Tag Archives: Bedtimes

Teenage depression: The potential pitfalls of too much social media use

A new mobile phone will be in the pockets of many teenagers as they head back to school in the coming days. The period between Xmas and New Year will have been spent signing up for social media apps where they can chat, share photos and videos with friends, all part of the excitement of owning a new device. But how many of these young people and their parents are aware of the potential pitfalls of spending too much time on social media sites?  And what can parents, teachers and young people themselves do to maximize the benefits of life online whilst minimising those pitfalls? It’s a question that Yvonne Kelly, Director of the ESRC International Centre for Life course Studies at UCL and colleagues have been asking as part of a major programme of research on social media use and young people’s wellbeing. Today they publish key new research, which provides much-needed new evidence on the links between heavy social media use and depression in teenagers. The research shines light on the underlying processes that could be at work and that might explain the link between the two. Here, Yvonne explains how their research might help policymakers, educators, parents and young people themselves better understand and prevent the potential pitfalls of living too much of their life on social media platforms.

2018 has seen a growing chorus of voices including those of the former and current Health Secretaries, Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock calling for a thorough investigation of the links between social media use and the growing numbers of young people struggling with mental health issues. Indeed Matt Hancock issued “an urgent warning” on the potential dangers of social media on children’s mental health, stating that the threat of social media on mental health is similar to that of sugar on physical health.

The Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies has been tasked by the Government with leading that investigation and with coming up with evidence based recommendations around what constitutes safe social media use and what changes need to be made and by whom to make that a reality. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) recently issued the first ever guidance on managing children’s screen time, calling for further research particularly into social media.

In recent months, we and others have submitted written and oral evidence to two Parliamentary inquiries in this area and had discussions with the Royal Society for Public Health which is campaigning actively  to get us all thinking harder about our social media use.

We’ve talked about our early research  showing that 10 year-old girls who used social media sites for chatting had more social and emotional problems at age 15 than their peers who used them less or not at all. Those problems continued to get worse as they got older.

Our new research published in The Lancet’s EClinical Medicine draws stronger links between heavy social media use and depressive symptoms in girls and boys at the age of 14.  We look at the possible ways in which social media use might linked to depressive symptoms. We consider 4 potential pathways – through young people’s sleep patterns, their experiences of online harassment, body image and self-esteem. It is the first research to look at all of these potential pathways at the same time.

Our data for this research came from the Millennium Cohort Study, which has followed the lives of some 19,000 children born at the turn of the century. This piece of research, looked at the social media use and mental health of nearly 11,000 of the study’s participants.

Social media use

In line with our earlier research, we saw that girls were heavier users of social media than boys with two fifthsof them using it for more than 3 hours per day (compared with one fifthof boys). Girls were a lot less likely NOT to use social media at all (4 per cent girls and 10 per cent boys).

Examining the underlying processes that might be linked with social media use and depression, we saw a number of really striking findings including:

  • 40 per cent of girls and 25 per cent of boys had experience of online harassment or cyberbullying
  • 78 per cent of girls and 68 per cent of boys were unhappy with their body/weight and 15 percent girls and 12 per cent of boys were unhappy with their appearance
  • 13 per cent of girls and 9 per cent of boys had low self-esteem
  • 13 per cent of girls and 11 per cent of boys reported getting fewer than 7 hours sleep per night and 40 per cent of girls and 28 per cent of boys said their sleep was often disrupted

Girls, it seems from these findings, are struggling more with these aspects of their lives than boys – in some cases considerably more. When we turned our attention to the signs of depression exhibited by our participants, we could see that here too girls fared worse with scores on average twice as high as those of boys.

The link between social media use and depressive symptoms was stronger for girls compared with boys. For girls, greater daily hours of social media use corresponded to a stepwise increase in depressive symptoms and the percent with clinically relevant symptoms. For boys, higher depressive symptom scores were seen among those reporting 3 or more hours of daily social media use.

There was a clear link between social media use and all the pathways we investigated – more time spent on social media related to having poorer sleep, more experiences of on-line harassment, unhappiness with the way they look and low self esteem. In turn, these things were directly related to having depressive symptoms.

