Almost 80 percent of elementary and middle school students are suffering from a lack of sleep due to excessive study pressure, experts say.

Beijing youngsters snooze for an average of just seven hours and 37 minutes a day, far short of the nine hours needed to prevent sleep depravation, according to the China Youth and Children Research Center.

A survey of 5,000 students aged 6 to 15 across 10 provinces last year found the number of children not napping enough is 30 percent higher than it was six years ago.

"The reduced sleeping pattern reflects the increasing study pressure that children face," said Sun Yunxiao, deputy director of the research center. "In the past, parents were proud if their children got into college, but now they only accept famous universities.

"In Beijing, it's especially difficult to get students into a famous high school, let alone a prestigious university, so both teachers and parents are putting pressure on children," he added.

The survey found that under-8s spend around 1.47 hours a day on schoolwork, while 9- to 12-year-olds work for 1.82 hours and middle school students 2.99 hours - 0.5 to 1.5 hours more than the homework cap advised by education authorities.

A Beijing mother who asked to be identified only as Qu said her 10-year-old daughter regularly studies from 7:30 am until midnight due to several extra-curricular classes, including dancing, painting, calligraphy, English, math and literature.

"Almost 90 percent of the students in her school work as hard as her," she told METRO. "Her after-school lessons take up every minute of her leisure time and cost our family 9,000 yuan each semester. I really feel bad for her but it's the price we need to pay if we want to send her to a key middle school."

Wang Qing, 24, an English teacher at a primary school in Chaoyang district, said the children in her class have not shown any sign of tiredness and insisted the school does not lay on too much homework.

However, Sun at the research center argued: "In my experience, many people don't even know that primary school students should be sleeping at least 9 hours a day."

China Daily

(China Daily 05/18/2011 page)