Hong Kong’s sleepless children will lack creativity, study warns
Survey finds about a third of youngsters don’t get enough sleep, prompting doctors to warn of the dangers to memory and growth hormones
About one in three school pupils in Hong Kong lack adequate sleep and this could impair their creativity, according to a study that has prompted doctors to urge parents to rethink loading their children with even more activities.
The survey of over 1,800 children by Caritas Youth and Community Service came on the back of another study released to mark Children’s Day today that found fewer Hong Kong children said they were happy compared to eight years ago.
In January and February this year, Caritas social workers sent out questionnaires for 1,838
Primary Five and Six pupils about their homework load, sleep habits and perceptions of their creativity.
It found a correlation of respondents who slept longer tending to give themselves higher scores for their creativity compared with those who spent longer on homework giving lower scores on creativity.
The survey found more than a third, or 34.8 per cent, of the children slept on average for six to seven hours on a school day. It also found 37.5 per cent of them had to do an average of seven to eight pieces of homework a day.
