My 11-year-old loves to go to the coffeeshop with her middle school friends. Chai latte is the drink of choice, and it includes a dose of caffeine. If it’s a Starbucks grande chai latte, that’s 95 milligrams.
Most kids don’t drink coffee until adolescence, but there are many sources of caffeine available to them before then: soda (38 milligrams in a 12-ounce can of Pepsi), bottled iced tea (60 milligrams in an 18.5-ounce bottle of Lipton Pure Leaf), energy drinks (80 milligrams in a can of Red Bull) and even Hershey’s kisses (1 milligram in each of the little candies).
Should parents worry about how much caffeine their kids are consuming? The effect that I get from my cup of coffee — a clearing out of the cobwebs in my head as I set about my morning — doesn’t sound all that risky.
However, caffeine is a stimulant — a naturally occurring one in coffee, tea and chocolate, but a drug nonetheless. Besides sparking mental alertness, it also increases heart rate and blood pressure and keeps you awake when maybe you should be sleeping. Sometimes it can cause agitation, stomach upset and heart palpitations.
And those are only the immediate effects. Scientists don’t know what caffeine’s long-term effects might be in children.
“What does it do to an 8-year-old’s cardiovascular system? Or her brain?” asks Judith Owens, director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital. “There’s really no reason for kids to have caffeine.”
And yet American kids are eating and drinking caffeine-containing products. Results from annual surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 73 percent of Americans ages 2-22 consume caffeine on any given day. In the first survey year, 1999-2000, 63 percent of it came from soda, but that declined to 38 percent in the last survey year, 2009-10.
Over that same time frame, the proportion of caffeine coming from coffee increased from 10 percent to 24 percent, and caffeine from energy drinks grew from nothing to 6 percent.
How much is too much? Unlike U.S. agencies, Health Canada makes caffeine recommendations: no more than 400 milligrams per day for healthy adults, and no more than 300 for pregnant or breast-feeding women.
And for kids? A 45-milligram limit for kids ages 4-6, 62.5 milligrams for kids ages 7-9 and 85 for kids ages 10-12. For adolescents, the recommended limit is 2.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.
Owens scoured the scientific literature for studies of how caffeine affects kids and published a paper last year in the journal Nutrition Reviews.
Caffeine does reduce sleepiness, she says. This might be handy for a high school student tackling a mountain of homework. But later, “you’ll have more trouble falling asleep and more sleep disruptions through the night,” she said.
A study of 191 Ohio middle schoolers found that caffeine intake varied from zero to 800 milligrams per day, with an average of 53 milligrams per day. Students in the study reported their sleep patterns and consumption of caffeine-containing foods for 14 days in a row. Higher caffeine intake was associated with shorter sleep duration at night, increased wakings at night and increased sleeping during the day.
The energy boost is a key reason many adults drink coffee. If you watch commercials for energy drinks, you might be convinced of their capacity to improve just about every aspect of your life. The marketing of energy drinks causes as much concern among caffeine researchers and pediatricians as the ingredients in these beverages, which also include sugar and herbal extracts.
In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a policy statement declaring that “energy drinks have no place in the diet of children and adolescents.”
Caffeine can also affect mood — in both positive and negative ways. Silk’s study also found that the kids with depression reported more anxiety on the days they consumed more caffeine.
Caffeine in food
A listing of the caffeine content of various foods and drinks can be found at , a website of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
