Study affirms self-reported sleep duration as a useful health measure in children

JOURNAL: Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine

FUNDERS: National Institutes of Health, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, American Academy of Sleep Medicine Foundation

While sleep questionnaires are commonly completed by children and their parents, there has been a lack of data comparing the validity of these self-reported sleep parameters. A new study indicates that these sleep characteristics are relatively accurate compared to one another, and they vary only slightly from objective sleep measures.

Results show that when compared with objective sleep characteristics recorded during overnight polysomnography, there was strong agreement between both child report and parent report: Children overestimated their sleep duration by a median of 32 minutes, and parents overestimated their child's sleep duration by 36 minutes. Similarly, children overestimated the time it took them to fall asleep - known as "sleep latency"- by four minutes, and parents overestimated their child's sleep latency by two minutes.