While parents may sometimes despair of their children getting enough shut-eye, especially with age-old stalling tactics of another story or another glass of water, children in the U.S. appear to be getting the recommended amount of sleep.
According to a U.S. study published in the Archives of Pedi-atric and Adolescent Medicine, there has been concern that U.S. children are getting too little sleep, with insufficient sleep tied to issues ranging from behaviour problems to heart health risks.
But there hasn't been a lot of hard evidence on how much sleep children typically get, so a group led by Jessica Williams, a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles, set out to get estimates of sleep times from birth to age 18.
The researchers gathered data from a nationwide survey that has tracked families for decades, focusing on parents' reports of their children's sleep, beginning in 1997.
At that time, 2,832 children were included. In 2002 and 2007, the families were surveyed again and 2,520 and 1,424 children were included, respectively.
The team found that until their second birthday, babies in the study slept an average of 12 to 14 hours during each 24-hour period.
By age four it had dropped to about 11 hours of sleep and by age 10, to 10 hours. By age 16, kids were getting an average of about nine hours of sleep per night.
