NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Infants who do not get enough sleep during the night do not appear to be at risk of cognitive or motor development problems, according to a Canadian study.
The study pointed out that training children to sleep most of the night is one of the problems faced by new parents, while previous research indicates that lack of adequate sleep may lead to a number of problems of growth in children.
But little is known about whether the growth of children is affected by the number of hours of sleep without interruption during the night.
In this study, the researchers looked at 388 pairs of mothers and infants, asked women about their mood and hours of sleep, and assessed the cognitive and motor development of infants at 6 months, 12 months and 36 months.
"We found that a high proportion of children between the ages of 6 and 13 months do not sleep at night, and that this is not related to children's growth or mood," said Mary Helen Benistre, a senior researcher at McGill University in Montreal.
"Parents should not be concerned if their child does not sleep overnight by the sixth month," she said.
