Impact of poor sleep on children's emotional, attentional and behavioural functioning

Poor sleep has been reported to disrupt daytime functioning in adults, but there is limited research in children. The research that does exist suggests that children who sleep less have lower academic achievement, act out more, and are more emotional. The majority of studies have used correlational designs, which demonstrate that sleep and daytime functioning are related but does not prove that one causes the other. The few studies that have tried to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship have had a number of problems related to their design and interpretation, so the question remains open as to whether sleep loss actually causes daytime problems. Our study will use an experimental approach to determine if short sleep causes problems with children's daytime functioning and if more sleep improves daytime functioning. We will manipulate sleep by asking our participants to go to bed one hour later for one week and to go to bed one hour earlier for one week. We will measure the children's performance on tests of attention and emotional regulation, as well as their general behavioural functioning. Information will be collected after their typical sleep, after they have had more sleep than usual, and after they have had less sleep than usual. We will study both typically developing children and children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and the effects of sleep loss and additional sleep will be compared between these two groups of children. Our results will help to determine the cause and effect relationship between sleep and daytime functioning in children. The findings from this study will have implications for the assessment and treatment of children with cognitive, emotional, and behavioural problems.