A closer look at the pathways was also revealing. The most important routes from social media use to depressive symptoms were shown to be via poor sleep and online harassment.

Social media use linked directly to having poor sleep which in turn was related directly to having more depressive symptoms. The role of online harassment was more complex, with multiple pathways through poor sleep, self-esteem and body image, all of which linked directly to depressive symptoms.

Potential pitfalls and key routes

Our findings add weight to the growing evidence base on the potential pitfalls associated with lengthy time spent engaging on social media. In particular they point to poor sleep and online harrassment as being key routes between social media use and depression.

These findings are highly relevant to current policy development on guidelines for the safe use of social media and calls on industry to more tightly regulate hours of social media use for young people. They add weight to the Screen Time Guidance issued by the RCPCH today, particularly the suggestion to set and agree child appropriate time limits on screen use.

When it comes to social media use specifically, our research indicates that the a similar approach could be useful. Clinical, educational and family settings are all potential points of contact where young people could be encouraged and supported to reflect not only on their social media use, but also other aspects of their lives including on-line experiences and their sleep patterns.

At home, families may want to reflect on when and where it’s ok to be on social media and agree limits for time spent online. Curfews for use and the overnight removal of mobile devices from bedrooms might also be something to consider. School seems an obvious setting for children and young people to learn how to navigate online life appropriately and safely and for interventions aimed at promoting self-esteem. Clearly a large proportion of young people experience dissatisfaction with the way they look and how they feel about their bodies and perhaps a broader societal shift away from the perpetuation of what are often highly distorted images of idealised beauty could help shift these types of negative perceptions.

As we head into 2019, millions of young people will be getting their first experiences of life online using the devices they got for Xmas. They will rapidly become expert at downloading apps, posting photos and interacting with their peers. With the gift there was no instruction manual to help them understand and navigate some of the pitfalls our research outlines. We hope our work brings, at least, some guidance for all those keen to ensure these children continue to thrive and do well, so that they enjoy the benefits that new digital technology brings whilst staying safe and happy.

Social media use and adolescent mental health: Findings from the Millennium Cohort Study is research by Yvonne Kelly, Afshin Zilanawala, Cara Booker and Amanda Sacker and is published in The Lancet’s EClinicalMedicine journal.

An equal start: longitudinal evidence to support children’s healthy development

Using longitudinal evidence to support children’s healthy development and give them an equal start in life is the subject of our editor Yvonne Kelly’s keynote address at the Growing up in Ireland Annual Conference in Dublin today.

Her talk discusses findings from the most recent of the British ‘birth ‘ cohort studies – the Millennium Cohort Study that have so far informed policy development. They include work by researchers at the ESRC Centre for Lifecourse Studies where Yvonne is based on alcohol consumption during pregnancy, breastfeeding and the introduction of solid foods, the physical punishment of children , childhood obesity, reading to children in the early years, and sleep patterns throughout childhood.

She will also share work with the potential to inform future policy challenges such as young people’s drinking, social media use and mental health.

Ahead of her talk, she said:

“It is well established that what happens in the early years of life has long-lasting consequences for health and social success across the lifespan. Stark social inequalities in children’s health and development exist and emerge early in life. It is therefore crucial to identify potential tipping points and opportunities for intervention   during childhood with the potential to affect change and improve life chances.”

 

 

Don’t let the kids get jet-lag: why regular bedtimes are key to a happy healthy childhood

The very best of sleep medicine and research is being presented at the World Sleep Congress in Prague this week. Among that research are findings from work by Child of our Time Editor, Professor Yvonne Kelly and colleagues at the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies. They have been trying to find out what it is about sleep that matters most when it comes to giving children the best possible start in life. Here Yvonne explains what they have found to date and why regular bedtimes are key to a healthy happy childhood.

What happens in the early years has profound implications for what happens later on in life. Thousands of research papers, many of them using the wonderful rich data in the British Birth Cohort studies, have documented the enduring impacts of the way we live our lives as children on how we fare later on. Children who get a poor start in life are much more likely to experience poor outcomes as adults, whether that’s to do with poor health or their ability to enjoy work and family life later on.

