Sleep patterns of school-age children with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism.

Allik et al. (2006) strapped actigraphy watches on school-age kids with Asperger or high-functioning autism. They also gave parents sleep logs to fill out.

The team compared these kids to typically developing classmates for one week. They looked at bedtime, fall-asleep time, wake time, and total sleep.

Kids with AS/HFA needed more minutes to fall asleep. Other numbers looked the same as controls.

Parents and the watches agreed on the longer sleep-latency gap. The extra time was small but consistent across nights.

McMillan et al. (1999) saw the same parent-actigraphy match-up first. They warned that questionnaires alone can over-count sleep problems; Hiie confirms the watch-plus-diary method.

Scahill et al. (2024) now give us a quick parent scale built for autism. It replaces the old actigraphy-only check with a five-minute rating that still tracks true insomnia.

Abel et al. (2018) add a behavior angle. They show that chronic poor sleep, not nightly dips, fuels next-day self-injury and repetitive behavior in kids already in ABA. Hiie’s longer sleep-onset could be one piece of that chronic load.

Before you write a behavior plan for tired-day behaviors, look at how long the child actually takes to fall asleep. A simple bedtime log plus a cheap actigraphy watch—or the new Lawrence scale—can tell you if the issue is sleep latency, not a clinical sleep disorder. Targeting that extra wind-down time with a shorter screen-free routine may pay off in faster sleep and calmer tomorrow sessions.