Ah, summer time. For most school age kids, it’s a break from the hectic up-at-dawn mornings hurriedly getting ready for school. It also means more lax bedtimes, and if you are certifiably insane and willing to give up your evening quiet time (which I am not, can you tell?) it means your kids are up late. That’s great if they sleep in, but most do not. So how much sleep do kids really need? And how important is it to maintain a sleep schedule?
The answer to both is a lot, and very.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, kids ages 1-3 need 12-14 hours, ages 3-5 need 11-13 hours, and ages 5-10 need 10-11 hours. Kids desperately need these hours for both physical and mental development. Kids who don’t get enough sleep can have mood swings, behavioral problems, cognitive problems, and physical symptoms such as headaches. You know how awful, forgetful, and physically ill you feel when your newborn hasn’t let you sleep in weeks? That’s how your kids feel. Although instead of being a coffee guzzling zombie like you, they ramp up in activity and also in bad attitudes and behavior. Sadly, the NSF says about 30% of kids fall in this category of less sleep than what is recommended.
PubMed has a study published by the Japanese Society of Child Neurology that shows the long term effects of having an early bedtime. A large group (over 40,000) children were followed over a lengthy period of time and it was found that children that had an early and predictable bedtime at the age of two were much less likely to have attention and behavioral issues at age 8. There are literally hundreds of studies showing the positive effects of consistent and early bedtimes on children’s health, and I could type them out for days.
So even though you may not need to be up and at ‘em first thing in the morning, try to maintain your child’s sleep routine throughout the summer. Vacations and other adventures are always going to throw a loop into your routine, but for the most part try to keep it within the norm. The recommended bedtime for elementary aged kids and younger surprisingly isn’t when-they-collapse-on-the-floor-o’clock. It’s between 7-8pm. My kids are in bed between 7 and 7:30. Yes, it’s still light out in the summer. Black out curtains work wonders! They are healthy and well rested, and I get a few peaceful hours to myself in the evenings after being tortured playing with them all day. Everyone wins.
Try to have the same routine every evening. Rooms should be nice and dark, nice and cool, and kids shouldn’t have TVs in their rooms (so basically nice and boring). Turn off electronics an hour before bedtime. Try to avoid school and sports functions that last up till bedtime.
So yeah, I get a lot of flack for peacing out early from social functions and whatnot because my kids have to go to bed. Whatever though, it’s science ya’ll. Science and sanity. My two favorite things.
Wow. Really judgemental and just odd for this blog. And you COMPLETELY missed the point. The problem is not the lack of an early bedtime, it is lack of sufficient quantity of sleep. KQ pointed out that not everyone chooses to have a lifestyle in which they need to be up early. YOUR kids have to get up early because YOU CHOOSE that lifestyle for them. Once they become adults, they can choose to have jobs in the afternoons or evenings just as easily as in the early morning hours. “Being on time for work” is a life skill, “waking up at the crack of dawn” is not. Do children – and adults for that matter, need sufficient quantities of sleep? YES. Is it vitally important for health? YES. But can those hours of sleep just as easily be 11pm to 10 am as 7 pm to 6 am?? YES. Of course they can. An “early” bedtime is only important if an early wakeup is a necessary/chosen lifestyle, and for many of us, it is NOT. You sound exactly like my father, who basically considered early waking a moral issue. Sleeping in was Wrong, even when I was working 3rd shift!!! Just because I worked from 5 pm to 3 am didn’t mean I should sleep all morning!!! Waking up at noon?? DISGRACEFUL!!! Even though that meant I was only sleeping for about 4-5 hours, it was still obviously a sign of my laziness for me to sleep until noon. Any respectable person wakes up at 6 am, dont’cha know! Very disappointed with this poorly written opinion piece, carseatblog.
We try to get the kids in bed by 8 each night. I want an evening. But hey, the 5 year-old is still always up until 9:30 or 10, as he never STAYS in bed. In the summer bedtime was the same since I ran them around to camps so we were busier than the school year. Now school feels like a total vacation and we can sleep in a bit, even. Kids have a bus after 8am.
I try to go to bed by 10pm latest. I won’t sacrifice anyone’s sleep if I can help it. But my little ones are pretty stubborn sometimes!
We’ve pretty much violated all these rules for all three of our kids. One of them is a light sleeper and might have benefited. Perhaps this will help someone in a similar circumstance, because I know from an experience that our child who doesn’t get enough sleep can be “difficult”…
We ended up with one early-to-bed, early-to-rise kid, a “typical” kid, and a night owl. Go figure!
When my kids were younger, we tried to keep as close as possible to a normal bedtime during the summer. It was more for *my* sanity than for the kids’ sake–I needed a break and dh and I needed the time together to talk. It turns out that my oldest is an early bird, just like dh, so he’s in bed by 9p anyway, followed shortly by dh. I enjoy the quiet in the evenings and get a lot of work done!
However, as we approach high school, my view on bedtimes is changing, probably because they’re being forced on us. Our kids now go to magnet schools which start at 7a, which is a terrible time for teenagers to start, as has been shown in studies. Even my early bird has a rough time. My dd is in softball, which has practice and games until after 9p; can’t change that given the availability of fields, plus she’s a night owl, like me. I completely understand trying to reset your internal time clock and it’s nearly impossible: I was a zombie every marching season in high school when I had to be at school for band practice at 6:30a.
I call BS on that Japanese study. I don’t think early bedtime inherently is better than late. Our kids sleep when they are tired and get up when they are ready. The only reason an early bedtime would matter is for kids who prefer or need to get up. Since we are congenital night owls in this house, who don’t have a schedule to adhere to in the morning, and sleep until 10 or later many days, going to bed at 11 doesn’t hurt my kids.
(And I have to say I felt a bit insulted by the tone of this article.)
I get it, but at some point they’ll be out in the world where they may have jobs that start at 8a. At least at this point in their lives you’re able to tailor their bedtimes to your schedule, but for many kids, they attend daycare or school that starts early in the morning so everything in their lives starts early and ends early.