists, this latest study will help in understanding the risks posed to the unborn child by alcohol consumption though it is difficult to establish the causes between drinking and epilepsy. Drinking during pregnancy can put a child at greater risk of various neurologic and behavioral health problems.

“Establishing a direct link between these clinical conditions will be a difficult challenge given our incomplete understanding of how ethanol damages the developing brain and what neuropathological changes in brain tissue lead to the development of different types of epilepsy.”

Another research by the researchers from Perth’s Telethon Institute for Child Health Research found that the amount and timing of alcohol consumption in pregnancy can affect behavior of a child in different ways. The study published in the international journal Addiction, found that exposure to moderate or heavy levels of alcohol in late pregnancy increases the risk of aggressive behavior in child.

Babies bawl aloud to reveal their emotions, but none of the parenting handbooks can tell whether they are feeling hunger or discomfort. To study this behaviour, Japanese engineers have now turned to an approach known as kansei engineering, which aims to “measure” feelings and emotions.

It was invented in the 1970s by Mitsuo Nagamachi, professor and dean of Hiroshima International University. The approach could translate infant cries, so that parents will know for sure whether their child is sleepy, hungry, needing a change, or in pain.

Tomomasa Nagashima of computer science and systems engineering, Muroran Institute of Technology, and colleagues, explain that the fundamental problem in building an emotion detector for baby’s crying is that it cannot confirm verbally what its cries mean.

The team has employed sound pattern recognition approach that uses a statistical analysis of the frequency of cries and the power function of the audio spectrum to classify different types of crying.

They were then able to correlate the different recorded audio spectra with a baby’s emotional state as confirmed by the child’s parents.

In their tests, recordings of crying babies with a painful genetic disorder were used to make differentiating between the babies’ pained cries and other types of crying more obvious.

They achieved 100 percent success rate in a validation to classify pained cries and “normal” cries, says a Hiroshima release.

The findings were published in the International Journal of Biometrics.

Poring over the adventures of the Bernstain Bears or exploring the worlds of Hans Christian Andersen with a child has always been a great parent-child bonding exercise.

But, according to George Georgiou, University of Alberta (U-A) professor in educational psychology, it is instrumental for English-speaking children if they are to acquire the language skills, particularly comprehension, essential to their future reading ability.

Georgiou and his colleagues recently published a study in learning and instruction examining the cognitive and non-cognitive factors that may predict future reading ability in English and Greek.

“We have found that in English, you need a rich home literacy environment. It’s absolutely necessary,” says Georgiou.

Since the study was published, Georgiou has expanded his research to Finland and China, with the same outcomes.

He says the home literacy environment, what parents do at home in terms of literacy, and motivation predict children’s various initial literacy skills, such as letter knowledge and vocabulary, differently across languages. These skills, in turn, ultimately predict future reading ability.

Orthography is the part of the study of language dealing with letters and spelling. Georgiou points out that English is an orthographically inconsistent language; in other words, letters can have more than one sound each.

Because of this, he says, children learning English “need someone to show them the letters, teach them the letter sounds, play with letter magnets on the fridge. But that’s not the case in other languages.”

Georgiou notes that students are able to learn to read faster in languages such as Greek and Finnish, because there is one-to-one correspondence between a letter and its sounds.

This difference with English, he says, implies that Greek or Finnish parents do not need to read as frequently to their children to give them an edge on learning the language, said a university release.

Simply put, Greek or Finnish children will eventually learn to read regardless of how rich the home literacy environment may be.

Preschool children are less likely to become obese if they regularly eat dinner with the rest of the family, get adequate sleep and limit television watching time.

In a large US sample, the study showed that four-year-olds living in homes with all three routines had an almost 40 percent lower prevalence of obesity than did children living in homes that practised none of these routines.

Sarah Anderson, assistant professor of epidemiology at Ohio State University (OSU) and her counterpart Robert Whitaker, paediatrics professor, analysed data collected in 2005 on 8,550 children who were born in the US in 2001.

Other studies have linked obesity to the individual behaviours of excessive TV viewing, a lack of sleep and, to a lesser extent, a low frequency of family meals.

But this is the first study to assess the combination of all three routines with obesity prevalence in a national sample of preschoolers.

Researchers suggested that adopting these three household routines could be an attractive obesity-prevention strategy for all families with young children, especially because these routines may benefit children’s overall development, said an OSU release.

However, they also cautioned that this study alone does not confirm whether the routines themselves, or some other factor, protect children from obesity.

The study is slated for publication in the March issue of Paediatrics.