So what has all that got to do with getting enough sleep as a toddler you might ask? Well our research shows it is one of a number of important factors related to getting children off to the best possible start in life and here’s why.

Recommended sleep

The National Sleep Foundation recommends that toddlers should get around 11 to 14 hours sleep every day. For 3-5 year-olds, the recommendation is 10-13 hours and it suggests 9-11 hours for children once they’re at primary school. But is it all about the number of hours sleep children get, or is there more to it than that? Those are the questions we have been addressing in our research into children’s sleep and how it ties in with how they get on at home and at school across the first decade of their life.

Digging into one of those studies mentioned earlier, the Millennium Cohort Study, which has followed the lives of some 20,000 children since the turn of the century, we found that it’s not just the number of hours a child sleeps that matters, but also having consistent or regular bedtimes.

First we looked at the relationship between regular and irregular bedtimes and how the children got on in a range of cognitive tests. The results were striking. Children with irregular bedtimes had lower scores on maths, reading and spatial awareness tests.

Parents who took part in the MCS were asked whether their children went to bed at a regular time on weekdays. Those who answered “always” or “usually” were put in the regular bedtime group, while those who answered “sometimes” or “never” were put in the irregular bedtime group.

Interestingly, the time that children went to bed had little or no effect on their basic number skills, and ability to work with shapes. But having no set bedtime often led to lower scores, with effects particularly pronounced at age three and the greatest dip in test results seen in girls who had no set bedtime throughout their early life.

The key to understanding all this is circadian rhythms. If I travel from London to New York, when I get to there I’m likely to be slightly ragged because jet lag is not only going to harm my cognitive abilities, but also my appetite and emotions. That’s for me, an adult. If I bring one of my children with me and I want them to do well at a maths test having just jumped across time zones, they will struggle even more than I will. The body is an instrument, and a child’s is especially prone to getting out of tune.

The same thing happens when children go to bed at 8 p.m. one night, 10 p.m. the next and 7 p.m. another — we sometimes call this a “social jet lag effect.” Without ever getting on a plane, a child’s bodily systems get shuffled through time zones and their circadian rhythms and hormonal systems take a hit as a result.

Bedtimes and behaviour

Having established the importance of sleep to a child’s intellectual development, we turned our attention to the relationship between regular bedtimes and their behaviour.

At age 7, according to parents and teachers, children in the MCS who had irregular bedtimes were considerably more likely to have behaviour problems than their peers who had a regular bedtime. In addition, the longer a child had been able to go to bed at different times each night, the worse his or her behaviour problems were. In other words the problems accumulated through childhood.

One really important piece of good news was that we found that those negative effects appeared to be reversible, so children who changed from not having to having regular bedtimes showed improvements in their behaviour. There seems to be a clear message here that it’s never too late to help children back onto a positive path and a small change could make a big difference to how well they get on. Of course, the reverse was also true so the behaviour of children with a regular bedtime who switched to an irregular one, worsened.

Bedtimes and obesity

In a follow up study, which looked at the impact of routines including bedtimes on obesity, we reported that children with irregular bedtimes were more likely to be overweight and have lower self-esteem and satisfaction with their bodies.

In fact, of all the routines we studied, an inconsistent bedtime was most strongly associated with the risk of obesity, supporting other recent findings which showed that young children who skipped breakfast and went to bed at irregular times were more likely to be obese at age 11.

Even children who ‘usually’ had a regular bedtime were 20 per cent more likely to be obese than those who ‘always’ went to bed at around the same time.

So we have a body of robust evidence now that shows very clearly that regular bedtimes really matter when it comes to a child’s health and development over that important first decade of their life.

Providing that evidence in the form of advice to parents and all those caring for young children alongside recommended hours of sleep could make a real difference, helping protect our children from ‘social jet-lag’ and getting them off to a flying start instead.

Why reading is key to giving our kids a great start in life

A growing body of research is pointing to how important and valuable reading is in giving children the best possible start in life, not just for academic success but more broadly including for a child’s mental health and happiness.

