For many a frazzled parent, bedtime — their children’s, that is — is the best part of the day. But it can be hard to ease snooze-averse kids into bed, and now a new study confirms that this is an age-old problem: children have consistently gotten less sleep than recommended guidelines, for at least the past 100 years.

Researchers from the University of South Australia did some historical spelunking, looking for every study about sleep duration in children beginning from the end of the 19th century through 2009. They discovered 300 such studies, dating all the way back to a French paper from 1897, and found that both age-specific recommendations for appropriate sleep and the amount of time kids actually spend in dreamland both declined at similar rates: 0.71 minutes per year for recommendations versus o.73 minutes per year for actual sleep duration, according to the study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. Across the board, children got about 37 minutes less sleep than was recommended.

Another constant: societal hand-wringing over children’s lack of sleep and a tendency to blame the hectic pace of modern life.

“We found that indeed kids are sleeping less,” says senior author Tim Olds, a professor of health sciences at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, who studies health and how we use our time. “People are always recommending kids sleep more than they do.”

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Over the 112 years the study covered, children lost about 75 minutes of shut-eye: in 1897, experts were recommending that kids sleep 1 hr. 15 min. more than was advised in 2009.

What’s perhaps most eye-opening is the researchers’ observation that sleep recommendations are pretty subjective; there’s just not that much empirical evidence about how much sleep children actually need.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/13/a-history-of-kids-and-sleep-its-never-enough/#ixzz1mGnwSQY7