Can what time a child goes to bed affect how they get on at school was one of the topics under discussion in the first of BBC Radio 4’s Bringing up Britain series, which this week considered whether and how it is possible to boost a child’s IQ. The programme featured research by Child of Our Time Editor, Professor Yvonne Kelly into whether the time a child goes to bed has any influence on their reading and maths ability and spatial awareness.
Presenter Mariella Frostrup and a panel of experts discussed a range of research and views about the role of parenting on intelligence – from the effect of exercise and diet to the difference can breastfeeding, flashcards, violin lessons and superfoods really make.
When it came to looking at the effect of bedtimes, the programme interviewed Professor Kelly, who talked them through findings from her recent work looking at the effects of regular and irregular bedtimes and some 10,000 children in the Millennium Cohort Study.
Speaking on the programme, she explained that that children with irregular bedtimes did not do so well as their counterparts with more regular bedtimes and that the difference was “not trivial”, equating to a difference of around 2-3 IQ points.
The research has also looked at the effects of irregular bedtimes on children’s behaviour as well as how well they are getting on.
If you are interested in finding out more about how the bedtimes research was carried out, you can listen to Yvonne Kelly in one of our Child of our Time Research Talks here on the blog.
Photo credit: Lars Plougmann