Amy Loch can’t afford more than one hit on the snooze button when her alarm goes off at precisely 5:45 a.m. every weekday.
After all, there are sleepy kids to rouse and a whirlwind — and sometimes exhausting — day of school, work and activities ahead for the Evanston family of four.
“We’re a family that’s constantly doing something,” said Loch, a Northwestern University athletic department account executive. “I’d love to give them more sleep, but they (also) love to be involved. We try to balance it all.”
So when bedtime beckons nearly 15 hours later, Loch can only hope the 9 1/2 to 10 hours of sleep her children Teagan and Graham will get is enough before the cycle resumes the next day.
Sleep concerns are nothing new. Parents have recorded complaints dating back at least as far as the late 19th century.
A report to be published in the March issue of the journal Pediatrics found a common thread as it examined more than a century’s worth of sleep studies.
“I was amazed that concerns from the early 1900s were so similar to that of today,” study co-author Lisa Anne Matricciani, a researcher and graduate of the University of South Australia School of Health Science, wrote last week in response to emailed questions.
“It also intrigued me that despite the fact that sleep duration had declined, the concern that ‘children are sleeping less than recommended’ appeared to continuously reappear in the literature,” she said.
An 11-year-old sixth-grader, Teagan Loch has a full schedule of classwork, volleyball practice and tournaments and is involved in a school play. Graham is an energetic 4-year-old who attends preschool and also gets a midday nap.
Add evening commitments at Northwestern athletic functions for both Amy and her husband, Jason (who sometimes works the basketball scoreboard), and the Loch family has an overflowing plate.
It’s a familiar story among their friends and many other parents these days.
“We have our hands full,” Amy Loch said. “(And) in our group of friends there are a lot of families that have two working parents. As a society we’ve become busier than it used to be.”
Matricciani and four researchers reviewed 32 studies conducted between 1897 and 2009. Compared with earlier generations, they found that today’s children get an average of 73 minutes less nightly sleep and that age-specific sleep time recommendations have dropped by a similar amount.
But only one study was supported by scientific evidence. Instead, Matricciani said most conclusions were based on preconceived notions that children needed more sleep.
Dr. Judith Owens, director of sleep research at the Washington-based Children’s National Medical Center, outlines the numerous benefits of proper rest.
“We all know what an overtired, not-well-rested child looks like,” Owens said. “Children who are well-rested, get adequate quantity and quality of sleep, (have the) benefits of improved attention and focus, improved cognitive efficiency in completing task and memory and behavior. And kids who are meeting their sleep needs are more likely to do well in school.”
But Owens, who doubles as a sleep issues spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics, cautions there is no one-size-fits-all recommendation.
“We never say to a parent, ‘your child must get X number of hours of sleep a night’,” she said. “We say, ‘This is the average range, this is the recommended range for your child.'”
Preschoolers need at least 12 hours of nighttime sleep, plus a nap, while 10-11 hours is a suggested range for school age children.
For teens, the recommendation is 9 to 9 1/4 hours a night, but actual experiences can vary.
“There may be some (teens) who need 8 1/4 (hours), but at the same time there may be some who need 10,” Owens said. “Unfortunately for most teenagers, they are falling short of what their sleep needs are and that’s a population we tend to worry most about. We know that adolescents are chronically sleep-deprived.”
Despite their hectic lives, the Loch kids appear to maintain suggested sleep times for their respective ages.
“They’re in two completely different places in life,” Amy Loch said. “But most of the time, they’re good.”
Owens said poor families and minority children are more broadly at risk.
“Unhealthy sleep practices also tend to be increased among kids who are living in poverty or kids from racial and ethnic minority groups,” she said. “They may be more vulnerable to the effects of (those) practices.”
Matricciani said it was “remarkable that sleep recommendations are still being issued in the acknowledged absence of meaningful evidence” and called for more and better evidence-based research.
But Owens said there’s already plenty of that.
“For those of us who have spent our professional lives working with sleep and children and doing professional research, the conclusion that these recommendations are not evidence-based is absolutely false. … There are many studies that were not included — for reasons that are unclear — in that particular paper.”
But whatever the conclusions, sleep experts are quick to agree that parental supervision and knowledge is critical.
“There are a lot of parents who really don’t know how much sleep their kids need,” Owens said. “They have this magic number of eight hours in their heads because that’s what adults are told they need — although most adults don’t get that either.”
