Children who live in communities within Arlington, Dallas, Mesquite, Carrollton-Farmers Branch, and Fort Worth Independent School Districts have the highest rates of sleep insecurity in Texas, according to a new report.
The Rest & Resilience: Securing Children’s Well-Being Through Sleep study by Children at Risk and Mattress Firm determined that an estimated 30,160 children live in sleep-insecure households in Tarrant County, and an estimated 29,065 children live in sleep-insecure households in Dallas County.
“The reason we are focused on sleep inequity is that we want to come at it from a racial and economic disparity issue, which has to do with policies at the state and the federal levels that affect families,” said Jessica Bundage, a Racial Equity Collaborative program coordinator with Children at Risk. “There is only so much parents can do because they’re working multiple shifts or they’re having to move houses, and that goes back to policies at the state and federal levels.”
Children at Risk is a research and advocacy organization that applies its research around children’s issues to state-level policy recommendations in Texas.
Sleep deprivation is a short-term condition, while sleep inequity is the gap in sleep quality between those who have sleep insecurity and those who are sleep secure, according to Bundage. Sleep quality refers to uninterrupted sleep that proceeds through restoration cycles.
“There are several factors that could impact sleep inequity for children, from environmental factors, such as light and noise pollution, to lack of a bedtime routine or a quality bed. These can all create sleep disparities,” said Kindel Nuño, Mattress Firm executive vice president and general counsel. “It’s essential for a child’s development and performance in school to get adequate rest every night.
According to the National Survey of Children’s Health, 34.9% of individuals between the ages of 4 months and 17 years receive less sleep than recommended for their age group.
The study further found that African American children had later bedtimes on average and therefore got fewer hours of sleep compared to their white counterparts. Additionally, households with food insecurity issues are less likely to implement a bedtime routine.
“There are local non-profits that work with families to provide them with access to beds for their children,” Nuño told The Dallas Express. “Mattress Firm frequently partners with those organizations to make donations to families and, in some cases, through direct requests for support via our website.”
The issue of sleep insecurity in vulnerable children is not a new phenomenon, according to Dr. Bohnhoff.
“There are so many issues in families who are experiencing adversity that we have not had a chance to study them all in any detail,” she said. “As long as we are chasing the symptoms, we are less likely to heal these issues at their root cause, which is the trauma and adversity families experience in daily life.”
What’s at stake, according to Bundage, is not just performance in school. The study linked insufficient sleep with increased instances of oppositionality and rule-breaking behavior.
“We’ve definitely found that sleep insecurity and sleep issues contribute to not paying attention as well as behavioral issues,” she said. “A child who misbehaves may be misbehaving because they only slept 3 hours the night before. Send them to the nurse’s office to take a nap if that’s a possibility for the school.”
To end sleep insecurity for children, Dr. Bohnhoff suggests a holistic approach.
“It’s important to create, implement, and evaluate programs that address the well-being of the entire family and the communities they live in,” she said.
The study includes policy recommendations such as eliminating daylight savings time and adjusting school start times to 8:30 a.m.
“School start time was the number one complaint that we got in all of these cities that we researched,” Bundage said in an interview. “Many elementary schools start at 7:00, 7:25, and 7:30, and feedback from a lot of people was that it’s too early for children. They come to school tired and barely making it through the first few hours of class.”
Another policy recommendation is to increase opportunities for children to be active.
“They need recess time and access to green spaces so that they can be active and exert their energy in different ways,” Bundage added. “Living in unsafe areas that experience higher levels of crime and have a lower sense of safety is usually linked to no nearby green spaces and no nearby grocery stores. We saw that across all the different regions we studied where it’s the neighborhoods themselves that have so many external factors contributing to sleep insecurity.