Sleep, learning, and the developing brain: early-to-bed as a healthy and wise choice for school aged children.

" Everything possible should be done to favor sleep as deep and sound in quality and usually as long in quantity as possible , and everything that seriously interferes with this end should be sedulously avoided…No one should be allowed to go to school at all without [at least] nine hours of sleep… " —GS Hall 1904. There is a long history of interest in understanding the importance of sleep for normal health, development, and academic performance in children. In a major work 1 published more than a century ago, G. Stanley Hall emphasized the crucial role of sleep for optimal health in youth and warned about the consequences of placing excessive time demands on students in ways that undermined this health priority. Hall—a towering figure in the history of psychology and a pioneer in the modern study of ado-lescence—devoted a lifetime of work to studying virtually all aspects of development, incorporating work in psychology, anthropology , sociology, neurology, and education among others. Given his truly multidisciplinary approach, it is perhaps not surprising that he was one of the first to recognize the value of adequate sleep during childhood and throughout adolescence. The scientific evidence to support this type of advocacy—par-ticularly, the kind of experimental data with sufficient rigor to convince skeptics and influence policy makers about the health and academic priorities of sleep—has been accruing slowly but steadily. A critical advance was launched more than 25 years ago, as Carskadon and colleagues began a series of studies examining the development of normal sleep, and the effects of sleep loss in children and adolescents. 2 Over the past few decades, several different research groups have published observational data, clinical data, and results from some cross-sectional studies that provide strong support for an association between inadequate sleep in children (including insufficient time in bed, as well as disruptions or disturbances of sleep) and higher rates of problems with attention , behavior, emotions, and academic difficulties. For example, children with a wide range of behavioral or emotional problems report higher rates of sleep problems, and children sampled on the basis of sleep problems show elevated rates of behavioral and emotional difficulties. There is also a body of data from clinical samples showing that successful treatment of sleep disorders in children and/or improving the quality or quantity of sleep has been associated with functional improvements in these domains. Despite the mounting accumulation of …