Is Your Child Getting Enough Sleep?

You don't really need to answer that. We can save you the trouble of trying to figure it out and just say that the answer is most likely 'no'. Your child is probably not getting enough sleep. At least that is what the experts are saying. In fact, it is said that the average person will spend about 40% of their childhood asleep, but this is still not enough according to some experts.

Being asleep for 40% of childhood sounds like a lot, and you may even question the validity of that number at first, but when you break it down it is not so crazy. For example, from birth to three months old, newborns should sleep from 14 to 17 hours per day. For infants aged four to eleven months, it only goes down to 12 to 15 hours per day. Preschoolers aged three to five years should sleep 10 to 13 hours per day, which is still around 50% of the day.

Only when they reach school age, 6 to 13 years old, does the number of hours of required sleep drop below 50% of the day, at 9 to 11 hours per night. Teenagers need 8 to 10 hours of sleep per night. So, if you work it out, from birth to 18 years old, the 40% number doesn't sound so crazy any more.

But the reality is that most kids just aren't getting the recommended number of hours of sleep per night. They want to stay up late, and they want to wait until the last possible minute to get out of bed before they will miss the bus or otherwise make themselves late for school.

It has become even harder for kids to get to sleep and wake up on time in recent years. As a parent, you probably just had a TV or books to keep you awake longer than you should be, but now most kids have smartphones, tablets, laptops, and so on. The light emitted by these devices is "short-wavelength-enriched", which means it has a higher concentration of blue light, and has been shown to affect melatonin levels. This is the hormone that helps us get to sleep and, in short, our phones and other light-emitting devices are making it harder to get a good night of sleep.

So, what can you do about it? Well, it's not going to be easy, and you will probably meet resistance from your kids, but the best thing to do is turn off all of those devices a while before bedtime. Relax by reading a book the old-fashioned way, with words printed on paper instead of on an electronic book reader device, for example.