It is a common complaint that kids don't get enough sleep these days.
Surprisingly, it may have always been a complaint, even before the days of kids having TV sets in their rooms, cell phones, and iPods.
A new study that will be published in the March issue of Pediatrics, "Never Enough Sleep: A Brief History of Sleep Recommendations for Children," found that the amount of sleep that kids get decreased by about 0.73 minutes per year since 1897. Surprisingly, the age-specific sleep recommendations also decreased by about 0.71 minutes each year, but was still about 37 minutes greater than however long kids actually slept.
I wouldn't put too much into this though.
Some of the biggest differences were in the earliest studies, from 1897 to 1905, which suggested that toddlers get 16 to 17 hours of sleep. Even then, sleep recommendations for school age children and teens were surprisingly about the same as today.
The study is kind of interesting to read, but shouldn't be used as the basis for any theories for the rise in ADHD or any other condition. As the authors clearly state in their paper, "it is acknowledged that there is almost no empirical evidence for the optimal sleep duration for children," so all of the different recommendations were not necessarily made because any one had better insights into children's sleep habits than another. They could have just taken a survey of how much kids were sleeping and added "an extra allowance based on the assumption that they were not getting enough."
So why would younger kids have been put to sleep earlier 100 years ago? What else were they supposed to do?
When you really look at it, there are so many co-founding factors, how can you directly compare a child born today with one born 115 years and say they would even require the same amount of sleep?
It would be interesting to look at how improved nutrition, protection from infections, and overall improved health, etc., could have caused a decreased need for sleep for infants and toddlers over the years. And how did the implementation of child labor laws, which came under federal regulation for the first time with the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, affect how much sleep kids got or needed?
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