We investigated the sleep-wake rhythm of nursery school children with the aim of supporting their health and balanced mental/physical development.
We analyzed 4881 children from infant to 6 years of age, using 2-week sleep tables recorded by their guardians. The table contains sleep onset times, wake times, nighttime/daytime sleep duration, and the differences in these between weekdays and weekends.
The total sleep decrement of children with age is due to a decrease in daytime sleep only, and nighttime sleep duration remains almost unchanged at about 10 hours, and is therefore called the nighttime basic sleep duration (NBSD). While sleep onset time stabilizes at around 9:30 pm by the age of 2, wake-up times to be before 7 am, resulted in weekdays sleep insufficiency. This lack of sleep is compensated by long naps on weekdays and by catching up sleep on weekends morning, which may be the background to future social-jet-lag.
Guardians are encouraged to know their children's exact NBSD and set an ap-propriate bedtime to maintain it on weekdays, which prevent sleep dept and form a daily rhythm of waking up at the same time both on weekdays/weekends.
These conditions are believed to maintain balance in mental/physical development and school-social-adaptation.