In this special episode of the Child of our Time Podcast, Professor Yvonne Kelly is joined by Jonathan Douglas, CEO of the National Literacy Trust and researcher Christina Clark, also from the  Trust. They discuss important new evidence about the benefits of reading for individual children and in addressing social inequalities.

Useful links

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

Screen use at seven: overweight at 11. Why it’s time to say no to a TV in the bedroom for children

Since the launch of the Childhood Obesity Strategy in 2016, there has been much attention focused on the so-called ‘Sugar Tax’. The March 2017 Budget saw confirmation that sugary soft drinks would be taxed in an attempt to combat rising levels of obesity. This is an important move that has been met with widespread approval from public health professionals. Still, obesity is hugely complex and there are many other things at play in addition to the sugary drinks and snacks that children may consume. Researchers at UCL have been looking in detail at different factors associated with obesity and, in a recent paper, find that children who have a television in their bedroom have higher BMI and more body fat than those who do not. Lead researcher, Anja Heilmann, explains the research and why saying no to a TV in the bedroom could be another important strategy in combatting childhood obesity.

As our TV screens have got flatter, our children have got fatter. There is no getting away from it! Screen-based activities play a central role in our children’s lives. At a very young age, they have unparalleled access to television screens, computers, game consoles and a host of mobile devices. Among 5 to 11 year-olds, TV is still the most consumed medium, with gaming coming second.

At the same time, childhood obesity is not just a national, but a global health worry. In 2014/15 a third of 11 year-old children in England were overweight and a fifth were obese.

Research has repeatedly reported a link between TV viewing and obesity, but although some has hinted at the idea that a television in a child’s bedroom might exacerbate the problem, the evidence here has been rather contradictory. Other plausible pathways could include eating unhealthy snacks whilst watching TV, exposure to food advertising and insufficient and poor quality sleep.

Using information from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), which has followed the lives of more than 18,000 children born around the turn of the century, we had the opportunity to see whether having a TV in their bedroom when they were age 7 was, in any way, linked with a child being overweight when they were 11 years old. In other words, we wanted to get to grips with whether there were implications over a child’s lifetime of their screen use and if so, what those implications were.

Useful information

Using trained interviewers, the MCS collects a wide range of useful information including the independently measured height, weight and body fat of a child. These provided us with a set of obesity-related measurements: weight, Body Mass Index (BMI) and Fat Mass Index (FMI), a powerful set of measures for overweight and obesity.

When the children were age seven, parents were asked if their son or daughter had a TV in their bedroom, how many hours they spent watching TV or DVDs and how much time they spent playing on a computer.

 At age 7, more than half of the 12,556 boys and girls we looked at in our research had a TV in their room and it was these children who were more likely to be overweight when they turned 11 when we compared them with those without a TV. They were also more likely to have higher BMI and FMI. In total, a quarter of the boys and nearly a third of the girls were overweight at age 11 and the links between having a TV in the bedroom and overweight were stronger for the girls.

Another strength of the research is that we controlled for the child’s BMI at age 3 and maternal BMI, that way adjusting for genetic factors, as well as food environment in the family. We also adjusted for family income and mother’s education – both of which are important as overweight/obesity is socially patterned, as is TV use.

Interestingly, there was no link between overweight and the time a child, whether they were a boy or a girl, spent playing on a computer.

Clear link

So, given the size of our sample and the robustness of the methods employed here, we can say with considerable confidence that there is a clear link between having a TV in the bedroom as a young child and being overweight a few years down the line. For girls, this represents a 30 per cent increase in the risk of being overweight at 11 compared with their peers who do not have one. For boys the risk increases by around 20 per cent.

Another interesting point to note is that the size of this risk or effect is about the same as that of other things shown to be linked with obesity, such as not being breastfed and being physically inactive.

Nevertheless, policy makers looking to create and implement strategies to reduce obesity should certainly consider building access to television screens in children’s bedrooms into their thinking. Specific initiatives focused on young girls could also be important.

