Published on February 13th, 2012 | by Kim LaCapria0
Kids These Days Haven’t Been Getting Enough Sleep For at Least the Past Century
It’s often said that “kids these days” are angrier, more vulgar, more disrespectful lazier and sleep less than the little bedtime-respecting angels of decades past.
And it’s easy to feel a lot of parenting guilt when you imagine the neat and tidy homes of the 1950s, with kids not sneaking iPods into bed into the wee hours. A new study reveals that kids today are getting less sleep than is recommended- but according to the data out of Harvard Medical School, not markedly so. While kids today are sleeping less than they should, previous generations of kids also liked to push the boundaries of bedtime:
The study looked at 32 sets of recommendations from the years 1897 to 2009. The researchers then gathered data on actual sleep time from roughly the same time period… The amount of sleep recommended slid by less than a minute—0.71 minute—a year. On average, children actually slept 0.73 minute less every year. In general, kids in all time periods slept 37 minutes less than recommended.
So kids today sleep about 70 fewer minutes than kids did 100 years ago- but recommendations for sleep needs have decreased about as much. Do you have a hard time getting your kids to sleep at night?