Who knows how much kids are sleeping? And why it matters

Abstract

According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, children from the ages of 6 to 12 should be getting 9–12 hours of sleep every night (Paruthi et al., 2016). However, many children are not getting enough sleep. The National Survey of Children's Health found that 38.4% of 6–12‐year‐olds in the United States had short sleep duration according to parental report (Wheaton & Claussen, 2021). This sleep deficit may increase with age, as the CDC found that around six in 10 middle schoolers and seven in 10 high schoolers self‐report not getting the recommended amount of sleep on school nights (Wheaton et al., 2018). In addition to age, this difference in the percentage of kids with insufficient sleep may also be due to the differences in informant between those two surveys. One study found that while both children and parents overestimated total sleep time compared with the polysomnography, the child report was slightly more accurate (Combs et al., 2019).