Children appear to suffer more from sleep apnea than adults, because they have smaller lungs. This means they have less oxygen in reserve, and, as a result, children take frequent, shallow breaths rather than slow, deep breaths. When this occurs, it can cause a child to have too much carbon dioxide in their blood.
To make matters worse, adults have fragmented sleep where they briefly wake up after their breathing stops, but children don’t do that. When pauses in breathing occur, children don’t wake up in response. Instead, they have a higher “arousal threshold” than adults, which can make their sleep patterns normal with sleep apnea. In order to help our children, let’s look at some of the signs and symptoms of sleep apnea: