Wow! Nice job, parents!
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 United States do appear to be getting the recommended amount of sleep.
How much sleep should our kids be getting? Reuters’ Kerry Grens reports on the study appearing in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine:
Williams’s 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.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that toddlers get 12 to 14 hours of sleep, preschoolers 11 to 13 hours, and adolescents aged 10 to 17 from 8.5 to 9.5 hours.
Read study abstract in Archives here.
Read Reuters article here.