why you shouldn't trust sleep experts {featured read}

I've always been skeptical to the universally prescriptive measures of sleep experts, so this new survey of 300 sleep studies analyzing more than a century of sleep experts' research, stood out to me for at least a couple of reasons. 1) For more than a century, children have consistently gotten less sleep than recommended guidelines. 2) Recommended guidelines change over time and appear to be pretty subjective. 3) The hectic pace of modern life has been blamed as the culprit throughout all the surveyed studies, dating from the late 19th century.

So perhaps they do need more sleep. But in reality, there is almost no evidence about how much sleep kids truly need to function their best. “We think for no particularly good reason that kids need more sleep than they’re getting,” says [senior author Tim Olds, a professor of health sciences at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, who studies health and how we use our time]. “People are always recommending kids sleep more than they do.” “Every so often a group of blokes get together and say, What do you recommend, boys? Should we push it up to 9 hours, 15 minutes? It really is like that, honestly. It’s an arbitrary public-health line in the sand that people draw.”
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The take-home message, according to Olds? “Never trust sleep experts.”

Read the whole article at Time Healthland: A History of Kids and Sleep: Why They Never Get Enough