Smartphones are making your kids lose sleep, and might be making them obese

Hey parents, stop letting your kids sleep with a smartphone or tablet. A new study says kids who sleep near a small screen get, on average, 20 minutes less sleep and are about one-third more likely to suffer restless sleep.

I know, that sounds obvious, but apparently it’s not. More than half of the 2,000 fourth and seventh graders studied said they sleep near a smartphone or other small screen. Sounds like a lot of nighttime battles are being lost.

We know adults suffer from NoMoPhobia (No Mobile Phone) after just a few moments. Try to protect your kids from that as long as possible.

This new study, called Sleep Duration, Restfulness, and Screens in the Sleep Environment, was published this week in the science journal Pediatrics. Researchers examined a dataset of school-aged students in Massachusetts that was initially designed to examine the relatinonship between inadequate sleep and child obesity. (NOTE: This study doesn’t mean smartphones are making your kids fat, but that’s not a very large leap.)

“The steady decline in child sleep duration throughout the past century is troubling,” says the study, which was directed by Dr. Jennifer Falbe, a postdoctoral research fellow at UC Berkeley. There’s plenty of reasons for that — such as insanely early school start times — but screen in the bedroom seem to be a heavy contributing factor.

Youth are now consuming media for the amount of time that most adults spend at work, the study notes.

While TV in the bedroom has had a bad reputation for a long time — and 75 percent of kids in the study said they slept near a TV – smartphones and tablets are even worse, Falbe argues.

“Small screens are especially concerning because they are a portal to social media, videos and other distractions, and they emit notifications that can disrupt sleep,” Falbe said. “Parents should keep screen media out of bedrooms, limit screen time, and set a curfew of an hour before bedtime.”

Children who slept near a small screen reported 20.6 fewer minutes of sleep per weekday in the past week, on average, the report found. And the impact on “insufficient” sleep was more pronounced for small screens than TVs.

As you might expect, seventh graders were more likely to say they slept near a small screen (65 percent) than fourth graders (46 percent). That’s still nearly half for kids who are usually 9 or 10 years old, and some three years away from being allowed to use Facebook — at least according to that site’s policy.

“Unlike small screens, TV presence was not significantly related to perceived insufficient rest or sleep, perhaps because TV sets do not interrupt sleep when turned off,” the study says.

The always-on world — another reason so many of us, including our children, are restless.