Why today's kids do not sleep well?

Too many fizzy drinks and not enough bedtime stories are reasons why younger generation does not sleep as well as their grandparents, according to a new study.

Research by the Sleep Council found that today's seven to 14-year-old children go to bed almost 40 minutes later than their grandparents.

They are also much more likely to snack on crisps and fizzy drinks before bedtime while their grandparents enjoyed cocoa or hot milky drinks such as Horlicks.

Around 54 per cent of the older generation either had a story read to them or had a quiet time to read independently - whereas only 27 per cent of today's youngsters read before bedtime and 58 per cent watch television.

If parents ditched the bad habits, bedtime would be less stressful and their offspring would sleep better, experts claimed.

According to the survey - which asked 1,006 grandparents with grandchildren aged seven to 14, to compare their early lifestyle with that of their grandchildren - 21 per cent spent more than three hours each day playing outside.

That compares to the 28 per cent who said their grandchildren now spend less than 30 minutes playing outside on a school day.

Seventy per cent of grandparents ate dinner before 6pm but only 38 per cent of youngsters do so now. Just over half, 51 per cent, eat between 6pm and 7.30pm.

For 95 per cent of the older generation, the evening meal was home cooked but now a quarter of children eat ready-made meals.

"Seven to 14-year-olds still need a good nine or 10 hours sleep a night," the Daily Express quoted Jessica Alexander, of The Sleep Council, as saying.

"Not eating too close to bedtime and avoiding caffeine-fuelled fizzy pop is also important, as is a well balanced diet with plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables," she suggested.

Source: http://www.indiatimes.com

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Tobacco smoke tied to flu complications in kids

NEW YORK: Kids hospitalized with the flu are more likely to need intensive care and a longer stay if they've been exposed to second-hand smoke at home, a small new study finds.

Analyzing the records of more than 100 kids hospitalized with flu in New York state, researchers found those exposed to second-hand smoke were five times more likely to be admitted to the intensive care unit and required a 70 percent longer stay in the hospital, compared to the kids not exposed to smoke.

"People are being a bit complacent and thinking that because they don't see smoking as often…that it's not a problem anymore," said Dr. Karen Wilson, of Children's Hospital Colorado, in Aurora, who led the study. "But we still need to be vigilant about protecting kids from second-hand smoke."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, passive smoking causes ear infection, breathing problems and lung infections in children, and leads to the hospitalization of up to 15,000 children under the age of 18 months every year.

The new work is the first study to look at the effect of second-hand smoke on kids with influenza, however.

Wilson and her team looked at hospital records for 117 kids admitted for influenza to a New York hospital between 2002 and 2009.

Second-hand smoke exposure was reported on the charts of 40 percent of the kids - slightly lower than the 53 percent national exposure rate for kids under 11 estimated by the CDC in 2008.

During the seven-year study, researchers found that overall, 18 percent of the flu-affected kids were admitted to intensive care, and six percent needed to be intubated with a breathing tube. On average, kids stayed in the hospital for two days.

When Wilson and her team compared the kids who had been exposed to second-hand smoke to those who weren't, they found that 30 percent of smoke-exposed kids needed intensive care versus 10 percent of unexposed kids. Intubation was required for 13 percent of smoke-exposed kids, compared to one percent of those from a smoke-free home.

Hospital stays were up to 70 percent longer for smoke-exposed kids, with kids staying in for four days on average, compared with 2.4 days in non-exposed kids. If kids had a chronic illness as well as the flu, their length of stay increased to about 10 days, on average, if they had been breathing second-hand smoke, versus about three days in non-exposed sick kids.

"We've known that (second-hand smoke) is bad for children in a whole variety of ways," said Dr. Susan Coffin, who has studied flu complications in children at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "With this (study) we see that smoke exposure not only increases risk of hospitalization but it specifically makes the course of illness worse."

The small study, published in The Journal of Pediatrics, does have limitations. The authors note in their report, for instance, that children with severe illnesses may have been screened more frequently for smoke exposure, leading to an underestimate of how many kids were exposed to smoke.

