Sleepless Days & Nights
Study: Children Under 5 Not Catching Enough Z
While it has been widely reported that older children,
teens and adults aren’t getting
enough sleep, it turns out that younger children might be sleep deprived as well. A study by researchers at Bradley Hospital and Brown Medical School finds that children ages 5 and under get less than the recommended amount of sleep.
“We were very surprised to find how little preschool-aged children actually sleep at night, which we could measure with our activity monitors. Children in our sample slept only about 8.7 hours at night and less than 9.5 hours per 24 hours when naps were included. This contrasts with the 12 to 15 hours usually recommended for children this age,” said lead author Christine Acebo, PhD, of the Bradley Hospital Sleep and Chronobiology Research Laboratory.
Other studies have shown that decreased sleep in older children, teenagers, and adults may lead to physical and cognitive problems including – decreased physical performance, lower academic performance and reduced cognitive and other daytime functioning.
“We are concerned that the problem of too little sleep extends even to the youngest members of families, though we do not know if this puts them at risk for problems down the line,” said Acebo.
The research was published in the December issue of the journal Sleep. It corroborates the results of a recent survey of parents by the National Sleep Foundation (NSF) and Pampers Baby-Dry, showing that many children from newborn to age four do not get the minimum 12 to 15 hours of sleep per day recommended by the NSF and pediatric sleep experts.
Acebo and colleagues studied 169 children between ages 1-5, once a week in their homes. The children wore activity monitors on their ankles or wrists to record their sleep, and mothers chronicled their children’s sleep habits in detailed diaries.
“We wanted to study sleep in preschool aged children because most of the research in this area is more than 25 years old — this is one of the first studies to describe sleep patterns in this age group with objective measures in recent years,” explained Acebo.
The researchers found that the children in the study awoke more often during the night than is usually described in the scientific literature, but which is consistent with concerns that many parents bring to their pediatricians.
Finally, they report that 82 percent of children older than 18 months were not taking naps on some or all days.
Acebo said that she was surprised to find that kids are sleeping less than the recommendations that have been in place for the past 50 years.
Founded in 1931, Bradley Hospital
(www.bradleyhospital.org) was the nation’s
first psychiatric hospital operating exclusively for children. Today, it remains a premier medical
institution devoted to the research and
treatment of childhood psychiatric illnesses. Bradley Hospital, located in Providence, RI, is a teaching hospital for Brown Medical School.
