In parenting, there aren’t often straightforward answers, and sleep tends to be contentious. There are questions about whether we are overstating children’s sleep problems. Yet we all know from experience how much better we feel, and how much more ready we are to take on the day, when we have had an adequate amount of good quality sleep.
I was one of a panel of experts at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine to review over 800 academic papers examining relationships between children’s sleep duration and outcomes. Our findings suggested optimal sleep durations to promote children’s health. These are the optimal hours (including naps) that children should sleep in every 24-hour cycle.
And yet these types of sleep recommendations are still controversial. Many of us have friends or acquaintances who say that they can function perfectly on four hours of sleep, when it is recommended that adults get seven to nine hours per night.
Optimal sleep hours: The science
We look for science to support our recommendations. Yet we cannot deprive young children of sleep for prolonged periods to see whether they have more problems than those sleeping the recommended amounts.
Some experiments have been conducted with teenagers when they have agreed to short periods of sleep deprivation followed by regular sleep durations. In one example, teenagers who got inadequate sleep time had worse moods and more difficulty controlling negative emotions.
Those findings are important because children and adolescents need to learn how to regulate their attention and manage their negative emotions and behaviour. Being able to self-regulate can enhance school adjustment and achievement.
With younger children, our studies have had to rely on examining relationships between their sleep duration and quality of their sleep and negative health outcomes. For example, when researchers have followed the same children over time, behavioural sleep problems in infancy have been associated with greater difficulty regulating emotions at two to three years of age.
Persistent sleep problems also predicted increased difficulty for the same children, followed at two to three years of age, to control their negative emotions from birth to six or seven years and for eight- to nine-year-old children to focus their attention.
