Introduction
In the NatureShock book, several myths on children are explained including the myths related to praise, sleep, race, lies, siblings, and teen rebellion. According to this book, which is one of the most influential books about children, the authors express that several modern strategies for nurturing children fail because important features in the science have been disregarded. On the praise myths, the book details that praise destroys motivation, and leads to underperformance. The book also indicates that children are less racists since they have little conception of the concept, having siblings does not always imply that the child is more social, and that teen rebellion builds strong relationships between children and parents. The sleep myth is the most important because it is key to brain development, which is the foundation for all the other myths.
This paper seeks to explain why the chosen myth of deprivation of sleep is the most important of the other myths. While comparing this myth with the myth on lies, this paper also seeks to explain the reasons behind the importance of sleep as key to the development of the child than the other myths. Child development has several perspectives, and in my opinion, the deprivation of sleep has the highest effect on children compared to the other myths because as will be discussed in this paper, sufficient sleep is key to the development of the child.
Body
There are several causes of deprivation of sleep in children. With the increasing technological advancements, technology has been blamed the most for leading to deprivation of sleep in children. However, these researchers and scientists have explained that an hour of sleep deprived of the child has severe effects on the child. With the technological advancements, there have been several gadgets introduced that the children use in the homes up to late in the night thereby depriving them of their sleep (p.31). For instance, children watch television in their bedrooms, play computer games, and browse on their phones for longer hours into the wee hours of the night (p.31). The other thing that deprives children of their sleep includes factors such as education systems, which keeps children engaged with burdensome homework from schools, and over scheduling of chores by the parents.
Sleep scientists have recently used newly developed technological and statistical tools to isolate and measure the impact of a single hour of sleep lost on children. These scientists assert that because children’s brains are a work progress until the age of 21 years and because much of that work is done while the child is asleep, this lost hour of sleep appears to have exponential impact on children that it simply does not have on adults (p. 31). Therefore, these scientific research results imply that the amount of sleep is very important to child development and important in countering international epidemics such as obesity and the rise of ADHD (p. 31). According to this myth on sleep, it is argued that sleep problems to children during the formative years can lead to permanent changes in the structure of the brain of the child and other consequences such as depression, moodiness, and even binge eating. However, the myth on lies only lead to effects such as erosion of trust, belief, and that the child might become a big liar when he grows up. Nevertheless, the effects of lies are lighter compared to those of the former because the effects of lies on the child can easily be corrected.
Deprivation of sleep among school going children leads to reduced academic performance. It has been revealed that most American parents think their children are getting enough sleep; however, this could be disputed because the statistics also reveals that 60% of the American high school students report daytime sleepiness, which implies that these children do get sufficient sleep (p. 30). Teachers also report similar statistics of students falling asleep in class during the daytime lessons. The studies further reveal that today’s children get less sleep than it was in the past, and that seniors get even less sleep than their younger counterparts do. While kindergarten children get 30 minutes less of their sleep, preschoolers get 1 hour less of the same while high school students are reported to have even up to six and a half hours of sleep every night, or even less. When Dr. Avi Sadeh conducted a study on 77 fourth-graders and sixth-graders, he noticed measurable and sizeable differences in the performance caused by the lack of sleep by his participants. He realized that the performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the gap between normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader, and concluded that a loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to the loss of two years of cognitive mutation and development (p. 32). Compared to the myth on lies, the lies that people tell to children have limited effects on their educational achievements, except when the lies are told by their educators.
Deprivation of sleep also leads to childhood obesity, which has become an international pandemic of the century. According to research studies, half of all the children in the United States are at the risk of being overweight (p. 39). The federal government’s efforts to educate the public on childhood obesity have borne little fruit. Most people have been blaming the television for the increasing childhood obesity, which has led to scientific explanation of this phenomenon. However, a lie told so many times becomes the truth: these might just be assumptions because other studies have also revealed that the thin kids even watch more if not equivalent TV as the obese kids do. Nevertheless, children have abandoned physical activities for social ones, thereby reducing their time to exercise. Other people also believe that obesity is related to the calories-consumed versus the calories-burned equation (p. 41). Even though this could not be wrong, children do not eat in their sleep, therefore, this equation might be vague. In fact, children who get less sleep in the night are less active during the day, thereby consuming many calories and burning very little of the same. Sleep, is a biological imperative for every species on earth, but humans alone tried to resist its pull and equate it to the weak (p. 44). Nevertheless, the lies told to children have no proven scientific hazards on children such as the ones evidenced by deprivation of sleep.
Even though the other myths might be important, sleep is instrumental to the physical, biological, and social development of the child’s brain, which is instrumental to the other myths because the human body relies on the brain for its operations. Lies only damage the social aspect of the child’s development, but sleep extensively damages the brain. For instance, when children get insufficient sleep, they are bound to perform poorly in class, and consequently in life.
Work Cited:
Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman. NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children. New York City: Grand Central Publishing, 2009. Print.
