Consequences of Sleep Loss or Sleep Disruption in Children

There are well-established consequences of sleep loss and sleep disruption in children. These consequences include daytime sleepiness and fatigue, reduced alertness, and compromised performance in specific neurobehavioral domains. Most of the well-established consequences have been supported by experimental studies using sleep restriction or similar manipulations for demonstrating these causal effects. Many other studies provided correlative data on the associations between sleep problems and insufficient sleep and compromised neurobehavioral functioning or other behavioral characteristics including mood and emotion regulation. These associations should be considered cautiously because of multiple potential causal links between sleep and other behavioral systems.