The children do not grow little by little, in plan a millimeter every day, but from one day to another, or in a couple of days, they are able to grow the odd centimeter.
Surely on more than one occasion you have put some pants on your son and you have noticed that suddenly they are small. It may even be that one day your daughter tells you how much her feet hurt with the slippers she had been wearing the day before.
Well, it seems that a relationship has been found between these growth spurts or "stretches" of children and sleep, since the days when children seem not to want to wake up, those in which you think "how strange, well yes, he is sleeping today", their bodies could be taking advantage to gain height.
To reach this conclusion, a study was carried out involving 23 parents who kept a daily record of their children's sleep and height (14 girls and 9 boys), whose age at the beginning of the study was only 12 days old In total they scored 5,798 sleep records which were assessed with the data obtained on the growth of babies.
It was observed that the children's sleep hours were irregular, since from time to time the amount of daily sleep increased by an average of 4.5 hours (spread between night and naps), for two days in a row.
In those two days in which the babies added a total of 9 hours of sleep (more) than other days they did not observed a greater probability of doing a stretch in growth. The researchers quantified that the probability of a stretch occurring increased by 43 percent for each episode of additional sleep of babies and at 20 percent for every extra hour of sleep.
According to Dr. Michelle Lampl, one of the researchers:
The results empirically demonstrate that growth stretch not only occurs during sleep, but is significantly influenced by sleep.
The relationship between sleep and growth is not yet clear. It is known that during sleep the growth hormone secretion increases, but as it has been observed the important thing does not seem to be the regularity of babies' sleep, but the hours they get to sleep.
Given this news, I now imagine parents trying to get their children to sleep a few more hours so they can grow more. The hard part will be that they get it, because the children sleep what they need, no more no less. Some do it especially at night, when it is ideal for everyone, and others more irregular (but who grow the same), share the dream between night and day (some babies even sleep more during the day than at night), which makes the parents go more zombies, without affecting the baby at all.
