Sleep Patterns in Pre-Adolescent Children: An Eeg-Eog Study

The typical all-night sleep pattern of the pre-adolescent male was determined by analyzing the simultaneous EEG-EOG tracings of 18 healthy schoolboys (range 8 to 11 years). The sleep patterns of these boys resembled that of older subjects by the occurrence of a more or less orderly sequence of sleep stages which spontaneously shifted from one stage to another. Stability of the pattern for a given boy was observed in the consistent amount of time spent in each sleep stage and in the number of sleep stage changes night after night. When compared with the adult sleep patterns, pre-adolescent total sleep time was 2½ hours longer with unequal distribution of the added time to each of the sleep stages. Sleep stages in children are longer in duration than in adults, and the sleep patterns are as stable as that of the adult.