Meanwhile, for parents who may consider it a good idea for a young child to have their own TV in their bedroom or feel under pressure to provide one, the message is quite clear: resist the idea and you may be doing even more to set your child on a healthier path into their teenage years and beyond.

Longitudinal associations between television in the bedroom and body fatness in a UK cohort study is research by Anja Heilmann, Patrick Rouxel, Emla Fitzsimons, Yvonne Kelly, and Richard Watt and is published in the International Journal of Obesity.

Tackling the childhood obesity epidemic: Can regular bedtimes help?

Nearly one in five 10 and 11-year-olds in England is obese, according to NHS figures. With childhood obesity posing not just a nationwide, but a worldwide health threat, public health researchers around the globe are striving to establish which aspects of a young child’s life might set them on a path to being obese later on. Associate Professor Sarah Anderson from The Ohio State University College of Public Health and colleagues from University College London outline the first research to try to disentangle the role of children’s routines and behaviour at age 3 on obesity at age 11 and show that bedtime routines and learning to manage emotions really do matter.

The UK’s Chief Medical Officer Professor Dame Sally Davies has warned that the health of millions of children is in jeopardy and is concerned that being overweight is becoming the norm. She fears half the population could be obese by 2050 at a cost of billions of pounds to the health service and wider economy.

The latest statistics highlight a stark contrast between the wealthiest and poorest families, with childhood obesity rates in the most deprived areas more than double those in the most affluent areas.

Despite the publication in August 2016 of the Government’s long-awaited childhood obesity strategy, charities and health organisations remain highly critical, describing it as a watered-down effort that puts business interests ahead of those of public health. Even the recent introduction of the so-called ‘sugar-tax’ on soft drinks has been met with scepticism in some quarters.

To help inform public health strategies going forward, our researchers looked at the bedtime, mealtime and tv/video routines of very young children and their emotional and behavioural development to see if, at this early stage, it is possible to identify those most at risk of becoming obese.

The study includes information on nearly 11,000 children collected through the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). When the children were three, their parents reported whether children always, usually, sometimes, or never or almost never had a regular bedtime and mealtime, and the amount of television and video they watched each day.

They were also asked a series of questions about the child’s behaviour during the previous six months. Questions were about how children cope with emotions and their persistence and independence in play, including how easily the child became frustrated and whether they sought help from adults when faced with a difficult task. This was to get an idea of how well the child was able to ‘self-regulate’ their behaviour in these areas.

Regular routines

Children with regular bed and mealtimes and who watched less television were better able to control their emotions than their peers with less regular and consistent routines.

At 11-years-old, 6.2 per cent (682) of the children in the MCS were obese, with obesity more common in lower income and less educated families.

Of the routines we studied, inconsistent bedtime was most strongly associated with the risk of obesity, supporting recent findings by our UCL colleagues which showed that young children who skipped breakfast and went to bed at irregular times were more likely to be obese at age 11, stressing the importance of adequate sleep for preventing childhood obesity.

Even children who ‘usually’ had a regular bedtime were 20 per cent more likely to be obese than those who ‘always’ went to bed at around the same time.

Regular bedtimes and obesity

Surprisingly, toddlers with irregular meal times had a lower risk of obesity at age 11. Once other routines were factored in, television viewing was not related to obesity, although it is important to note that computer use was not taken into account, and the media environment for young children today is different than it was when children in MCS were young.

There was also a clear link between lower levels of emotional self-control in early childhood and obesity later on. Children with poor emotion regulation at age 3 were over 50 per cent more likely to be obese when studied at age 11.

Children’s level of persistence and independence was not linked to later obesity, however, and it is possible that this could be explained by the relative immaturity of the parts of the brain responsible for a child’s cognitive compared with their emotional development at this young age.

Strongest risk

Our study is the first to look at the relationship between a child’s routines, their ability to regulate their emotions and behaviour and how these factors work together to predict obesity.

The two strongest risk factors for obesity were irregular bedtime and a poor ability to control emotions and these were completely independent of each other. In other words, the link between bedtimes and obesity could not be explained away by a child’s inability to regulate their emotions.

