I know our early bedtime means we miss evening stuff and also we eat family dinner at 5:30pm which is early for most people. But right now everyone in the house is asleep by 9 because we have too many small children to stay awake ourselves.

Almost 7-year-old: she tends to be lights out, asleep by 7:45-8p (except for swim meet nights, which usually go until 10p). She almost always wakes up between 6:30-7a, and tends to wake up earlier the later she goes to sleep–which is why we don’t usually let her stay up/out as late as her brother!

2-year-old (3 in August): lights out, in crib by 7:20-7:30p. He usually chatters to himself for a while before falling asleep. He tends to wake up between 6:30-7a, but will sleep later if we have a later night (like when he went to bed at 9p earlier this week after a neighborhood block party, he slept till 8 the next day). He still naps 2.5-3 hours a day, and is a third kid, so we are much more flexible with his bedtime than we were with his big siblings’ at that age! He is also my only child who has loved to nap this much and I’m guessing we are going to pay for it with later bedtimes/more shenanigans once he is out of a crib.

@Kate- I think people’s innate sleeping tendencies reveal themselves pretty early on. The early birds and night owls are just different, even as kids…

Hi, @Laura — I’d never thought about it before this (not my area), but a quick internet search turned up the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) and a quick search on sleep (https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/uccb/nschdict?s_keyword=sleep ) turned up 3 sleep-related question, 2 about “how many hours” and 1 about sleep position for babies (click link to see more details). So it looks like there are some data out there from surveys with more scientifically crafted samples, though not the exact same questions.

@Alexicographer – I’m trying to remember if there have been ATUS style surveys done of children’s time. I know the ATUS does have age 15+ so you get some adolescent data in it.
Yes, there are always big caveats with non-representative samples. On the other hand, I think this is interesting, given that it’s a lot of people (14,000?) and probably similar demographic to me so I can see how my kids are compared with what might be their peers. It does reinforce for me that we are skewed later than a lot of families — though that also has to do with a later start in the morning.

@Erica- there may be something to that – she noted that it is people who are interested in child sleep, and a higher income group of folks — we may just be seeing that people in this demographic know what time kids are “supposed” to go to bed and how much sleep they are supposed to get. Whether that happens on any given night in their household is a different matter.

@Lisa- wouldn’t it be nice if it was just 2 steps forward?? Ugh. Last night my 4-year-old got up twice. He usually doesn’t do that but it was definitely frustrating.

@Coree- late summer light (and early light) will change people’s sleep cycles. I have to imagine that ancient humans in northern places must have just slept less in summer and more in winter.