Parenting Tip:
cultivating
sound slumber
“F
ew studies have investigated
how parenting can affect sleep
in children,” explains Valérie Simard,
of the Department of Psychology at the
Université de Montréal, who recently
recruited nearly 1,000 parents with
five-month-old toddlers to answer
questionnaires about their children’s
sleep, as well as their own behavior
at the children’s bedtime. Then, the
parents were asked to follow and detail
their offsprings’ psychological char-
acteristics, socio-demographic factors
and sleep habits up to the age of six.
The researchers found that giving
food or drink, which is a known effec-
tive strategy for early sleep problems,
can become inappropriate as the chil-
dren get older. Instead, it can provoke
bad dreams, causing delays in falling
back asleep and reducing overall
sleep time. They also learned that
parents’ electing to sleep with their
children when they awoke tended
to delay the little ones’ falling back
asleep and created negative conse-
quences for future sleep patterns.
Green Tea BeaTs
superBuGs
drinking green tea while taking
antibiotics boosts the
drugs’ potency by up
to three times, making
the fight against resistant
superbugs more effective,
according to a report this
year by the society for
general microbiology.
October 2008 11
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