Health care practitioners should be aware of the potential negative impact of television viewing at bedtime. Parents should be questioned about their children's television-viewing habits as part of general screening for sleep disturbances and as part of anticipatory guidance in regards to healthy sleep habits in children. In particular, the presence of a television set in the child's bedroom may be a relatively underrecognized, but important, contributor to sleep problems in school children.

Sleep disturbances, particularly at bedtime, are frequently reported by both parents and children with ADHD. Children undergoing evaluation for ADHD should be routinely screened for sleep disturbances, especially symptoms of sleep-disordered breathing. The causes of sleep-onset delay in children with ADHD should be considered in designing intervention strategies for children with difficulty falling and staying asleep.

Children with autism or a related disorder will frequently have an ophthalmologic abnormality. Since cooperation with vision screening is understandably limited in these children, a comprehensive eye examination by a pediatric ophthalmologist is recommended for all such children.

African American children with autism are seriously under-represented in existing genetic registries and biomedical research studies of autism. We estimated the number of African American children with autism in the St. Louis region using CDC surveillance data and present the outcomes of a concerted effort to enroll approximately one-third of that population into either of two large national genetic autism registries. The results revealed that even after traditional barriers to research participation were addressed and all contacted families expressed a willingness to participate, 67% of the reachable families were disqualified from participation because of family structure alone. Comprehensive efforts—including expansion of eligibility to families of diverse structure—are warranted to facilitate the inclusion of African American children in biomedical research.