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Sleep

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Pediatrician's Guide to Discussing Research with Patients

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Abstract

Parents commonly raise concerns about their children’s sleep. Childhood sleep problems cause negative short- and long-term outcomes. Parents also suffer when their children’s sleep problems disrupt, shorten, or otherwise fragment their sleep. Sleep problems can be medical, psychological, and behavioral in nature, and are further affected by cultural, social, and familial norms. As such, they are highly subjective; sleep behaviors that present a problem in one household—such as co-sleeping—are the accepted practice in another. Children outgrow some sleep problems, but not all. Parents and primary care physicians must differentiate between problems that will remit without intervention and those requiring attention. Parents experience disruptive bedtime routines as draining nightly struggles to put children to sleep are a considerable source of stress and lead to delayed sleep onset. Parents strive to ensure their children attain sufficient sleep despite the lack of a research-driven consensus on the amount of sleep children require. In this chapter, we offer the most recent evidence for physician’s information regarding the negative effects associated with a sleep-deprived child, the use of antihistamines or other medications to promote sleep, and the controversy surrounding efficacious, evidence-based behavioral interventions for promoting sleep in children (i.e., sleep training, also called “cry-it-out”).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Child Study Center, NYU Langone Medical Center, New York, New York, USA

    Christina A. Di Bartolo

  2. Department of Pediatrics, The Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, New York, USA

    Maureen K. Braun

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  1. Christina A. Di Bartolo
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  2. Maureen K. Braun
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Correspondence to Christina A. Di Bartolo .

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Di Bartolo, C.A., Braun, M.K. (2017). Sleep. In: Pediatrician's Guide to Discussing Research with Patients. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49547-7_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49547-7_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49546-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49547-7

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