Still, the findings do point to a need for better screening when kids with the flu are seen in the ER, researchers said.

"If you have a child who comes into the hospital and they are exposed to tobacco smoke, they have more risk of going on to develop more severe illness," Wilson told Reuters Health. Knowing that kids are at increased risk could help physicians make better treatment decisions, she added.

For Wilson, it's critical that children don't end up in the ER in the first place.

"This is a preventable cause of severe flu, and it's sad that children are in a position to be exposed even though these serious complications can occur," said Wilson.

"Obviously not smoking and protecting children from smoke won't stop them from getting influenza, but it may help it from becoming a severe illness or (preventing) complications that we sometimes see," she added (REUTERS)

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Hitting, slapping kids tied to later mental disorders

 NEW YORK: People who remember being pushed, slapped and hit as children are more likely to be diagnosed with depression, anxiety and personality disorders later in life, a new study suggests.

Canadian researchers estimated between two and seven percent of those mental disorders might be due to punishments inflicted in childhood, not including more severe forms of abuse and maltreatment.

"We know that maltreatment is traumatic, but I think the point here is that even harmful parenting behaviors that may not be classified as maltreatment per se have this association with (mental) disorders," said Lisa Berlin, who studies parenting and child maltreatment at the University of Maryland School of Social Work in Baltimore.

The finding "adds to our existing worries about the use of physical punishment, and speaks to the value of non-physical discipline," Berlin, who wasn't involved in the new study, told Reuters Health. "There just seems to be one study after another... that says we can and should find different ways to discipline our kids."

Up to half of all children may be spanked as punishment, according to researchers led by Tracie Afifi at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg - but they wanted to look at harsher punishments, such as shoving and hitting.

The study team used data collected by United States Census interviewers in 2004 and 2005 in surveys of close to 35,000 adults across the country.

The interviewers asked participants about how often they were physically punished as children, other problems their families had - such as parents who had drug problems or went to jail - and about their own symptoms of mental disorders, current or past.

Afifi and her colleagues didn't include anyone who reported being physically, sexually or emotionally abused by family members to zone in on the effect of punishment that didn't go so far as to constitute maltreatment.

They found about six percent of interview subjects had been punished beyond spanking "sometimes," "fairly often" or "very often."

And those people with a history of harsh physical punishment were more likely to have a range of mood and personality disorders or to abuse drugs and alcohol.

For example, 20 percent of people who remembered being physically punished had been depressed, and 43 percent had abused alcohol at some point. That compared to 16 percent of people who weren't hit or slapped who had been depressed, and 30 percent who drank too much.

Those links held up after the researchers took into account family problems - including which participants' parents had been treated for mental illness themselves - and interviewees' race, income and level of education.

"People believe that as long as you don't cross that line into child maltreatment, and the physical punishment is controlled and doesn't cross the line into abuse, it won't have any negative long-term consequences for the child," Afifi told Reuters Health.

"The way we see it is along a continuum of having no violence to severe violence."

She and her colleagues write in the journal Pediatrics that physical punishment may lead to chronic stress in kids, which could then increase their chance of developing depression or anxiety, for example, later on.

Michele Knox, a psychiatrist who studies family and youth violence at the University of Toledo College of Medicine, agreed that's a likely explanation.

"Physical punishment is a chronic and sometimes repeated stressor for young people, and we know that chronic and repeated stressors have a negative impact on the brain," Knox, who wasn't part of the research team, told Reuters Health.

But the findings can't prove the punishments, themselves, caused kids to develop mood and personality disorders.

Knox pointed out the interviewees might not have known if their parents had been treated for mental illness - and many people with a mental condition never get treated anyway - so those cases wouldn't be accounted for in the data. Mental illnesses like depression and anxiety are known to be at least partially genetic.

Still, Knox said, "Spanking and other forms of corporal punishment have a huge variety of negative outcomes, and almost no positive outcomes." Those negative outcomes include aggressive behavior and delinquency in kids, she added.

She said parents can make an agreement even before their child is born to never use physical punishment, and instead rely on methods like "time out" and using positive reinforcement to reward good behavior.(Reuters)

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