Eye-opening study says kids appear to get enough sleep

While parents may sometimes despair of their children getting enough shut-eye, children in the United States do appear to be getting the recommended amount of sleep.

According to a study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, there has been concern that U.S. children are getting too little sleep, with insufficient sleep tied to issues ranging from be- havior problems to heart health risks.

But there hasn’t been much hard evidence on how much sleep kids typically get, so a group led by Jessica Williams, a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles, set out to gather some.

“These estimates are consistent with the amount of sleep recommended for children, and no evidence was found of racial/ethnic differences,” they reported.

The researchers gathered data from a nationwide survey that 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’ team found that until their second birthday, babies slept an average of 12 to 14 hours during a 24-hour period.

By age 4, that had fallen to about 11 hours of sleep and by age10 to 10 hours. By 16, youths were getting an average of nine hours of sleep per night.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that toddlers get 12 to 14 hours of sleep, preschoolers 11 to 13 hours, and adolescents ages10 to17 from 8.5 to 9.5 hours.

The researchers didn’t find any differences between boys and girls, and only a slight gap between white and Hispanic children. Hispanic children tended to sleep 19 minutes longer than white children after age 9, but Williams said that difference is not significant.

Sleep research

Data from several years show children’s average sleep times: