ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Recorded observations on human sleep date back to antiquity (1), but it was not until the nineteenth century that Western medicine began to explore the potential for sleep problems in children. Perhaps the first published account of a specific childhood sleep problem affecting daytime behavior in the Western medical literature was from Dr. William Hill, who in 1889 wrote that nocturnal breathing problems could cause “backwardness and stupidity” in schoolchildren (2). By the early twentieth century, advice on appropriate childhood sleep practices proliferated in popular books and magazines (3). Much of this was grounded in presumed causal relationships between sleep and daytime behavior, with the Journal of the National Education Association in 1928 declaring that chronic fatigue was “one of the major causes of school failure and breakdown” (3, p. 351). While this basic premise-that children’s sleep and daytime behavior are linked-remains widely held in the lay and scientific communities, rigorous scientific methods to test and explicate the nature of this link have been applied only within the past half-century.
