Monday, June 11, 2007

Sliding rules for children's sleep

If making sure your children get the sleep they need is a problem in your family, there may be a way to make your job easier. Sleep specialist Kurt Lushington, a professor at the Unviersity of South Australia, has developed what he calls the Sleep Slide-Rule.

He argues that one reason children are getting less sleep than they did 20 years ago is not only because the importance of sleep has disappeared from our cultural consciousness, but also because kids are concrete learners. Simply telling them, "Getting enough sleep makes your brain work better in school," is too abstract a concept. His Sleep Slide-Rule is a concrete tool children can manipulate to see just how much sleep they need each night.

Here's how it works:

The top bar incidcates bedtimes; the bottom bar shows a range of wake-up times. By manipulating a moveable center rule, children can arrive at how many hours of sleep 3- to 5-year-olds, 5- to 12-year-olds and 12- to 18-year-olds need. Lushington says by making the relationship between bedtime, sleep need and wake-up time something physical that they can literally manipulate, children are much more likely to say things like, "I need a lot more sleep than I normally get." The tool was used successfully as part of a lesson plan on sleep with 9- to 11-year-olds in Australian classrooms.

An abstract of the idea is being presented in Minneapolis today at SLEEP 2007, the 21st meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, a joint venture of the Amercian Academy of Sleep Medicine, and the Sleep Research Society. According to the AASM, preschoolers need between 11 to 13 hours of sleep and school-age children need 10-11 hours.

My guess is that it's just a matter of time before the Sleep Slide-Rule is available for sale....

Posted by Barbara Meltz at 02:33 PM

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