How much sleep does your child need? More than you think.

One question I’m asked again and again in my work is: “How much should my child be sleeping?” Variations of this include: “When should my child’s bedtime be?” and “Why is my child waking up so early?”, and “Why is it impossible to get my child out the door in the morning?”

When it comes to determining when bedtime should be, when a reasonable wake up time should be, and if and how long your child should nap, how much total sleep they need is relevant information! In fact, one question I always ask when interviewing a parent about their child’s problematic behavior is: what does his or her sleep look like? The answer often provides me with the answer to where we should start.

When our children are infants, they seem to sleep all the time (although it’s broken, and often not when we wish they would!). Babies are typically good at making sure they get the sleep they want. As children get older; however, their sleep habits often become more dependent on their parents’ decisions, and they often put up a fight against bedtimes and naptimes or have sleep time replaced with other activities since “they don’t seem tired anyway”. And if parents don’t know how much they should be sleeping anyway, why wouldn’t this happen?

The opposite problem that can arise from not knowing age-appropriate sleep amounts is that parents expect their child to be getting too much sleep, and feeling frustrated when they resist bedtime, wake up early, or take what they consider to be a short nap.

There are actually well-established recommendations on sleep amounts, based on science, and while every child is slightly different, the range isn’t actually that large: about a half hour on either side of the recommended amount.

A toddler age 2 should get anywhere from 11-12 hours of sleep each day, with their sleep decreasing slightly at age 3 by about 15 minutes (“Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems”, Ferber 2006). Age three is a time many parents struggle, because children are often dropping their afternoon nap, and shifting that sleep to evening sleep. Even by the time a child enters kindergarten they should be getting more than ten hours of sleep per night.

Though kids’ lack of sleep is a problem, lack of sleep isn’t a new problem. Kids have been getting less and less sleep for years. A study in the journal Pediatrics (“Never Enough Sleep: A Brief History of Sleep Recommendations for Children”) looked at sleep literature from the 1800s through 2009 and found that on average, children’s sleep decreased .73 minutes per year. As with adult sleep, the frantic pace of life and many virtual distractions have likely taken a toll on children’s sleep.

There are, of course, many negative effects that result from a lack of sleep. The one I am most familiar with is the behavioral effects of a sleep deficit. A study in Pediatric Clinics reviewed a number of studies examining the relationship between sleep and daytime functioning, and found, in summary, that “inadequate sleep quality and/or quantity can cause sleepiness, inattention and, very likely, other cognitive and behavioral deficits that significantly impact children and adolescents in functional settings” (“Cognitive, Behavioral, and Functional Consequenes of Inadequate Sleep in Children and Adolescents”, Beebe, 2011). I have observed that a child who is deficient in sleep can demonstrate it in different ways. One is how you might expect: falling asleep at strange times, difficulty focusing, irritability, acting out. The other way a child might show it is with hyperactivity and even difficulty falling asleep, when they are actually overtired.  

So, how does your child’s sleep match up to the recommendations? Are you within the range, or like most parents is your child sleeping less than the recommended amount? If so, what’s the reason why?

With knowledge comes self-assurance. Once you know how much sleep your child requires, you can set bedtimes and naptime expectations with confidence.

Getting the wrong amount of sleep can have consequences in both the day and the night. Along with the daytime behavioral issues mentioned above, lack of adequate night sleep can result in night time issues such as difficulty falling asleep at bedtime, night wakings, and early morning wakeups. I created a free quiz to help you diagnose the cause of your child’s sleep struggles, and suggest a proven strategy to start implementing right away. Click below to begin: