How Can You Tell That Your Child Is Not Getting Enough Sleep?

A sleep deficit in growing children is seen to be detrimental to growth, deployment and also negatively affects performance in school.

Children sometimes suffer from inadequate sleep and sometimes from poor quality of sleep; both are detrimental.

So it is important for parents to be watching out for the following telltale signs that a child may be suffering a sleep deficit:

  • The child does not wake up by himself in the morning. Rather he has to be woken up. In so being woken up, he is difficult to awaken and is reluctant to wake up.
  • The child often oversleeps, thereby creating a recurrent scenario of rushing through morning activities such as getting dressed, having breakfast etc.
  • The child may display signs such as lack of concentration and leaving incomplete tasks that he is given. Academic performance and grades may also suffer.
  • The child may often seem sleepy and irritable during the day. And it could be that the teacher may tell you that he sometimes falls asleep in school or that the child nods off on the bus when getting back from school.
  • The child may seem to be “making up for lost time” on weekend. He tends to sleep a lot longer on weekends, which indicates that he is making good the sleep deficit incurred during the week days.