Shacking off on sleep

At 8.30pm, the six-year-old was playing basketball in the park with his baseball cap jammed backwards on his head. I gratefully noted that no other mothers bore witness to my slack parenting as they were presumably at home, relaxing with a glass of wine, while their clever little darlings snored upstairs.

Our bedtime routine - thanks to the disruptive influence of older brothers - has crumbled from being a brisk military-style operation (Codename: Processing The Kids) into a shambolic free-for-all, with a thousand excuses for wakefulness ranging from hay fever and cricket matches to forgotten but urgent homework, sudden-onset 99% plausible ailments and sobbing hysteria because the cat isn't asleep on one's bed.

This slide into anarchy would be a minor inconvenience, merely blacking out more of the parental arrow-slit window of leisure time, were it not for the ghastly news from researchers at University College London who have discovered that irregular bedtimes at an early age have a negative impact on children's intelligence.

They studied more than 11000 children, whose parents were questioned about the night-time routine when their offspring were three, five and seven. Youngsters whose bedtimes were unscheduled had disrupted circadian rhythms and suffered sleep deprivation, thus limiting the brain's ability to absorb and retain information.

Guiltily, I recall that when my six-year-old's teacher introduced a basic maths concept to the class, he cried: "Miss Farrar, you're blowing my mind!"

I'm forced to admit that wildly zigzagging bedtimes have caused my children cognitive blips. The eight-year-old recently identified a pigeon on our balcony as a chicken, and Oscar, 11, forgot his cousin's name. But the most glaring deterioration is in mood: if any child retires 60 minutes later than is ideal, the following day brings tears over such disasters as a "too squashy" satsuma, an upsurge in fighting and explosions of "I hate you".

Scouring the report, I pray that exhaustion-induced stupidity is reversible - alas, it looks unlikely. Aged seven, the children were tested on reading, maths and spatial awareness. Those with an irregular bedtime at the age of three performed relatively poorly in all tests, suggesting their intellectual development had been stunted at a critical period.

Lead researcher Professor Yvonne Kelly concluded in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health: "Relations between inconsistent bedtimes may have knock-on effects for health and broader social outcomes throughout the life course."

Nothing too serious, then.

However, searching the data for loopholes, I find that varying bedtimes aged five had no negative effect on later intelligence.

This research is important, but for more parents the gist of it can hardly be news. We all have anecdotal evidence of exhaustion rendering the juvenile brain witless. Few parents of three-year-olds have greater priorities than enforcing a prompt bedtime. But children aren't robots. Despite a bath and story, our middle child tottered downstairs every night until he was five.

At some ungodly hour, sir would conk out, but in the marital bed.

In a perfect world, my children would be unconscious by 8pm. In real life, they're knocking about on a cricket pitch - and when they come home, they expect a story. Reading can eat into sleeping time, with no ill effects.

The six-year-old was so enchanted by The Secret Garden, he took a scrap of paper to school on which he'd scrawled "th'art".

"It means 'you are' in Yorkshire," he told Miss Farrar.

I feel passionately about the intelligence benefits of evenings in a field, crowned by a pink and gold sunset. It's the same when the children snuggle with their father in front of a documentary about restoring cars.

Good, solid sleep is crucial to brain plasticity, but rigid routine is not the sole route to smart children. Spontaneity also develops the intellect. As the bleary-eyed eight-year-old remarked, after joyously playing out late with friends: "If we didn't have imagination, we'd still be in caveman times." - © The Daily Telegraph