How Blue Light Is Affecting Your Children’s Sleep and Health and Here’s What to Do about It

2 What you need to now about melatonin and blue light

Melatonin is secreted from the pineal gland a few hours before bedtime. Melatonin secretion reaches its peak at around midnight. When you start reading on a device that emits a blue light such as a tablet or an E-reader even in the evening, it will delay your onset of sleep. Those exposed to such blue light also experience poor REM sleep which is the stage of sleep when dreams occur. This means that even if you sleep for eight hours, you still wake up feeling you’ve not had much sleep.

It would be a good idea to take a strict decision and impose a curfew on the use of all electronic devices at home two hours before sleeping. In older kids you can relax that to an hour before bed. This will help their bodies to produce the melatonin as usual. Should it be an absolute necessity in the case of completing homework, you should make them dim the light on the screen.

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3 Here’s what you need to do

As surprising as this sounds, light does affect your sleep. After sunset, your biological clock signals the body to prepare for the melatonin production and release. Thus it would be a great idea to avoid blue bulbs as night lights in bedrooms and bathrooms even if they are energy efficient. Use dimmer lights or red lights instead as red has a higher wavelength and will not suppress melatonin.

Where your kid’s electronic devices are concerned, it would be a good idea to install an app that may change the color of the screen to red or yellows after sunset. Now that you know blue light delays sleep, here’s what you need to do for your child’s health.

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• Expose your kids to sunlight or blue-rich white light in the morning
• Reduce the exposure to blue-rich and bright light in the evenings or two hours before sleep
• Shut off all electronic devices two hours before sleep
• Avoid reading from e-readers as they too are bad for health and sleep
• Avoid sleeping with lights on, darkness or a dim red light at a distance away is perfect for a sleeping environment.