There is a need to look more closely at the timing and regularity of children’s mealtimes and how they impact obesity later on, as we think there may be a lot more factors at play than we have considered here. We also need to better understand how the development of emotional and cognitive self-regulation interacts with metabolic, behavioural and social pathways to obesity.

However, our study supports previous research showing that children’s emotional regulation develops within a family context which includes routines.

One message from our study is crystal clear. To be effective, obesity strategies must target early childhood, and must find a way to support parents, especially those from the most deprived areas, to introduce and maintain consistent bedtimes and other home routines, as well as help children regulate emotions and respond to stress.

Another key message is that one size does not fit all. There is a lot going on in children’s lives that is important for their health and development. Saying that, it would seem that getting our children to bed at the same time every night could be a simple, cost-effective tool in the tool-kit to get them off to a good start and maybe in the larger battle against obesity.

Self-regulation and household routines at age three and obesity at age 11: Longitudinal analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study is research by Sarah Anderson from The Ohio State University College of Public Health; Amanda Sacker and Yvonne Kelly from University College London and Robert Whitaker of Temple University, Philadelphia.

Giving children the best possible start – what matters most?

Child of our Time Editor Yvonne Kelly spoke to a 500-strong audience of politicians and professionals in Gothenburg recently on what matters when it comes to giving children the best possible start in life.

Yvonne was the keynote speaker at the conference hoping to identify the best strategies for making Gothenburg a more equal and socially sustainable city.

Yvonne, Professor of Lifecourse Epidemiology at the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies at UCL  explained which factors are most closely linked with a child’s health and well-being and presented her research findings on children’s verbal skills, behaviour, bedtimes, reading and obesity.

Better start for children

Giving children the best possible start in life is the topic of a keynote talk today by our editor Yvonne Kelly.

Yvonne will be presenting a range of new evidence from the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies  to politicians, business leaders, and other professionals and key decision makers at an event discussing how Gothenburg can be made an equal and socially sustainable city.

Yvonne will talk about the factors which are most closely linked with a child’s health and well-being and present findings on children’s verbal skills, behaviour, bedtimes, reading and obesity. She will make the case that signs of social inequalities are evident early in a child’s life and that it is important to intervene early to tackle those inequalities.

BMI development and early adolescent psychosocial well-being

Research looking at how and when children become overweight is helping to shed new light on ongoing efforts by the Government and others to tackle the childhood obesity epidemic.

A team of researchers at the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies at UCL has also been asking whether children who are overweight are more likely to go on to smoke and drink alcohol and if their mental health suffers as they become adolescents.

The research, published in Pediatrics, shows clearly that when it comes to the likelihood of a child becoming overweight or obese in the first decade of their life, there are many more influences than just sugar (a main plank in the Government’s Childhood Obesity Strategy).

The research also shows that  influences are at play in families even before children are born and indicates that helping pregnant women to stop smoking and maintain a healthy weight, making sure all young children have healthy eating and sleeping routines may be key, together with targeted support for ethnic and social groups identified as being most at risk.

Lead researcher, Yvonne Kelly presented the findings at the Society for Longitudinal and Life Course Studies 2016 conference in Bamberg.

A bedtime story

Reading is key to giving children the best possible start in life. That’s what Child of our Time Editor Professor Yvonne Kelly will be telling representatives of the Swedish Government and European Commission today when she delivers the key note presentation at a seminar highlighting the importance and benefits of early interventions in children’s lives.

The seminar in Brussels has been organised by the City of Gothenburg in Sweden as part of its efforts to achieve the political goal of becoming an equal city and of its commitment to reduce inequalities.

Yvonne will be sharing research by herself and colleagues at the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies looking at factors associated with children’s poor verbal skills and behaviour problems. The research shows the links between regular bedtimes and reading with children and better outcomes for them in terms of behaviour and how well they get on at school.

Organisers of the event hope their efforts will encourage other cities in Europe to join them in their ambition to create health equality and a good start in life for all.

Photo credit: Lars Plougmann