Roxanne Prichard, psychology and neuroscience professor, recently spoke to Sleep.com about the bedtime woes that follow this spooky, sugar-filled, late-night holiday.
From the story:
For some parents, the horror of Halloween isn’t the scary movies or haunted houses, it’s trying to get kids to bed after they’ve eaten their weight in candy. But even if you become the treat police and cut your kids off from sugar-fueled frenzy, you might have other slumber-disrupting monsters to contend with. After all, the sugar lurking within your kids’ trick-or-treat haul is just one of many things that could make it hard for them to drift off on Halloween. ...
This is a lot for the body to process when it should be resting. But just how bad that is for kids’ sleep isn’t entirely clear.
“The relationship between sugar and sleep is complicated,” explains Roxanne Prichard, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. “The only aspect of diet that’s been linked to sleep problems in children is sugar-sweetened beverages,” she added, explaining that since those beverages often contain caffeine as well, it can be difficult to determine what’s causing the sleep troubles.
