Impact of different recommendations on adequacy rate for sleep duration in children

A huge amount of literature in the last decades showed that sleep is essential for children’s health and well-being and that short sleep duration is associated with several negative health outcomes. Many developmental phases in infancy and childhood are in strict relationship with an healthy sleep. In the last years some specific recommendations made for how much sleep children need have been published. The empirical evidences for contemporary sleep recommendations has changed and the new recommendations are clearly different from the previous ones and reflect clearly the changes in the sleep need of the children and adolescents in the last decades although seem still to be largely unfitting for preadolescence and adolescence. If sleep is to be treated as a therapeutic intervention, then consensus guidelines, statements, and evidence-based best-practice documents are needed to underpin sleep recommendations for children. Sleep recommendations for children play an important role for public policies and interventions, and to advertise parents and children of the negative consequences of sleep deprivation/reduction.