Recent studies have shown that sleep is influenced and shaped by cultural factors, including cultural values, beliefs and practices. However, a systematic understanding of how cultural factors in countries may influence sleep duration and sleep disturbances is still lacking. Therefore, we focused on a comparison of sleep duration and disturbances in young populations between countries. We report cross-cultural differences between the child, parent and environmental factors, and their association with sleep duration and disturbances. The review is based on literature searches of seven databases published until December 2020. Studies were included if they investigated sleep duration and disturbances of individuals up to 18 years across at least two or more countries. The results of this review have shown that sleep duration and disturbances vary between countries and regions and certain factors (e.g., bedtime routines, sleeping arrangement, physical activity and psychological functioning) have been associated with sleep duration or disturbances. This review also demonstrates that certain factors which were associated with sleep duration or disturbances in one country, were not shown in other countries, suggesting a need for recommendations for age-related sleep duration and sleep interventions to consider cultural differences that influence sleep duration or disturbances in individual countries or regions.

Sleep duration and disturbances in typically developing (TD) children have been found to vary across countries. Given the impact of culture on sleep patterns in TD children, it is also necessary to examine the impact of culture on sleep patterns in children with atypical development. However, previous studies have often relied only on parent reports of children's sleep. Hence, the present study conducted a cross-cultural comparison of sleep duration and disturbances of school-aged TD children and autistic children in the UK and South Korea (hereafter Korea) using both subjective and objective sleep measurements. Cultural differences were observed in both actigraphy measures and parent reports of children's sleep duration and disturbances. Both TD children and autistic children in Korea had a later bedtime, later getting up time and shorter nocturnal sleep duration than their peers in the UK (p < .05). Furthermore, greater parent-reported sleep disturbances were reported in TD children in Korea compared to TD children in the UK and in autistic children in the UK compared to autistic children in Korea. Correlational analyses indicated that most parent-reported measures of children's sleep did not significantly correlate with objective measures and child reports, suggesting that studies on children's sleep can benefit by collecting data from multiple sources. Taken together, these findings suggest a cultural influence on sleep duration and disturbances of both TD children and autistic children. This study raises questions for further research to identify factors underlying cultural differences in children's sleep duration and disturbances.