Rethinking Child and Adolescent Sleep in the 24/7 World: Mental Health, Emerging Exposures, and Public Health Solutions

Childhood and adolescence are critical periods for sleep and circadian development, during which adequate and well-timed sleep supports emotional regulation, cognitive functioning, learning, physical health, and overall wellbeing. Disturbed sleep, including insufficient duration, poor quality, irregular timing, and circadian misalignment, has been increasingly linked to depression, anxiety, behavioral problems, impaired school functioning, and broader health risks, making sleep an important public health concern in young populations. At the same time, contemporary children and adolescents are growing up in a 24/7 environment shaped by early school schedules, academic pressure, artificial light, digital connectivity, social media, gaming, and emerging AI-enabled technologies.Sleep should no longer be viewed simply as a consequence of individual behavior or mental health problems, but as a multidimensional and modifiable public health target shaped by the environments in which young people live, learn, and connect. This Research Topic aims to rethink child and adolescent sleep in the context of a 24/7 society and to advance understanding of how sleep duration, quality, timing, regularity, and circadian alignment influence mental health and population wellbeing. We seek research that identifies emerging determinants of sleep, clarifies mechanisms linking sleep with mental health, recognizes vulnerable populations and health inequalities, and develops scalable solutions across families, schools, communities, healthcare systems, digital environments, and public policy. A public health perspective therefore requires moving beyond sleep duration alone toward multidimensional sleep health, while examining how biological, behavioral, digital, social, environmental, and structural factors jointly shape sleep and, in turn, mental health and healthy development.We welcome interdisciplinary studies that place sleep at the center of child and adolescent mental health and public health. Relevant themes include sleep duration, quality, timing, regularity and variability; insomnia and daytime sleepiness; chronotype, social jetlag and circadian misalignment; and the ways in which these dimensions of sleep influence depression, anxiety, suicidality, emotional regulation, cognition, behavior, school functioning, physical health, and overall wellbeing. We are also interested in emerging determinants of sleep, including digital and AI-enabled environments, nighttime connectivity, academic demands, school schedules, family and neighborhood contexts, socioeconomic conditions and other 24-hour behaviors. We welcome longitudinal, experimental, population-based, cross-cultural, wearable and digital phenotyping, causal inference, and implementation studies, as well as family-, school-, community-, healthcare-, technology-, and policy-level interventions. Original Research, Systematic Reviews, Meta-analyses, Reviews, Brief Research Reports, Perspectives, and Policy and Practice Reviews are welcome. Topic editors: Hongyu Zou, Ling Qi, Peng Zhang Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85493/rethinking-child-and-adolescent-sleep-in-the-247-world-mental-health-emerging-exposures-and-public-health-solutions