The emergence of pediatric sleep medicine

In the following sections, we outline the development of pediatric sleep medicine. We first review the clinical picture, analyzing studies on insomnia, parasomnias, respiratory disturbances, narcolepsy, disorders of movements during sleep, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). In the second part, we describe how the initial studies on infant and child sleep helped the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and how sleep research led to the definition of sleep structure in newborns, infants, and children. The third part describes the fascinating stories of sleep researchers that made this process possible and that built the history of pediatric sleep medicine. The final section is devoted to the description of the birth of different pediatric sleep associations.