Teens need more sleep
Oct. 25, 20002

By BARBARA KINGSLEY
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Is your teenager acting insolent, inattentive, bored? Maybe she’s sleepy.

Everybody knows that babies need lots of sleep. But teenagers? New research is showing that teens are not getting enough sleep. They need nine-10 hours every night, but average just seven. Oftentimes, they get less than that.

About 60 percent of kids younger than 18 say they feel tired during the day, according to a study by the National Sleep Foundation.

Soccer practice, socializing, computer games, jobs, homework and television are pushing bedtimes later and later, making teens ever-wearier at the morning alarm.

But there’s another factor, too. By the time they hit their teens, young people’s internal clocks start shifting, making it easier for their bodies to stay up later, like adults, and harder to go to bed earlier.

“Until a decade ago, we thought they stayed up late because they can and there’s lots to do — the entire psycho-social milieu pushes in that direction,” said Mary Carskadon, who researches teens and sleep at the Sleep Research Lab at Brown Medical School in Providence, R.I.

“But their brains become reconfigured, not pushing them to stay up later, but making it easier to make that delay. What seems crystal clear is kids can’t just decide, ‘I have to get up at 5, so I’ll go to bed at 8.’ They just can’t do it.”

So early-morning gymnastics practice and pre-dawn school start times tend to work against kids’ evolving natural clocks.

Researchers have found sleep-deprived adolescents are more likely to feel depressed, rise quicker to anger and show symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. They also don’t learn as well. Carskadon’s research in Rhode Island discovered an association between sleep and grades. She found that students getting Cs, Ds and Fs slept far less than those who pulled As and Bs.