How does Technology Affect Children’s Sleep?

When the world “technology” is associated with children, it’s a whole other mess. In the past two decades, the use of technology has gone crazy over time. As more and more products are making their way in the market, these innovative products never ceases to amaze us. This article is about sleep vs technology.

From mobiles to computers, these tech gadgets are so mainstream. However, we are going to focus on how does technology affect children’s sleep.

But how does it affect?

Here’s an easier explanation. The first thing we are going to talk about is troubleshooting. Ever seen your child all drowsy and stuff the other day before going to the school? Well, it might be due to the gadgets that he\she might be playing all night.

It is known for a fact that as the time passes by, children are most used to tech products rather than actual physical activities. There is a lot of fun in gadgets and sometimes they are scary. It can go to a point where it might become impossible to control the addiction of these gadgets.

As a tech blog, we are going to explain to you the factual information of how it’s ruining the kid’s sleep. Common sense media found that children and teens use gadgets for over a nine hour average per day. Isn’t that crazy?

It’s good to have fun but as they say that excess of everything is bad and it’s true for this one too. Electronic devices has become a part of our lives. It’s like oxygen to us. Just like the meme that oxygen has been replaced with Wi-Fi, we can see where it came from.

However, the main problem here is that children’s sleep is getting affected and it can create a lot of problems. Here are some after effects of consuming a lot of media right before sleep, all night.

The after effects

1. Consuming a lot of media will ultimately drive your child to have a low count of speed per week. This will increase the drowsiness and mental illness.

2. With gadgets in their arsenal, children have difficulty sleeping as their mind is towards the technology side.

3. All night chatting and calling can also lead to low time sleep and will increase day time sleep.

4. With all those rays in eyes, it can damage eye-sight especially at night time,

Facts

Enough of the rhetoric talk. Let’s talk about straight facts that how technology actually affects a children’s sleep. There are three main factors that can affect the sleep cycle of a child. As a tech blog, we must mention all the facts.

1. Using gadgets increase the brain usage

Using technology makes our brain awake. The same with kids, if they are to use social media apps or playing games, it will keep their brains alert at all times. The brain itself will remain proactive even if our body is feeling tired.

What’s more alarming is that after using technology for so many hours, kids need to get some rest to get that feeling out of their minds. Another thing that I’d like to mention is that technology can also give anxiety or depression.

Getting unknown text or email can really make us anxious. Moreover, there are also facebook posts that are disturbing to look at or just plain scary. Even playing violent video games can harm the kid’s brain and he might act just like the main character in a certain game is doing.

Not to bash Grand Theft Auto but the kids that this game has ruined are on a whole other level.

2. Waking them up

We all have alarms and notifications on phone. Even if someone is having a good night sleep, the notification of your friends or just any app can disturb the kid’s sleep. This is how it works. Kids gadgets are the technology gadgets that we use.

Every single minute, a YouTube video is released. Hence, if your child has subscribed to a lot of channels, they should sleep with the Wi-Fi turned off or there will be so many notifications keeping him or her awake.

3. Harm of Bluelight

All of the gadgets we use today such as mobile, laptops, pc, or any other display emit something called as the bluelight. The bluelight is picked by our eyes to detect the dark and light, telling our brain whether it’s morning or night.

However, the issue here is that blue light affects the melatonin in our bodies. It’s a hormone that controls our night and the whole sleep cycle. When we sleep at night, our melatonin levels should rise just before. Hence, reducing that hormone would ultimately give us difficulty in sleeping.

The fix to this problem is the blue light filter. Most of our devices contain the blue light filter that is supposed to remove the harm of this blue light damaging our sleep cycles.

Now, we are going to talk about how do we avoid this mess and how should we keep our children’s sleep on a normal level?

The Fix

Technology has come a long way. Even smartwatches are a thing nowadays. But here are some tips to avoid the harms.

1. Powering off the device

There should be a rule in your household to power off devices before you kid is asleep. That way, the child won’t worry or have any interest in using the phone itself.

2. Turning the brightness down

This is another way to minimize the harm. If we turn down the brightness when it’s night, the harm can be halved in a sense. More brightness is equal to more blue light to ruin the kid’s sleep.

3. Limiting the usage

As a parent or guardian, you should think about what is best for your child. You should set a limit on the usage of gadgets. I used to have permission of only 2 hours usage of phone all day. My own parents were pretty strict and now I think that they were right.

4. Physical activities

Physical activities are really important especially for kids as it’s their growing age. It’s always better to play some physical game after extensive usage of media. Thus, you should encourage kids to play various sports games. 

Not just sports but any other mind stressing games like chess or board games. Reading book is another thing that can refresh the mind. Doing exercise also helps in minimizing the harm of what technology causes.

Conclusion

In conclusion, sleep vs technology is what most people are suffering from. However, it’s not as difficult to cope with as we think it is. The only thing that you need to do is to follow these steps that we’ve mentioned and you’re good to go.