IMPORTANT
- Good sleep is essential for good health.
- Very modern, weighted blankets allow, according to their manufacturers, to improve sleep.
- However, new research has shown that this product does not have a positive effect on the nights of children who have been bullied.
While many children who have been abused in the past sleep poorly, according to a new investigation that weighted blankets are not a good option for solving this problem.
The popularity of weighted blankets has skyrocketed in recent years, largely due to the idea that the pressure they exert on the body induces relaxation and calmness that help you fall asleep.
However, very little research has examined these claims. And in fact, the question of whether weighted blankets can improve the sleep of children in foster families has not been studied so far.
Sleep: children in care often have problems
Even after adoption, a large proportion of foster children have persistent sleep problems, including difficulty falling asleep, night awakenings, nightmares, and parasomnias.
“Childhood abuse can lead to sleep problems through multiple pathways, including over-arousal of the stress response system or heightened feelings of fear and insecurity during the night,” explains study leader Candice A. Alfano.
His work, just published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, focused on 30 children between the ages of 6 and 15. All were adopted from foster families in Texas. They were asked to use a weighted blanket for two weeks and their regular blanket for another two weeks. Sleep was continuously monitored for one month using a diary and an actigraph.
Sleep of abused children: no variables affected by a weighted blanket
“We were somewhat surprised to find no differences in objective or subjective variables based on coverage type, including total sleep time, sleep onset latency, minutes awake after falling asleep, or night quality assessments,” indicates the author of the research. “We also looked at whether the child’s age, gender or history of abuse might have influenced the results, but no such effects were found“, she adds.
“Children who have been abused in the past are a very diverse sociological group, so further well-controlled studies with larger samples are still needed,” also declares.
The essay was co-authored by students Anthony B. Cifre and Alyssa Vieira.
Quality sleep and enough sleep are two essential elements if we want to be and stay healthy.