Findings on Teen Sleep an Eye-Opener
Teenagers--what undisciplined slugs! If they’d only get to bed earlier, waking up in the morning wouldn’t be such an ordeal. Right?
Parents and even sleep experts have long thought so, believing that adolescents deliberately drag out bedtime and hate getting up because of pubescent rebellion and other social and psychological factors.
But science is proving that conventional wisdom wrong.
The nation’s leading sleep researchers are coming to the conclusion that teenagers’ inner clocks, or circadian rhythms, are set differently from the ones that govern slumber and wake patterns in the rest of us. They have come to this conclusion by scrutinizing teenagers’ sleep cycles, even isolating the kids in laboratories to measure their levels of melatonin, the brain hormone that regulates sleepiness and wakefulness. And they are finding evidence that teenagers have a physiological need to go to bed later and wake up later than most of the rest of us--a phenomenon called “phase delay” in sleep lingo.
This research led the Minneapolis school board in May to change school schedules, postponing the start of middle school by 2 1/2-hours, to 9:40 a.m., and high school by one hour, to 8:40 a.m. Minneapolis is just the latest of several Minnesota school districts to take the teen sleep research to heart.
“From the age of 14 to 18 or 19, kids’ sleep patterns are just different,” said Kyla Wahlstrom, associate director of the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota, who is studying the impact of recent school schedule changes on student achievement.
As this body of research grows, school officials said they are growing more conscious of students’ sleeping needs when planning school schedules.
“Their bodies are in a growth mode,” said Karin Lynch, assistant superintendent of the Fullerton School District, which recently scrapped plans to start school earlier. Students’ sleeping health “was a significant factor in our decision.”
The Fullerton school board initially considered beginning classes about 45 minutes earlier to cut transportation costs by better coordinating bus routes for elementary and junior high school students. But parents and students objected to the proposal, persuading the board to kill the item.
“It’s already so hard to get these kids up,” said Wendy Florin, a Fullerton parent of three who opposed the schedule change. “They are basically sleep walking or comatose in the morning. Kids these days do so much, everything from honors courses to sports to volunteer work. It’s no wonder they don’t get enough sleep.”
Florin’s 14-year-old daughter, Whitney, said she gets on average seven hours of sleep. Even on nights when she goes to bed early to catch up on her sleep, she added, “I still wake up tired. A lot of days at school, I’m so tired and I’m just waiting to go home to sleep.”
To be sure, some kids have no problem rising with the sun. And for some of those who find it painfully hard, simple sloth may be the reason, said Mary Carskadon, a Brown University professor of psychiatry and human behavior, who has studied adolescent sleep for two decades.
Mounting research suggests, however, that biological patterns are the main culprit for many teenagers.
About 20% of all high school students fall asleep in school, according to a 1995 study cited by Wahlstrom. Difficulty waking up is a prime cause of school tardiness.
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Contrary to popular belief, Carskadon and other experts say, teens need more sleep--about 10 hours a night--than do grown-ups or even younger children. But most teens get only six or seven hours. A number of factors conspire against them. More high school students need to work after school or take care of younger siblings. And the high school day is starting earlier than it used to.
“Young people tend to shorten their sleep time and think they can get away with it,” said Peter Fotinakes, director of the UC Irvine Sleep Disorder Center. “But when they start to experience difficulty with sleeping, they become less sharp and it affects their performance in school.”
Similar findings were reported by Richard P. Allen and Jerome Mirabile of the Sleep Disorders Center at Johns Hopkins University, who examined 61 17-year-olds from two Maryland high schools in 1989.
Not surprisingly, Allen and Mirabile found a correlation between getting more sleep and getting higher grades. Similarly, Carskadon and others found more depression, lower grades and more behavioral problems among students who got less than the recommended 9 or 10 hours a night.
Sleep deprivation more often occurs among teens with poor scheduling habits and those diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Fotinakes said.
The proper home environment also is key to healthy sleep, Fullerton’s Lynch said.
“Sometimes it’s caused by the family television being on until midnight,” she said. “The appropriate conditions must be there for students.”
If students begin to show sluggishness or a decline in their performance, UCI’s Fotinakes suggests that parents monitor their children’s sleeping patterns. Bad habits usually are the culprit and can be resolved with structured schedules. In more severe cases, a student can consult a physician for sleep therapy, which resets the body’s biological rhythm through strict sleeping schedules and artificial lighting.
But the rule of thumb is to pay attention to your body’s needs, Fotinakes added.
“When you feel tired in evening time, you should go to sleep,” he said.
