How Much Sleep do Children Need?

Excerpt from About.com

The American Academy of Pediatrics Guide to Your Child's Sleep provides some helpful guidelines regarding just how much sleep children need at different stages in their development.

Children need:
Between Ages 3-10, children need 10-12 hours
Between Ages 11-12, children need about 10 hours
Teenagers need about 9 hours of sleep per night

Kids who are regularly sleep deprived will exhibit some pretty difficult behaviors. They display frequent irritability, overreact emotionally, have difficulty concentrating, forget easily, wake often during the night, and may even display hyperactive behaviors.

The best thing you can do is simply move your child's bedtime up. This may sound impossible at first, but by moving the entire bedtime routine up half an hour, you'll help your child associate bedtime with an earlier time. In fact, you may be surprised to find that he/she goes to sleep easily and sleeps through the night more regularly when he/she is well-rested.