Young children are getting about nine hours of sleep a night, substantially less than the 12- to 15-hours of shut-eye experts recommend, a new study shows.
While it’s not clear that children actually need a dozen hours of nightly sleep, Dr. Christine Acebo of the Bradley Hospital Sleep and Chronobiology Research Laboratory in Providence, Rhode Island told Reuters Health, the findings do raise the possibility that some young children may be sleep-deprived.
“Sleep’s a very important part of our lives but it’s typically given short shrift in our culture,” Acebo said. “Although adults may be able to deal with that by other means, caffeine for example, little kids may be kind of blowing in the wind about this.”
Most research on sleep in young children is more than 25 years old, Acebo and her team note in the December issue of Sleep, and there is little concrete information on how much young kids sleep and how much sleep they need. The 12- to 15-hour recommendation, Acebo notes, is based on observations over the past decades of how much sleep young children typically got.
To investigate the sleep and wake patterns of today’s kids, the researchers followed 169 healthy children one to five years old for up to seven days. Wristwatch-like monitors called actigraphs were attached to the ankle (in younger children) or the wrist (in older children) to measure each child’s activity, while mothers kept sleep diaries.
Not surprisingly, the one-year-olds went to bed earliest and slept the most. On average, children in the study slept for 8.7 hours at night. The older the child, the shorter the nap time, and by age five, just 43% of kids were napping.
The researchers also found children in lower-economic-status families had more variability in bedtime and in total time spent asleep; they also woke up later in the morning. Children from higher economic status families had more consistent bedtimes and woke up earlier. There’s no evidence that either pattern is better for kids, Acebo notes.
Given the findings, parents with small children should be on the lookout for sleep deprivation in their kids, she advises. “We need to be very alert to watch for signs of sleepiness in children. I think both parents and teachers need to watch if their young child is yawning during the day or kind of falling asleep when they’re watching TV. That’s a sign that they’re not getting enough sleep.”
Inattention and “hyper” behavior can also signal overtiredness, Acebo added.
Consequences of sleep deprivation may be serious, she noted, pointing out that there is increasing evidence that getting too little sleep can lead to obesity and related health problems such as diabetes in adulthood.
