Children sleeping 10 or more hours nightly transition more successfully to kindergarten
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Children who regularly get 10 or more hours of sleep per night transitioned more successfully to kindergarten than peers with worse sleeping patterns, according to a study published in Pediatrics.
Researchers from Penn State University hypothesized that children “obtaining more sleep would show higher levels of socioemotional and learning engagement, executive functioning, and academic outcomes, net of socioeconomic, health, and school attendance covariates, compared with children with lesser amounts of sleep.”
“Curiously, one determinant largely missing in studies of [kindergarten] transition is children’s sleep duration,” they wrote. “This is noteworthy, given that sleep disturbances in young children are common (prevalence rates between 20% and 30%) and that sleep deficiencies in childhood are predictive of compromised functioning in cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and academic domains.”
The authors recruited 230 families to examine three predictors of kindergarten adjustment: mean amounts of child sleep per 24-hour period, proportion of 24-hour periods per week that children slept 10 or more hours, and proportion of nighttime sleep periods per week that children slept 10 or more hours.
The examined each in 7-day bursts at levels of pre-kindergarten (July to August), early kindergarten (late September), mid-kindergarten (late November) and late kindergarten (mid-to-late April) while they wore a Spectrum Plus Activewatch to sample activity.
Among the 221 families who completed the study, the regularity of nighttime sleep in which children slept 10 or more hours per night consistently had more favorable outcomes in the aforementioned domains.
The researchers said sufficient nighttime sleep appeared to be more important for school adjustment, as opposed to overall amounts of sleep across the day or the proportion of 24-hour periods in which children got 10 or more hours of sleep.
“We further propose that such interventions target parental, as well as child, sleep because sleep between parents and children (eg, bedtimes, sleep onset, and morning wake-ups) are closely aligned,” they wrote. “Such interventions may need to be flexibly adapted, especially when parents have irregular, nonstandard work hours. Findings suggest that family-based interventions to establish consistent patterns of sufficient nighttime sleep should begin well before (eg, 5 to 6 months) the start of [kindergarten].”