If you’re a parent of teens, you know why your kids don’t get enough sleep.
Take 45 minutes of homework per class per night, plus a few extracurricular activities, plus screen time on TikTok or chatting with friends, and a normal amount of procrastination, and it adds up to between five and seven hours of sleep on an average school night. Throw in a term paper or heavy exam week and the average can easily drop to three or four.
Multiple studies have shown that the vast majority of teens today are living with borderline to severe sleep deprivation.
Sleep expert Mary Carskadon, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University and director of chronobiology and sleep research at Bradley Hospital in Providence, told the Child Mind Institute’s website that teenagers actually need more sleep than younger kids, not less. To be optimally alert teens require 9¼ hours of sleep.
According to a 2010 large-scale study published in The Journal of Adolescent Health, a scant 8% of American high school students get the recommended amount of sleep. Some 23% get six hours of sleep on an average school night and 10% get only 5 hours.
In studies conducted by Dr. 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.
There are scientific reasons for this.
Along with the more obvious hormonal changes that transform children into teens are shifts in the production of melatonin, the sleep hormone. That is why your teenager actually seems more awake at midnight than at dinner and left alone would probably sleep until 10 or 11 ... at least.
Experts say it may drive you crazy but that is the normal circadian rhythm for 15- to 22-year-olds. The typical high school student’s natural time to fall asleep is 11 p.m. or later, they say.
That’s why communities like Attleboro and Norton are making the smart move in re-examining the issue of school start times, which had been discussed for years but got pushed to the back burner by the COVID pandemic.
Scientists are saying that we really need to adjust the environment instead of asking teenagers to adjust their physiology. We need to follow the science.
That will be a challenge, however. High school students also must squeeze in time for often necessary jobs or extracurricular activities like sports and theater that enrich their education, not to mention greater homework demands than younger children.
Pushing back start times will bump against that as well as transportation issues as school times are staggered among levels to maximize bus usage.
There are no easy answers. But we’re glad to see local school officials are doing their homework on the issue.
Some very sleepy teenagers hope they come up with the right answer.