![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() For example, an inconsistent bedtime routine, need for parental presence after lights out or expectation of being lulled to sleep in the car can interfere with natural patterns, says Mindell. They treat a range of disorders, including sleep terrors, night-waking and sleep apnea, and Mindell estimates that about 30 to 40 percent of the problems they see are behavior-related. The multidisciplinary team includes professionals from pulmonology, neurology and psychiatry. Mindell has turned her research findings into practice through her work at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, where she is part of a team that runs a half-day sleep disorders clinic for children 0 to 18 years old once a week. "The real issue is whether they can return to sleep on their own." "All children wake during the night," she says. In other words, once a child is able to fall asleep without parental assistance-such as being rocked or nursed to sleep-the same skill generalizes to naturally occurring night-wakings. Mindell's early research focused on the basics: What helps children fall asleep? How do they stay asleep through the night? What she found was that within two weeks of infants and children being able to fall asleep independently at bedtime, they naturally begin sleeping through the night. Parents aren't the only ones thirsty for sleep solutions: Pediatricians and other children's health professionals grapple with sleep problems daily in their practice, and research shows that nearly 25 percent of young children experience some kind of sleep problem that can significantly affect their functioning and well-being. "And what's more, she is able to bridge the gap between the researcher and the academic journals and jargon and the general public and their right, and need, to know."Īfter graduate school, Mindell had no trouble shaping her career around her newfound passion for infant and toddler sleep. "She is, in my mind, the foremost expert on babies and sleep," says psychologist James Maas, PhD, an expert on adult sleep disorders at Cornell University. And through her public education efforts with companies like Johnson & Johnson and Parents magazine, she has been able to share her expertise with thousands of parents and children's health professionals. Joseph's University-has established a reputation for having one of the most successful techniques for getting children to sleep soundly through the night. Through her research and clinical work, Mindell-who is also a professor of psychology at St. What started as brainstorming ways to help Jonathan sleep led to a groundbreaking career in pediatric sleep for Mindell, who is now the associate director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where she treats infants, children and teenagers. ![]() "So we decided-to his wife's chagrin-to experiment a little on Jonathan," she says. The "crying-it-out" theory of Harvard pediatrician Richard Ferber, MD, had just gained national attention, but psychologists hadn't jumped on the bandwagon yet. To their surprise, there was little research on pediatric sleep in the psychology journals. "Exhausted, he told me to 'go to the journals, and find whatever you can on this,'" Mindell recalls. His newborn son, Jonathan, wasn't sleeping at night-so neither were he and his wife. Mark Durand, PhD, came to her one day bleary-eyed and desperate for any information on babies and sleep. When Jodi Mindell, PhD, was a graduate student at the State University of New York at Albany in the mid-1980s, her adviser, V. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |