October 07, 2025
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Most parents believe their children get the recommended amount of sleep each night, but in reality, few kids do, new research shows.
Children need adequate sleep for optimal learning and for their mental and physical health. But a new study finds that few kids are getting the recommended amount of shut-eye, even though their parents think they are sleeping sufficient hours.
The research, published in Frontiers in Pediatrics, found that 83% of parents reported that their children were logging the recommended hours of sleep each night. In reality, only 14% of children in the study actually met guidelines.
"What parents often don't see is how long it takes for kids to fall asleep or how often they wake up during the night," Diana S. Grigsby-Toussaint, the study's senior author and an associate professor at Brown University School of Public Health, said in a news release.
Children who get enough sleep benefit from better emotional regulation, attention, behavior, learning, memory and overall quality of life, the Cleveland Clinic says.
To see if parents' perceptions of their children's sleep was accurate, the Brown researchers had 102 children wear wrist accelerometers that tracked how quickly they fell asleep and how often they woke up during the night – calculating the total time they spent sleeping. Parents completed surveys and kept sleep diaries about their children's sleeping patterns.
Parents reported that their children – between ages 6 and 12 – were getting more than 9 1/2 of sleep, which falls in line with sleep recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics. But the children actually only were getting an average of 8 hours, 20 minutes of sleep each night.
In general, parents said their children were awake only 5 minutes a night. The trackers showed the children were awake an average of 38 minutes a night.
The researchers were specifically interested in racial and ethnic disparities in sleep outcomes. Out of the study's participants, 56% were Latino families.
Data from the trackers showed Latino children got less sleep than the other children in the study: just over 8 hours a night, compared to 8 1/2 hours. Only 4.4% of Latino children were sleeping enough to meet national guidelines compared to nearly 23% of other kids.
Latino parents were less likely than other parents to say they were concerned about their children's sleep, the study found.
Co-sleeping, children sharing rooms and other cultural factors more common in Latino homes may account for some of these discrepancies, the researchers said.
Better communication between health care providers and all families about the importance of sleep for children's health is needed, the researchers said.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the AAP published a consensus statement in 2016 about the following sleep guidelines for children to achieve optimal health:
• Infants 4 months to 12 months should sleep 12 to 16 hours per 24 hours (including naps)
• Children 1 to 2 years should sleep 11 to 14 hours per 24 hours (including naps)
• Children 3 to 5 years should sleep 10 to 13 hours per 24 hours (including naps)
• Children 6 to 12 years should sleep 9 to 12 hours per 24 hours
• Teenagers 13 to 18 should sleep 8 to 10 hours per 24 hours
