Mobile phones and video games 'are depriving children of sleep'

Mobile phones, computers and other such gadgets in the bedroom are seriously disrupting the sleeping patterns of a growing number of children, a study has found.

Mobile phones, computers and other such gadgets in the bedroom are seriously disrupting the sleeping patterns of a growing number of children, a study has found.

Reading a book under the bedclothes with a torch has now been replaced by insidious distractions such as video games and mobile phones used for late-night text messages. 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."

Dr Van den Bulck has conducted extensive research into how gadgets in the bedroom affect the sleeping patterns of children and found that it was not only television that had an impact. He said: "People have always been concerned about television and more and more children have their own TV sets in their room. I started to think that we have to look at more things than just television.

"I get the impression that parents think that anything to do with computers means that their child is probably learning something, even if they are actually only using computer games."

In his survey of 2,546 children from a random sample of 15 schools in Flanders, Dr Van den Bulck found that children with televisions and game computers in their rooms went to bed significantly later on weekdays than those without such gadgets. Other leisure activities involving a more structured use of time - such as evening sport sessions - had little or no influence on the amount of sleep a child received.

Children can, to some extent, compensate for sleep lost during the week by sleeping in during the weekend. But this did not appear to happen with children kept awake by hi-tech gadgets.

"If you lose sleep because you play too many computer games or you sleep more lightly because you get too many phone messages I cannot really see the positive side to it," Dr Van den Bulck said.

"Sleep patterns change and develop constantly during adolescence. Changes in sleep patterns have been linked to numerous problems including daytime sleepiness, behaviour problems and even accidents."