Norms and Determinants of Sleep Time among U.S. Children and Adolescents

Frederick J. Zimmerman, University of Washington
Jessica Williams, University of California, Los Angeles
Janice F. Bell, University of Washington

Anecdotal evidence indicates too many children in the U.S. suffer from inadequate sleep but little empirical evidence exists to back this claim. Although sleep norms have been developed for some ages of children in Australia, Zurich, and Rome, there are no sleep norms available in the U.S. context. We used data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a large, nationally representative survey, to develop national sleep norms for U.S. children and adolescents. We estimated norms for daytime and total sleep, and explored stratification by gender and race/ethnicity and changes over time. We used a method of non-parametric quantile regression to estimate the conditional quantile function that incorporates sample weights. We did find some differences from other estimates of total sleep but did not find large difference between racial/ethnic groups, between boys and girls, and over time.