Not only does the full moon change the tides or cast a romantic glow, it also changes your children's behavior - somewhat.
If there's one thing we've learned during the 1969 landing on the moon, it's that the moon is Earth's satellite. But when it comes to folklore, the heavenly object takes a different form. For example, it may induce lunacy or the lunar effect, a strange phenomenon where people are believed to become more violent and act weirdly during full moon.
This strong odd connection between astronomy and behavior is enough for international researchers to gather together and focus on the moon's effect on children.
Wearing accelerometers on the waist 24 hours for at least seven days, over 5,800 children ages 9 to 11 from 12 countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, China, and Kenya were observed.
Using the device, the researchers monitored the children's sleeping habits and level of activity at night during different phases of the moon, namely, full moon, new moon closest to the full moon, and half moon from September 2011 to December 2013.
The data published in Frontiers in Pediatrics journal revealed that while children are no more active during full moon than in any other lunar phases, full moon may actually interfere with their sleeping time, which may be due to its brightness, "especially if the window curtain is not sufficiently opaque," said the study.
However, sleep is just reduced to a mere 4.9 minutes per night. Considering that children around this age may sleep at least 9 hours a night, the amount of sleeping time missed during full moon doesn't even reach 1 percent.
This simply means that children don't necessarily turn into werewolves come full moon. Nevertheless, the lack of sleep may be caused by something else.
One, sleep quality may be disturbed if the children have been exposed to lead when they were young. Children who like to thumb their mobile phones, tablets, or laptops during bedtime for at least half an hour may also lose some sleep quality by altering the way their brain is conditioned prior to snoozing.
"We found a delay of 30 minutes in the generation of the restorative slow waves during sleep in the iPad condition," said Janne Gronli, a professor at University of Bergen in Norway.
