Macon nonprofit and MGA team up to study effects of childhood bedlessness

In a Macon bedroom scattered with Spider-Man drawings and learning worksheets, something was missing.

The room belongs to Camden, a 6-year-old boy. As Brian Cornett and his team surveyed the superhero headquarters last week, they discussed the best place to put the gift they had brought.

Their delivery did not come wrapped in a bow, but in a ready-to-be-built, six-piece set. 

What Cornett and his team had brought to Camden was something that most of us take for granted: a bed.

Cornett serves as co-president of the Macon chapter of Sleep in Heavenly Peace, a nonprofit that builds beds for kids in need of them.

“This is literally a crisis that you can walk right past and not even put two and two together,” Cornett said. “We’re just now getting to the point where people are realizing that this is a problem in our community.” 

According to the Georgia Family Connection Partnership, 23.6% of children in the state live in poverty. More than 750 children in Macon are on the waitlist for beds, the local Sleep in Heavenly Peace chapter says.

Cornett’s nonprofit delivers more than 500 beds on average every year to children in the area. The organization targets “bedlessness” because it has concluded that there’s a tie to a child’s well-being and academic success. 

Sleep in Heavenly Peace’s efforts caught the eye of Middle Georgia State University’s Kristi Roberts-Lewis, who met members of the nonprofit at a Chamber of Commerce event.

“We started having a conversation with them, learning more about their mission goals and objectives, and I said, ‘I love this,’” said Roberts-Lewis, executive director of the school’s Center for Middle Georgia Studies. “We learned that this notion of child bedlessness likely has some connection to their academic performance.” 

Roberts-Lewis explained that bedlessness can look very different from case-to-case. To the untrained eye, the problem can be almost invisible. 

“You go spend a night at grandma’s and all the cousins come and everybody makes a palette,” Roberts-Lewis said. “You’re on the floor, and you’re having a great time, but that isn’t necessarily quality sleep.” 

Roberts-Lewis and her research team signed a contract in June with Sleep in Heavenly Peace to conduct formal research on the effects of bedlessness.

It will be an uphill battle for the research team. 

As of now, there aren’t any major studies that link bedlessness to children’s moods and behaviors, Roberts-Lewis said. Although Sleep in Heavenly Peace has done a small amount of their own data collecting, it hasn’t been enough to net major funding for the project.

“They really were not able to, in those initial kinds of documents, create enough evidence and identify variables that would allow them to be able to connect receiving a bed and the impact on those key areas,” Roberts-Lewis said.

Much of the legwork has yet to be done. 

“This is really a pilot study; we’re going to pilot it in Macon,” Roberts-Lewis said. From there, researchers can scale the study.

Surveys, a major element of the study, will be rolled out to all who have received a bed from Sleep in Heavenly Peace. Parents and kids will report sleeping habits before receiving beds then at three-month intervals afterward. 

To gather sufficient information for the study, Roberts-Lewis said it will take 18 months total. 

The study’s results could be a game changer for Sleep in Heavenly Peace.

“When we go out and speak, we can say all day long, ‘We believe that kids who show up to school better rested are going to do better in school,’ but nobody cares what we believe,” Cornett said. “They want to know what research has shown, so they’re conducting research so we can change that sentence to start with ‘research has shown.’”

While data will help the organization, Cornett emphasized that, for him, it’s about the kids. 

There’s no better reward for Cornett and his team than seeing Camden run into his bedroom and fall face first onto the pillows, then sink into the mattress. 

Camden and his family no longer have to worry about where he’s going to sleep at night. All they have to worry about now are the perils of putting on a fitted sheet.