A study was done that focused on the affect of lack of sleep on preschool aged children. I bet that most parents can pretty much guess some of the results, based on how their preschoolers behave after not getting enough sleep. The more interesting part of the study reveals that kids who didn’t get enough sleep when they were preschoolers exhibited more symptoms of ADHD then were typical when those children reached kindergarten.
What does your preschooler do when he or she is overtired? Many preschoolers who are lacking sleep can get giddy, giggly, and hyperactive. Your child who lacks sleep might be running around the room, in a very excited state whether or not she actually has ADHD.
It’s also fairly common for sleepy preschoolers to have problems focusing on things for more than a few seconds. This does not necessarily mean that your child has ADHD, even though he or she is displaying some of the symptoms at that moment.
There have been studies done that suggest that kids who have been diagnosed with ADHD are much more affected by a sleep deficit than children who did not have ADHD were. Again, this news might not be surprising to parents of kids who have ADHD, and who have noticed a big difference in their child the morning after staying up too late the night before.
A research abstract that was done by the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC shows something rather unexpected. They looked at a sample of 6,860 preschool children, and asked their parents to note when the child went to sleep, and what time the child woke up. Obviously, parents reported that their kids were more hyper when they didn’t get enough sleep, but that part is something I think most people would expect.
The surprising part of the research showed that preschoolers who didn’t get enough sleep were rated by their parents as being twice as hyperactive as their peers when those preschoolers became kindergarteners. In other words, this study suggests that lack of sleep can affect a child the year after it occurs. It implies that preschoolers who suffer from sleep deficits could become kindergarteners that have ADHD.
The converse was not necessarily true, however. If you reverse-engineer it, you get a slightly different result. Kids who were diagnosed as having ADHD when they were in kindergarten were not always ones who didn’t get enough sleep when they were preschoolers. Overall, researchers note that it is important for children to get a proper amount of sleep, and a regular sleep schedule can facilitate that.
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