According to a new study in the journal of Pediatrics, smartphones will take away sleeping hours from your children if you allow them to sleep with it.
The children sleep less on the average compared to kids who sleep without their smartphones, according to the study in the publication.
"I don't think that all screen time is ubiquitously bad, but definitely recreational screen time should be limited. Parents can set a screen or device curfew one hour before bedtime," Jennifer Falbe, a researcher at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health and the lead author on the paper, said in the journal.
Fourth-graders and seventh-graders who go to bed without their mobiles will enjoy more sleep at an average of 20.6 minutes more than those who do, Falbe said.
On the other hand, children with a TV set in their room will only lose an average of 18 minutes of their normal sleeping pattern compared to those who don't even have a TV in the room.
The research showed that small screens have a more negative effect in terms of sleep loss compared to big screens.
Falbe said that she was not a bit surprised by the results.
"It was actually exactly what I expected," she said.
The study comes from the information gathered in 2012 involving more than 2000 fourth and seventh grader schoolchildren who were ethnically and racially diverse from two schools located in Massachusetts.
Falbe and her colleagues reported that of those who were interviewed, fifty four percent said they go to sleep with a small screen beside them. It was observed that they were more likely to sleep less than their schoolmates and also grumbled about their poor quality of sleep. The presence of a TV in the room led to less sleep, but it did not affect the quality of their sleep as they observed, according to the report.
The research paper lists three possibilities for explaining why small screens caused more sleep deprivation than its large screen counterparts.
