Sleeping less than 9 hours, make up for nothing Parents are always faced with a problem when choosing a school: a good school can’t be just around the corner from you. So, should we rather go to school farther away, but also let our children into the so-called good schools in our minds? Obviously, a long way to school will affect your child’s sleep. We spent more than ten years to make a statistic on the sleeping time of children from birth to 18 years old, and compared the sleeping time of Chinese children with that of Swiss children. No matter Chinese children or foreign children, the trend is the same, they sleep a lot when they are small, and sleep gradually decreases as they grow older. We can find that the line of Swiss children’s sleep time is very peaceful. In Chinese children, however, the curve has a very clear steep slope: it appears when the child is 6 years old. What is the reason for this steep slope? The reason is that the child’s life changes completely when he/she goes to school. And we find that the problem of schoolwork burden definitely does not only come from the school – when the school thinks of reducing the burden, parents put pressure on the school, and when the school assigns less, parents assign it themselves. If parents help their children to choose schools, the children wake up earlier, so there is a non-physiological drop in sleep time at age 6. We did a survey in 10 districts and counties in Shanghai to analyze the impact of different hours of sleep on children’s academic performance. And through the teacher to evaluate all aspects of the child’s performance, including attention, self-motivation, language, math, peer relations and overall grades. It was found that the child who slept less than nine hours was significantly worse in all his latitudes than the child who slept enough. The same is true for sleep quality – quality and time interact, and when you don’t get enough sleep, sleep quality goes down. We also did some gender comparisons – is it different for boys and girls? In elementary school it was found that in the case of girls, the only aspect of sleep that is affected in terms of how it affects the student is attention, which decreases when you don’t get enough sleep, but girls don’t seem to have a significant effect in the other latitudes. Boys must not, in his brain development process does have its own characteristics, boys if not enough sleep, all latitude appeared to affect his academic performance – in the elementary school stage, because men and women in the development process, there is indeed a certain difference. Does catching up on sleep at the weekend help? Many parents say it’s okay to go farther, sleep less during the week and make up for it on the weekends. So we looked into the issue of making up sleep on weekends again. We divided into three groups. The first group had less than 9 hours of sleep on both weekdays and weekends. The second group slept more than 10 hours on both weekends and weekdays. The third group was those who didn’t sleep enough on weekdays and made up an hour or even two hours on weekends. There was a clear difference between the three groups: the best were those who slept enough on both weekends and weekdays, but the second group surprised us with less than 9 hours on both weekdays and weekends coming in second. The worst was the group that slept less on weekdays and then made up for it on weekends. There are individual differences in sleep, some people sleep 8 or 9 hours, some people sleep 6 hours and that’s enough. Among the children, it is the third group that really lacks a lot of sleep, which means that they lack more during the week, which has the greatest impact on his academic performance. The Effects of Sleep Deprivation We’ve also been looking at what the effects of sleep deprivation on learning look like. We made a comparison between children and adults. It’s like a simulation of pressurizing a child to sleep a little less each day for five days. We looked at the effects on college students and middle school students – the college students felt bad about themselves when they slept two hours less per day, but the elementary school students didn’t feel as bad about themselves when they were given two hours less sleep per day. The question is, if you don’t feel sleepy, does it have any effect on your memory? Although an adult is particularly sleepy, he has a strong compensatory ability and basically does not affect his reaction time. The degree of subjective drowsiness of the child is not very obvious, but in the completion of simple tasks, these children appeared to be significantly prolonged reaction time, slow reaction speed. And when it comes to some complex tasks, the child is not affected, why is that? We found that when the child is deprived of sleep, he doesn’t feel it himself, but many areas of his brain show inhibition, which manifests itself as carelessness, and he shows a decrease in cortical functioning. But when he does difficult tasks, his brain shows reactive compensation – he uses more brain areas to maintain alertness. In elementary school, children with good memories have a big advantage in the early years. But children who don’t have particularly strong memories themselves can have big problems. For example, some schools focus a lot on mental math skills, and these types of children can become very frustrated. I once came across a child who had very good higher cognitive functioning, very strong thinking and problem-solving skills, but had problems with short-term memory. As a result, he defined himself as “I’m a math dummy.” When there is a mismatch between a child’s ability level and your educational environment, it is very easy for a child to lose self-confidence early on. When a child has no self-confidence, his expectations of himself drop, he lowers his level of effort, I can’t do it anyway, and at the same time what’s worse is that such a child is more prone to anxiety. When this anxiety and low effort are intertwined, the child will experience real academic failure. So at an early age, parents must be careful to build up the child’s self-confidence, and it would be most damaging if we squashed the child’s self-confidence when many of his abilities have yet to be demonstrated. Suitable for the child is the most important Let’s take another example, PISA is proud of Shanghai, two consecutive years of measurement down are leading. Shanghai is more than 100 points ahead of the United States in math scores, which is a common problem, that is, the overall level of education in Shanghai and the level of basic education, which is why I recently heard that the United Kingdom has come to take the lessons of Europe and the United States to take the lessons of Shanghai. We did an analysis of the PISA scores and the age of children’s school enrollment, and found that children in Shanghai basically enroll at the age of 6, with a few enrolling before the age of 6. In the U.S., the percentage of children enrolling in school at an early age is quite high. When we compare the impact of early schooling on children, it is very interesting to note that when children in Shanghai enter school more than 3 months earlier, the performance of boys is significantly lower than that of school-age children in language, math, and reading, while the impact on girls is not significant. Let’s look at the United States, the United States than our early enrollment is much more people, but they have an enrollment assessment before the school is ready to measure the child, including physical development, social-emotional development, cognitive-linguistic development level, etc., a comprehensive assessment, found that the development of the “under-age children” ahead of time, allowing early enrollment, found that the maturity of the backward For those who are found to be behind in maturity, it is recommended that they be delayed in enrollment. Their early schooling is actually based on the decisions made after assessment. In the United States, there is also a programme called “No Child Left Behind”, under which every child, despite his or her varying abilities, must not be left behind, and in the process of commonality education, much emphasis is placed on individuality education. This shows that there is still a lot of room for exploration in our education. As parents, I hope that parents should understand their children and help them develop. As pediatricians, we are very willing to cooperate with parents and schools to do more help, especially for children with special needs. Lift up the child, hold him up and help him grow. Our ultimate goal is to make every child successful and help them find a path that is suitable for them to grow up healthily.