{"doi":"10.1093/eurpub/ckaf094","title":"Promoting sleep health in children and youth: application of the population health promotion model","abstract":"Johnson and Stranges call for comprehensive public health approaches to address sleep health disparities and promote sleep health across the life-course [1]. However, despite recognition of sleep health in national population health objectives, strategic plans, and guidelines (e.g. Healthy People 2030; Advancing our Health: Prevention in the 2020s), children and adolescents continue to experience poor sleep health. Given their inherent vulnerability in society and since sleep health is crucial for children’s and adolescents’ physical, mental, and social health, there is an urgent need to strengthen and broaden public health initiatives within this life-course stage. The Population Health Promotion Model (PHPM) [2] blends population health and health promotion by outlining how a broad set of comprehensive health promotion strategies can be employed to act upon a range of determinants of health at different societal levels. This article showcases how the PHPM can be used to plan the comprehensive public health action called for by Johnson and Stranges [1] to promote sleep health in children, adolescents, and their families by addressing the model’s three critical questions: “What should be done?”, “How should it be done?”, and “With whom should we act?”. Key challenges of sleep health in early childhood are often intertwined with parenting and relate to the notable differences between young children’s sleep compared to adult sleep, as well as the dramatic changes in sleep that occur during early childhood [3]. Parents are often inundated with overwhelming amounts of information on sleep, not to mention the target of many consumer products that promise better sleep; thus, parents as individuals and part of families (the “who”) are a key audience for sleep-related public health interventions. Such interventions could support healthy child development and personal health and practices and coping skills (the “what”) by developing parental knowledge about key sleep health concepts, including what sleep patterns and behaviors are developmentally appropriate, how sleep patterns are established and maintained, and how sleep health is a multidimensional concept—more than just sleep duration (the “how”). Public health sleep-related efforts have historically focused on promoting sleep safety, resulting in significant declines in Sudden Unexpected Infant Deaths. However, broader sleep health in early childhood have yet to be adequately addressed from a public health standpoint. Instead, parental sleep deprivation has often been viewed as a taken-for-granted consequence of parenting young children and parents with concerns about their young child’s sleep are often not sufficiently addressed by health services. Health services that specifically support families of young children who experience sleep difficulties (the “who”) as a means of supporting healthy child development, providing social support networks, and developing personal health and practices and coping skills (the “what”) exist in some countries (e.g. Australia). However, countries without such services could consider reorienting existing health services (the “how”) to better support families in achieving and maintaining sleep health. Finally, given that young children nap during daytime hours, which often occurs in childcare settings, public health action could promote healthy child development (the “what”) by creating supportive environments and developing policies related to protecting and promoting young children’s daytime sleep (the “how”) within the childcare sector (the “who”). For school-aged children, a key sleep health issue that could be addressed via public health action is the interplay between screen time, physical activity, nutrition, and sleep [4] within school communities and the educational sector. For example, since adequate physical activity and nutrition can support sleep health, school communities and districts (the “who”) can build healthy policy and create ","journal":"European Journal of Public Health","year":2025,"id":541944,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9595,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":925048,"name":"Tetyana Kendzerska","orcid":"0000-0002-5301-1796","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1430657,"name":"Elizabeth Keys","orcid":"0000-0002-0251-0720","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":5,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:52:51.593043Z","pmid":"40740018","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}