Joshua Sparrow, M.D., a child psychiatrist, is co-author, with T. Berry Brazelton,
M.D. of "Sleep - The Brazelton Way and Director of Special Initiatives of the
Brazelton Touchpoints.
Helpful Sleep Habits ......by Joshua Sparrow M.D.
AmeriKids
Christian Center
0-3 months
12-18 hours (including naps)
4-12 months
11-14 hours (including naps)
1-6 years
10-12 hours
7-13 years
9-11 hours
14-18 years
8-10 hours
the best rest guide
Some children need more sleep than others, but most need a little less sleep as they get older.  
The amount almost always falls roughly within these ranges.
Sleep and Learning
We have only just begun to understand how sleep and the brain work together to affect memory, learning, and
behavior.  Although studies connecting sleep with academic performance often focus on quantity of sleep,
poor-quality sleep--light sleep, lack of deep sleep, interruptions during sleep--has also been shown to interfere with
cognitive functions essential to school success.  Sleep that doesn't refresh and restore may be caused by a noise
environment or by medical and psychological problems that interfere with the normal sleep cycle.  Here are a few of
the abilities critical to academic performance that may be jeopardized by too little or low-quality sleep:
Sustained
Attention
 the ability to pay attention to a specific task for prolonged periods, despite
other,competing demands and distractions
Impulse
Inhibition
 the ability to resist responding impulsively to an appealing stimulus and to think about the
results of reacting before doing so
Verbal creativity
 the ability to use words and sentences to invent stories or describe things in new ways
Working
memory
 the kind of memory that keeps certain information available in one's thourts in order to
manipulate it; to perform a certain task while performing that task with new, additional
information
This full story is found in the November 2007 - SCHOLASTIC PARENT & CHILD