How Much Sleep Do Children Need?

By Author: Ankit
Total Articles: 2
Comment this article

Sleep is of paramount importance to the development of your child. It builds the path for one of the earliest stages of development. When babies turn into toddlers and gradually into school-goers and then teenagers, their sleeping patterns and needs may happen to shift. It is a fairly difficult task to keep a tab on how many hours of sleep your kid is gettinge each day.

The amount of sleep your child gets varies at different stages of life adn highly depends on the child and certain individual factors. These also include the age of yoru child.

Here are some of the basic guidelines to understand if your child is getting enough sleep

1-4 weeks old
The average sleeping time of your baby at this age should be around 15-16 hours everyday.

How much sleep do children need-1-Mamanbaba
Newborn babies tend to sleep a lot more and end up being in bed over 15 to 18 hours in a day. They sleep in short periods of time that vary between two to four hours. Premature babies tend to sleep longer and colicky babies tend to sleep less, comparitively.

Newborns do not have an internal biological clock ...
... and thus their sleep patterns are not related to the daytime or nighttime cycles. Infact, at this age, your baby may not have a pattern of sleep at all

1-4 months old
The average sleeping time of your baby at this age should be around 14-15 hours everyday.

How much sleep do children need-2-Mamanbaba
When your baby is 6-8 weeks old, he/she is starting to settle down a little bit to some sort of sleeping pattern. At this time you can notice a kind of sleeping pattern emerging in your baby’s schedule. The longest period of sleep for your baby is 4-6 hours and it now mostly occurs during the evening time and a bit regularly. This is the point where the day-night confusion ends for your baby

At this stage, you will encounter your baby having about 3 naps a day and this count drops to 2 when your baby turns 6 months old. At this time, your baby will be capable of sleeping throughout the night time. During the latter part of this time frame, as the biological clock matures, your baby will be able to establish a pattern of regular naps. The early morning nap will last about an hour and start around 9 am. The afternoon nap lasts about an hour or two starting at 2 pm. Lastly, the late afternoon nap will last the same amount of time, starting around 5 pm.

1-3 years old
The average sleeping time of your baby at this age should be around 12-14 hours everyday.

How much sleep do children need-3-Mamanbaba
While your child is making its move to the completion of a year, that’s around 18-21 months of age, he/she is likely to lose its morning and evening nap and would switch to napping only once a day. Even though toddlers need about 14 hours of sleep, they typically end up getting only 10 hours of it.

Most of the children between 21 to 36 years of age would still need one nap during the daytime. This nap may range from 1-3 hours long. They would typically end up going to bed by 7-9 pm and wake up around 6-8 am

3-6 years old
The average sleeping time of your child at this age should be around 10-12 hours everyday.

Kids at this age are fully aware of the biological clock. They tend to go to sleep typically by 7-9 pm and wake up around 6-8 am. This is somewhat similar to the pattern they follow when they ae younger. Most of the kids are still napping at the age of 3. At the age of 5, some end up giving up the nap schedule. Their naps gradually become shorter as they grow older. Any newer sleep problems or issues do not develop after 3 years of age

7-12 years old
The average sleeping time of your kid at this age should be around 10-11 hours everyday.

During this age, your child is doing a lot of things together. He/she is socializing, schooling, participating in family activities. These things tend to push the bedtimes and most of the children at this age are likely to hit bed at around 9 pm. Still, this age tends to show a wide range of bedtimes ranging from 7:30-10 pm along with the total hours of sleep ranging from 9-12 hours. However, the average remains to be 9 hours.

12-18 years old
The average sleeping time of your child at this age should be around 8-9 hours everyday.

At this stage, sleep just becomes a vital commodity to health and well-being of your teenager. Scientifically, it turns out that children during their teen years require more sleep than they did while they were younger. However, most of the time, societal pressures tend to conspire against this cycle and work against your teenager getting a proper amount of sleep or even quality sleep