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Reuters.com
While parents may sometimes despair of their children getting enough shut-eye, especially with age-old stalling tactics of another story or another glass of water, children in the United States do appear to be getting the recommended amount of sleep.
According to a U.S. study published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, there has been concern that U.S. children are getting too little sleep, with insufficient sleep tied to issues ranging from behavior problems to heart health risks.
But there hasn't been much hard evidence on how much sleep children typically get, so a group led by Jessica Williams, a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles, set out to get estimates of sleep times from birth to age 18.
"These estimates are consistent with the amount of sleep recommended for children, and no evidence was found of racial/ethnic differences," the group wrote in its report.
The researchers gathered data from a nationwide survey that has tracked families for decades, focusing on parents' reports of their children's sleep, beginning in 1997.
At that time, 2,832 children were included, In 2002 and 2007 the families were surveyed again and 2,520 and 1,424 children were included, respectively.
Williams's team found that until their second birthday, babies in the study slept an average of 12 to 14 hours during each 24-hour period.
By age four it had dropped to about 11 hours of sleep and by age 10, to 10 hours. By age 16, kids were getting an average of about nine hours of sleep per night.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that toddlers get 12 to 14 hours of sleep, preschoolers 11 to 13 hours, and adolescents aged 10 to 17 from 8.5 to 9.5 hours.
One of the big strengths of this study is that it tracked changes in sleep among the same children as they aged, said Maurice Ohayon, director of the Stanford Sleep Epidemiology Research Center in Palo Alto, California.
"We have an evolution of the sleep during the childhood. That is the unique thing," said Ohayon, who was not involved in the study.
The researchers didn't find any differences in the amount of sleep between boys and girls, and only a slight gap between white and Hispanic children.
Hispanic kids tended to sleep 19 minutes longer than white children after age nine, but Williams said that difference is too small to matter for individual kids.
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isn't there a problem in that the report relies on parents? It assumes parents reliably know when their kids are asleep in their electronic-filled bedrooms (while the parents have likely retreated to their own televisions, computers or tablets), and it discounts the parents have a motivation to misrepresent how much sleep their children get (since if you report your kids are sleep-deprived, it reflects negatively on you as a parent).
Maybe the kids are getting enough sleep, but most adults I know aren't getting the shut-eye they should have. Everyone is working wayyyyy too many hours to survive or avoid being laid off.....
Funny, just about every kid I know started having some degree of sleep deprivation at about grade 6...myself included. By university-so age 18-ha!
I am 22 now, fifth-year university, and unfortunately fall into that category of adults-2.5% or less-that need 9.5 hours of sleep per night. Even eight hours and I'm exhausted waking up. It's very frustrating.
I'd like to know the median hours of sleep for each of the age categories or the range, not just the average. I don't believe for a minute that teenagers are not sleep deprived as a group. In addition to the problem of parents reporting what they think is going on, there's also the possibility of bias due to participating in the study.
I am curious, how many parents would admit that they aren't getting their kids to bed on time?Wouldn't they worry that they might be seen as unfit parents if they consistently are failing to have their kids in bed by a certain time?
I knew of so many parents over the years, whose little ones got in bed very late, and were back up way too early because mom and dad had to get them off to the daycare on the way to work.Then had them picked up early to go to other activities. I swear they kept those kids on sugar highs trying to keep up with the Jones. So how was that factored into the survey?
Then there were the high risk youth, ages 1-18 I worked with, over 200,000 one on one, over a decade. Who I knew personally, weren't getting the length of sleep they needed. It seems I would guess some fudging might have gone on for those surveys. Did they think every parent always was telling the truth over all those years? Something to think about.
I also think those recording the data should have talked to teachers. Who, having spoken to countless numbers, complained of students in classes, over and over, falling asleep in the early morning classes. I think professionals who want to make the claim this article does need to branch out to gather more data from other critical primary resources.