Click to play videoNew Delhi: Meet class XII student Pareekshit. He is a gadget freak, his room is his world, his laptop keeps him company after dinner. He takes a break only to answer calls from friends and then it's back to the laptop, only to doze off by 2 am.
"Sometimes I doze off even without switching off my laptop," says he.
Pareekshit's meager hours are no longer an exception among teens. A recent survey by the Sleep Council in Britain found that 30 per cent of children between the ages of 12 to 16 are sleeping just four to seven hours a day.
The reason: they are distracted by electronic gadgets in their rooms. Experts say this is a trend catching up with children in India too.
"Not only do children lose sleep because of the mental stimulation provided by these gadgets, the light or sounds emitted can disturb their sleep. Their sleep quality is becoming poorer," says paediatrician Apollo Hospital, Dr Vidya Gupta.
The Sleep Council calls the phenomena junk sleep — that is sleep that is of neither the length nor quality that it should be in order to feed the brain with the rest it needs to perform properly at school. And it is as bad a lifestyle choice as junk food.
Says Dr Gupta, "As it is children in their teens tend to be difficult to deal with. This just adds to that difficulty."
But all one needs to do to make sure your child sleeps well is to switch off that distracting gadget before your child hits the sack.
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