HOME HEALTH GUIDE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 4, 29 July 1946, Page 8

HOME HEALTH GUIDE

YOUR CHILD AND HIS SLEEP (By the Department of Health) Medical officers at school medical inspections still go on finding a proportion of children kept back in development and physique by lack of sleep. The tragedy about this is that many parents do not recognise the cause and are inclined to be doubting Thomases. Nobody has yet solved the growing problem without adequate sleep. But about one parent in every ten in this country is careless about the child’s sleep. The result—too many class—two children in our land.

It is not much use laying down hard and fast rules. Nevertheless nobody came to grief by following grandma’s injunction of 8 hours’ sleep for grown ups, 12 hours’ for growing children, and 10 hours for the early ’teen years. Even if there were not sleep all the time, at least the child was resting in bed. Here is a good way to determine your own child’s needs. If he gets out of bed in the morning full of life and spirits, bright-eyed and on the go, his sleep has been sufficient. If it’s hard to get him up, if he’s heavy-eyed and lackadaisical in the mornings, and if he’s obviously tired in the late afternoons, scratchy and perhaps quarrelsome, then you should wonder if he is short of sleep. He will be unless you see to a regular bedtime. Whether it is light still or not, the child should be in bed at the proper time. Irregular sleep means below-par bodies. You may say “Well, the child doesn’t go off to sleep when sent at the proper time.” But he will only get more tired, and he is resting while waiting to go to sleep. Regularity of time soon encourages and develops regularity of sleep, and the waiting period soon gets shorter.

MEXOTHONE—THE SELECTOR An amazing new weed-killer has been discovered which selects the weeds and leaves the crops unaffected. It was described recently by Dr. Templeman, of the Imperial Chemical Industries’ Agricultural Station, Angland, who said that it promises to increase the yield of foodstuffs in Great Britain by as much as a million tons a year. Mexothone, as this new chemical is called, is applied to the land as a dust or spray, and should be available to farmers next year.