Recommended child sleep hours came from a formal expert consensus

The short answer

In 2016 the American Academy of Sleep Medicine published a consensus statement setting a recommended range of nightly sleep hours for five age bands, from infants to teenagers, reached through a formal panel process rather than a single new study. A specific bedtime screen rule for your own child follows from protecting that range, not from a separate finding that screens are uniquely harmful in themselves.

What the evidence says

Thirteen named sleep medicine specialists, based at institutions across the United States and Canada, used a modified RAND Appropriateness Method, described in the full statement as a ten-month process of evidence review, discussion and voting, to reach the recommendations, published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine on 15 June 2016. The published ranges are: infants aged four to twelve months, twelve to sixteen hours per twenty-four hours including naps; children aged one to two years, eleven to fourteen hours; children aged three to five years, ten to thirteen hours; children aged six to twelve years, nine to twelve hours; and teenagers aged thirteen to eighteen years, eight to ten hours. The statement names specific risks tied to sleeping less than the recommended amount, including problems with attention, behaviour and learning, and increased risk of accidents, injuries, hypertension, obesity, diabetes and depression; for teenagers specifically, it names increased risk of self-harm, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts associated with insufficient sleep.

For context

This is a consensus statement, a formal expert judgement process, not a single controlled trial, and its short published abstract states that the detailed evidence review behind each figure was intended for a separate, longer paper. Each age band's range spans several hours, reflecting real variation between children rather than one fixed nightly target. The statement itself does not name screens, phones or bedtime devices; the connection between this document and a household's device rules is drawn later, by families and other guidance, linking known disruptors of sleep, light exposure, alerting content and delayed bedtimes, to a range the statement sets from the sleep side rather than the screen side.

A practical next step

You could work back from your child's age band to a target bedtime and wake time, then treat a screen rule as one option among several, alongside light, noise, routine and temperature, for protecting that number, rather than as the goal in itself.

• What time would your child need to fall asleep to reach the lower end of their age band's range, given how they actually wake?
• Is a screen the main obstacle to that bedtime in your house, or is something else, such as a sibling's schedule or your own evening routine?
• Would you notice the attention or mood changes the statement names if your child's sleep quietly slipped below range for a few weeks?

The 2016 statement gives a documented, expert-agreed range rather than a single ideal number, and it says nothing directly about screens. Using it as the target, and treating device rules as one route to reaching it, keeps the two questions, how much sleep, and how to protect it, usefully separate.