Read This If You Are Worried About Your Baby’s Sleep Time
There are many guidelines for how much sleep your children should sleep and when they should go to bed. All of the tips can make the evening bustle even more stressful, especially for parents who come home from work and feel like they have to strike the clock before they strike 7:30 or 8, or whenever they decide it’s time to go to bed. …
But excessive rigidity is not needed. Sleep and sleep times differ across cultures. In Switzerland, children go to bed later than in the US, and in many Asian countries such as Japan and China, teens sleep less than teens in the US and Europe. In Maggie Curt-Baker’s FiveThirtyEight column, the child asks why she needs to go to bed when it’s light outside. Answer: bedtime is a product of culture.
The National Sleep Foundation states that sleep times for preschoolers can be eight to 14 hours, with the recommended amount being 10 to 13 hours. The timing of going to bed and being awake also changes with age . Children get up early and go to bed earlier than other age groups. Teens tend to fall asleep late and wake up later. And as people age, the time to go to sleep and wake up becomes earlier.
According to Kert-Baker, biology still determines when you feel like sleeping, but how we perceive our sleep is influenced by social expectations. It becomes a problem when you cannot sleep or get up at the times that society expects of you. This is what constitutes the diagnosis of a sleep disorder such as delayed sleep-wake disorder . A 7-year-old who cannot fall asleep at 8:45 pm may be an anomaly in the United States, but many children in countries like Spain regularly go to bed after 10:00 pm.
Plus, just as worrying about being awake definitely doesn’t help you fall asleep , treating insomnia as a serious problem can turn it into one. In cultures where insomnia is not considered special, some of this stress is relieved.
Kert-Baker explains:
All of this means that it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what “normal” sleep looks like or what “ideal” sleep is — a problem that is compounded by the fact that we still do not have a lot of reliable data on the effects of intercultural sleep. differences in sleep both within and between countries.
So the next time your child says he can’t sleep, relax a little – not necessarily a set time for your child to sleep. Instead, focus on a good bedtime routine like storytelling and yoga , and don’t worry if your child doesn’t fall asleep by 7:31 am.
Don’t tell kids, bedtime is a social construct | Five thirty eight