Editorial Standards & Review Process

👥 Who produces this site

Child Sleep Calculator is an independent website maintained by its founder and a small editorial team of writers and editors who research parenting and child-health topics. We build free, single-purpose tools for parents and write supporting guides around them.

What we are not: we are not doctors, paediatricians, sleep consultants or a medical service, and we are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or funded by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, or the NHS. We reference their publicly available guidance; we do not speak for them.

Because we are not clinicians, everything on this site is written to reflect published expert consensus rather than our own opinions. Where the evidence is genuinely mixed or evolving, we say so instead of picking a side.

📚 Where our numbers come from

Every sleep-duration figure and age band used by the calculator and the articles traces back to one of these published sources:

• Paruthi S, et al. "Recommended Amount of Sleep for Pediatric Populations: A Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine." Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2016 - endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics. This is our primary source for age-based sleep duration ranges.
• Hirshkowitz M, et al. "National Sleep Foundation's Sleep Time Duration Recommendations." Sleep Health, 2015 - an independent expert panel whose ranges corroborate the AASM/AAP figures.
• NHS guidance on children's and teenagers' sleep - practical bedtime and wind-down advice for UK families, consistent with the consensus ranges above.
• AAP HealthyChildren.org - parent-facing guidance on bedtime routines, sleep environment and safe sleep for infants.

Our full citation list, including how each figure maps onto the calculator's age bands, is on the Sources & Research page.

✍️ How articles are written and checked

Every guide on this site goes through the same steps:

• Research first. We start from the primary sources above plus recognised paediatric bodies, not from other blogs.
• Draft against the source. Any specific claim - a number of hours, an age range, a physiological mechanism - is written with the source open and is only included if the source supports it.
• Editorial review. A second person checks every factual claim against its citation, flags anything that reads as stronger than the evidence, and removes filler.
• Plain-language pass. We rewrite for a parent reading on a phone at 9pm, not for a search engine.
• Publish with dates. Each article shows a publish date and a "last reviewed" date so you can judge how current it is.

We do not publish AI-generated articles at volume, thin "10 tips" filler, or near-duplicate pages spun from one template. If a topic does not warrant a genuinely useful, specific article, we do not publish one.

🔄 Our review schedule

Sleep guidance changes slowly, but it does change, and outdated health information is worse than none. So:

• The calculator's sleep-duration data and every guide are reviewed at least once every six months.
• We check for new or revised consensus statements from the AASM, AAP and NHS whenever we do a review, and out of cycle if a major revision is announced.
• If official recommendations change, we update the calculator's figures and all affected pages, and note the change on this page and in the affected article.
• The "last reviewed" date on each page reflects the most recent time a human checked that page against current guidance - not just the last time a typo was fixed.

🛠️ Corrections policy

If you spot something on this site that looks wrong, out of date, or unclear, please tell us. Email hello@childsleepcalculator.com with the page, the claim, and the source you are referencing if you have one.

• We investigate every correction report.
• Clear factual errors are fixed as quickly as we can confirm them, usually within a few days.
• When we change something substantive, we update the "last reviewed" date and, for significant corrections, add a short note explaining what changed.

💰 How this site is funded

Child Sleep Calculator is free to use and is funded entirely by display advertising served through Google AdSense.

• We do not sell sponsored posts, paid placements, or "reviews".
• Advertisers have no input into our content, our sleep figures, or what we recommend. Ad slots are filled automatically by Google and are kept separate from editorial content.
• We do not use affiliate links in our guides. If that ever changes, we will disclose it clearly on the relevant page.
• The calculator runs entirely in your browser. We never collect, store, or sell your child's age or wake-up time - see our Privacy Policy.