Many children have difficulty sleeping alone. They are afraid of the dark or the monsters under their beds. Adults dismiss this as silliness but it’s very real for the children. Methods that can be used for dealing with this is to be imaginative. Children look up to us as heroes and anything we say can be true for them. So when you say you have a monster repellent spray, they will believe you and their fear may subside.
But the real monsters in the dark are something different: electronic gadgets. According to research “excessive exposure to light at night, including extended use of electronic media, can disrupt sleep or exacerbate sleep disorders, especially in children or adolescents.”
There is mounting research proving that television watching causes learning, behavioural and sleep problems. Television has become accessible on every hand-held device it has become like the hydra, destroys one head and two will appear. The type of light produced by handheld devices is very harmful to the sleep wave pattern. The closer you have a source of light to your face the more intense it is. So having things close to your face is worst than watching TV from a distance.
All this is not an issue for the adults who have already learned at a young age, how to wind down after closing their gadgets. But for a child, this could lead to a lifetime of sleep problems as it creates a state of ‘high-alertness’ in the child.
According to research conducted, a few young teenagers have their phones on and they were being bombarded by new incoming messages and it was established that they slept poorly as their mind was distracted leading to shallow sleep. This is very worrying.
The only solution for this is to remove all the communicative devices from the rooms of our children to ensure a good and healthy sleep
