How melatonin can mess with kids sleep and may impact memory, learning and emotional development

Almost half of American parents give their kids melatonin to help them sleep.Could it actually be doing the opposite?A new study suggests that melatonin, the second-most popular supplement for kids after multivitamins, may reduce the time they spend in a critical phase of sleep that affects memory, learning, and emotional development.Melatonin use has exploded over the last 20 years.

While it’s thought of as a “natural” solution to get restless kids to bed, there’s growing concern about long-term use and side effects like nightmares.Perhaps what’s most concerning is that because it’s a supplement and not tested for safety or efficacy by the FDA, the actual dose delivered to kids has been shown to be anywhere between only 74% to nearly 3.5 times the dose on the label.“Melatonin is a hormone that our body naturally produces,” said Dr.Daniel Bigman, child adolescent psychiatry attending physician at Northwell’s Zucker Hillside Hospital and Cohen Children’s Medical Center. “So, whenever there is anything that we give to children that can alter hormones, that can cause a kind of a domino effect with things in our body.”The new study looked at how 684 children slept with a polysomnogram, which looks at different stages of sleep.“It looks at if our sleep is interrupted, how we breathe, and so forth,” Bigman said.

“This study looked at the difference between children taking melatonin and those who do not.”Researchers found that children who took melatonin had less rapid eye movement sleep, aka REM sleep, overall compared to kids who didn’t take the supplement.“REM sleep is also thought of as the dream stage, or the dream sleep, because this is where most of us will experience dreams,” Bigman said.More importantly, there’s evidence that this stage of sleep is crucial for memory, learning, and emotional development.Research indicates drugs like antidepressants and ADHD medication that affect REM sleep could hurt young brains’ dev...