The problem is compounded when many adolescents, like my daughter, try to make up for lost sleep on the weekends, sometimes sleeping upwards of 12 hours on Friday and Saturday nights, which only further disrupts their sleep cycle. We really need to adjust the environment instead of asking teenagers to adjust their physiology.” “The typical high school student’s natural time to fall asleep is 11pm or later. Allison Baker, a child and adolescent psychiatrist. “It’s a major contributing factor to sleep deprivation which is unique to adolescence,” says Dr. Max Van Gilder, a pediatrician in Manhattan, “that is the normal circadian rhythm for 15- to 22-year-olds.” Effectively, they are in a different time zone than the rest of us. That is why your teenager actually seems more awake at midnight than at dinner and left alone would probably sleep until ten or eleven. When you consider the fact that many of these kids are getting behind the wheel in the early morning and driving themselves to school, the issue of sleep becomes literally a matter of life and death.Īlong with the more obvious hormonal changes that transform your child into a teen, are shifts in the production of melatonin, the sleep hormone. Carskadon, half the teens she evaluated were so tired in the morning that they showed the same symptoms as patients with narcolepsy, a major sleep disorder in which the patient nods off and falls directly into REM sleep. Some 23% get six hours of sleep on an average school night and 10% get only 5 hours. According to a 2010 large-scale study published in The Journal of Adolescent Health, a scant 8% of US high school students get the recommended amount of sleep. Nine and a quarter hours of sleep is what they need to be optimally alert. According to sleep expert Mary Carskadon, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University and director of chronobiology and sleep research at Bradley Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, teenagers actually need more sleep than younger kids, not less. In fact, multiple studies have shown that the vast majority of teens today are living with borderline to severe sleep deprivation. Throw in a term paper or heavy exam week and the average can easily drop to 3 or 4. The reasons are multiple but when you add together 45 minutes of homework per class per night, plus a few extra-curricular activities, plus the downtime spent everyday watching a John Green video on YouTube or chatting with friends, and a normal amount of procrastination, it adds up to between 5 and 7 hours of sleep on an average school night. My 16-year-old daughter is finally entering the homestretch of sophomore year, and she has been chronically sleep deprived since September. In reality, studies show that teens don’t function well before 9am. This is made worse by the fact that some high schools start as early as 7:20 in the morning. But the more they do, the less sleep they get. A lot of times that’s because they’re being told that colleges want them to be well-rounded. Teens often participate in more activities than they have time for. We also live in a culture that values activity over sleep. Staying up all night to study becomes competitive among some groups of high-achieving friends. And then there’s the anxiety of kids who want to be perfect in school. Between doing homework on computers and socializing on phones, that means a lot of screen time. The light coming from the screen keeps their brains from making melatonin, which is the sleep hormone. When kids try to catch up on sleep on the weekends, it messes with their sleep even more.Īnother reason for sleep deprivation in teens is the time they spend on screens. The major reasons for sleep deprivation in teens are biology, screen time and unreasonable expectations.īecause of hormone changes, teens are more awake at midnight and would wake at 10 or 11am if they didn’t have to get to school. But over a third of teens get only five to six hours a night. Experts say teens need over nine hours a night to be healthy. Teens actually need more sleep than little kids. Most teens today are living with mild to severe sleep deprivation.
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