January 5, 2004
Mobile phones and video games 'are depriving children of sleep'
Mobile phones, computers and other such gadgets are seriously disrupting the sleeping patterns of a growing number of children, according to a Beglian study, reported by The Independent.
"A survey of more than 2,500 teenagers found that many of them were losing sleep, particularly as a result of the boom in the popularity of "texting" with mobile phones.
Jan Van den Bulck, a senior lecturer in psychology at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, found that text messages interrupted the sleep of most adolescents and that up to one in five said they were awakened regularly by friends texting late at night.
Dr Van den Bulck said: "These preliminary findings suggest that mobile telephones may be having a major impact on the quality of sleep of a growing number of adolescents. The threat to healthy sleep patterns is potentially more important than the threat posed by entertainment media. The latter mainly appear to influence time to bed, while mobile phones actually seem to lead to interrupted sleep.
"It's not so much whether they are disturbed in their sleep by being awakened. If they take their phone with them and leave it switched on, they sleep at a different level because they are constantly aware of the phone."
See previous article on the Belgian study and a similar study conducted in Australia:
-- Children text at night instead of sleeping
And just for fun, in Textually's Year End Review, I rounded up in an entry entitled Cell Phones' Bad Rap, a list all sorts of things cell phones were blamed for last year - from making children fat, to triggering the onset of Alzheimer to being responsible for a new form of addiction disorder as well as leading to sexually transmitted diseases.
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