Kids sleeping longer amid at-home schooling

Children have been sleeping in as a result of school closure from the coronavirus pandemic, and this can be good for their health and well-being, a local study reports.

Singapore is typical of East Asian countries where children chronically lose sleep in the pursuit of academic excellence, according to a team of researchers from the National University of Singapore and Khoo Teck Puat-National University Children's Medical Institute. “The enforced national school closure during circuit breaker (CB) period because of the COVID-19 [crisis] meant that children and their families had to rapidly adapt to changes from school-based to home-based learning on a massive scale.”

What happens to children’s sleep after moving to home-schooling and staying indoors could go one of two ways, the researchers mused. On the one hand, sleep issues might be exacerbated through “increased screen time, reduced physical activity, and the lack of enforced school routines”. On the other, some children might well get more sleep with “the elimination of school travel time and the opportunity for later waking.”

Looking at a cohort of 593 children (median age, 8 years), the researchers found that the change in sleep was actually not unpleasant. “Children went to bed later but woke up even later, with a net increase in total sleep time. This difference was significant among primary and secondary school children. However, there was little impact on the hours of sleep in preschool children.”

Of the children, 139 were in preschool (23 percent), 336 in primary school (57 percent), and 118 in secondary school (20 percent). Prior to the pandemic, sleep duration was longer on weekends (mean, 9.99 hours), with a shorter duration on weekdays (mean, 9.01 hours). [Sleep Med 2021;78:108-114]

During CB, children were sleeping on weekdays about as much as they were on pre-CB weekends, contributing to an overall longer daily sleep duration of 9.63 hours. Average weekly bedtime was delayed by 0.65 hour but wake-up time by 1.27 hours, which added up to a mean increase in sleep duration of 0.35 hour. Secondary school children had the largest gain in sleep (mean increase, 0.70 hour).

Traditional schooling: Sleep, interrupted

The researchers explained the increased sleep duration during weekends was potentially an effect of the absence of time pressures from the usual school routines. This was especially evident among secondary school children, who are wired to go to bed later and wake up later due to a delayed sleep phase syndrome occurring from puberty onwards. Previous studies also suggested that in this age group, increased academic demands and early school start times can significantly affect their bedtime. [J Sleep Res 2013;22:549-556]

Mornings, children are forced to get out of bed too early to get to school because of an early school start time, with some of them having to travel to get to their campus. Such a routine can prevent them from getting enough sleep, especially if at night, they stay awake later. Sleep deprivation is bad news, and its effects range from a poorer memory and executive function skills to an increased risk of chronic diseases and behavioural difficulties. [Pediatr Obes 2019;14:e12507; Child Dev 2002;73:405-417]   

In Singapore, private schools have a later start than public schools (8:00–9:00 vs 7:30–7:45 am). Indeed, in the study cohort, the children attending private school got more sleep on average during school days compared to their public school counterparts, both prior to (mean, 10.01 vs 9.05 hours) and during CB (mean, 10.05 vs 9.49 hours).

“Interestingly, sleep duration on pre-CB weekdays among private school children was closer to their pre-CB weekend sleep duration, suggesting that private school hours did not significantly impact on their sleep, and that the decrease in pre-CB weekday sleep we saw in our school-age children overall was contributed mostly by public school children who had earlier school start times,” the researchers noted.

In other words, later school start time factored in increased sleep duration for children, “and that the CB period acted as a leveller to improve sleep quantity, particularly among public school children,” they said. As indicated in the present data, children slept more when fixed start times (which were mostly set at 8 am) were removed from the home-learning schedule during the CB period than when fixed start times were continued.

Studies from across the world have demonstrated that children from Asian countries, including Singapore, sleep less than the recommended number of hours each day. The researchers are positive that pushing back the start time of schools can help children achieve their required duration of sleep—which is 10–13 hours for preschoolers, 9–12 hours for primary school children, and 8–10 hours for adolescents in secondary school. Possibly, it would result in much longer sleep time in the absence of pandemic-related stressors, they said. [Ann Acad Med Singap 2012;41:99-104; Pediatrics 2005;115(1 Suppl):241-249; J Clin Sleep Med 2019;15:1495-1502; J Clin Sleep Med 2016;12:785-786]