My 8 y/o tends to be very moody and at times irritable at home, whereas at school she is a smiling joy! As my husband and I tried to figure out what are we doing wrong, or differently than at school, one of the things we decided to try was getting her to bed earlier. Being the younger sibling, it is difficult because she wants to stay up to watch TV with her sister, or just doesn’t want to go up because her sister doesn’t have to. In my ideal world she would be asleep by 9pm and awake at 7am. However in my reality, she’s been going to sleep closer to 9:30 or 10:00 and I can’t get her up at 7. It got me thinking, how much sleep do children really need? I know that even I need my 8 hours of sleep to be at my best.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, school aged children need 10 to 11 hours of sleep, whereas preschool aged children need more like 11-13 hours. What’s interesting is that I can’t find much scientific evidence on how much sleep children require, but there does seem to be a trend of the recommendations decreasing as well as the amount of actual sleep. As cited in an article in USA Today “children's daily sleep decreased about 75 minutes, while the recommendations for how much sleep children should get declined by 70 minutes. As the numbers keep pace, "experts have always recommended that children get about 40 minutes more sleep than they do, no matter how much sleep they get,"
Insufficient sleep can lead to difficulty paying attention in school, accidents and injuries, as well as obesity. To read the rest of the article go to http://yourlife.usatoday.com/parenting-family/story/2012-02-13/No-science-just-expert-guesses-on-how-much-sleep-kids-need/53065594/1
In addition, http://kidshealth.org/parent/general/sleep/sleep.html# can give you guidelines on sleep for children of all ages.
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