A small three-week study published in the
Journal of Pediatric Psychology in 2013 involved 32 children, between 8 and 12 years old, who were instructed to go to sleep either one hour later or earlier than usual. They were asked to complete tasks that measured emotional functioning, memory attention and math fluency at the end of each week, and the researchers found that going to sleep one hour later impaired children’s performance on the tasks.
A separate 2010 study published in
the journal Sleepfound that adolescents with bedtimes set at 10 p.m. or earlier were significantly less likely to suffer from depression and to have suicidal thoughts.
The research involved analyzing data from 15,659 students in grades seven to 12 who participated in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which included their
bedtimes as well as their mental health.
“A variety of theories have been developed to explain why we need to sleep,” said Dr. Sumit Bhargava, clinical associate professor of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine and sleep physician at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.
“Some of the reasons are energy conservation theory: We sleep to conserve energy so we can be functional during the day,” he said. “Restorative theory suggests we sleep to ‘restore’ something that we lose while awake, with the body repairing and rejuvenating itself. Important hormones are secreted while we sleep and byproducts of the brain’s activity are cleared. … Brain plasticity theory suggests sleep is correlated to changes in the structure and organization of the brain.”
Bedtime advice for parents
Therefore, a child’s bedtime is not nearly as important as the amount of sleep he or she is getting each night, Bhargava said.
“An early bedtime, per se, will not necessarily affect a child’s physical health or mood and mental health in a positive way. The goal should be, choose an age-appropriate bedtime that allows the individual child to get the hours of sleep the child needs,” he said.
“Set an appropriate bedtime based upon the amount of sleep your child needs to be functional and effective during the day. Then, be consistent with it, even on weekends,” he added. “Sleep is just as important to human life as eating and breathing. We spend almost a third of our lives sleeping.”
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine released
updated sleep guidelines for children in June, recommending that:
- Babies 4 months to 12 months should get 12 to 16 hours
- Children 1 to 2 years old should get 11 to 14 hours
- Children 3 to 5 years old should get 10 to 13 hours
- Children 6 to 12 years old should get nine to 12 hours
- Teenagers 13 to 18 years old should get eight to 10 hours
Roughly, infants should sleep by 7 p.m., toddlers by 7:30 p.m., younger children by 8 p.m., preteens by 8:30 p.m. and teens between 9 and 10:30 p.m., said Harriet Hiscock, associate professor at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Australia.
“There is no hard and fast rule for this, as sleep quality is probably more important than sleep duration, at least in children,” she added. “A regular bedtime and bedtime routine are probably more important.”
To get your child to go to sleep, Gruber advises, don’t negotiate bedtime.
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