Parents Often Overestimate Their Children’s Sleep Quality

While adequate sleep is vital for children’s growth and overall health, parents often misjudge how well their children actually sleep. To explore this mismatch, a study compared parent-reported sleep quality of 102 children aged six to ten years with objective measurements obtained from wrist-worn accelerometers. Over a seven-day monitoring period, parents reported that 83.3% of children met the recommended sleep duration of 9–12 hours per night. However, accelerometer data showed that only 14.7% achieved this target.

Parents estimated an average sleep duration of 9.58 hours, whereas actigraphy revealed a shorter average of 8.32 hours. Similarly, parents believed their children were awake for only 4.78 minutes during the night (wake after sleep onset), while accelerometry indicated an average of 38.27 minutes. These findings highlight that parents tend to overestimate their children’s…