Next week, March 1-8 marks National Sleep Awareness Week, a time to take a look at our own sleep habits. Do your family members get enough sleep? Are you getting quality sleep? If not, is your disrupted sleep affecting day-to-day activities? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, it’s important to note that sleep is a key component to our health, performance, safety and quality of life. Sleep is just as important as exercise and good nutrition! Adults should sleep between seven and nine hours a night and adolescents on average should be sleeping approximately nine hours a night. Toddlers and newborns should be sleeping even more than that!

Unfortunately, 39 percent of Americans are sleep deprived and are sleeping less than the recommended hours of sleep each night. Two-thirds of all children experience at least one sleep problem a couple of nights a week and nearly one-third of children younger than 10 wake up at least once a night needing attention. Only 20 percent of adolescents are getting the recommended hours of sleep each night, and more than 50 percent of teenagers surveyed reported that they feel tired during the day. This can lead to adverse effects such as being late to or absent from school, falling asleep in school, being too tired to exercise, or driving while drowsy. Also sleep deprivation can be associated with hormonal changes that lead to weight gain.

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Have you ever wondered how it is that we know so much about many of the injuries and illnesses that occur in children? Did you ever think about how a medication was developed to treat cancer, epilepsy, asthma, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or Crohn’s Disease? How in the world did physicians figure out how to treat and repair heart defects in newborns?

The answer is clinical research. You are very important in the effort to discover causes and cures for the medical issues we deal with every day at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin.

Children are not just small adults. They are quite different in how they act, think, get sick or injured and respond to treatments. Still, the majority of our treatments used in sick kids only have been clinically proven in adults. The rules for clinical research have, until recently, not allowed much drug testing in children. As a result, most drugs used in kids today are just lower doses of adult medications.

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Did you know that every month 100 Milwaukee County children enter foster care? Right now, there are approximately 2,600 children in foster care. These children come from diverse backgrounds and have a wide range of needs. What they have in common is a need for a nurturing, temporary place to call home. In our work as adoption and foster care advocates, we see how the lives of children and families have been affected when a family is in distress. But we also see what good can happen when a community pulls together and helps a family through difficult times.

That is one of the reasons the recruitment team at Children’s Service Society of Wisconsin and some of the foster/adoption staff has teamed up to work together to make connections in the community. We are stepping out of our normal job duties to develop a comprehensive grassroots initiative to move towards solving some of the major issues in our community revolving around child welfare. (more…)