Now that I am playing a sport that runs until 6:30 at night and am dealing with high school level homework, I am finding that I am not getting adequate sleep every night. More and more often, I find that I am not waking up in the morning on time, or I am waking up and feeling extremely tired and burnt out. Now, this is common among teens, and I have a few ideas on how to handle it.
According to Stanford University, “Adolescents need 9 hours and 15 minutes of sleep. Children need 10 hours and adults need 8 1/4 hours. They rarely get that much due to early school start time, inability to fall asleep until late at night, work, social life and homework. Parents may need to adjust their child’s schedule to allow more sleep. Most teens are chronically sleep deprived and try to ‘catch up’ on their sleep by sleeping in on the weekends. Ultimately they should go to bed and wake up at the same time. That is considered good sleep hygiene.”
Unfortunately, this may be true, but this amount of sleep is very hard to achieve. As a teen, you tend to stay up late due to a variety of outside factors, like schoolwork, cramming for quizzes, sports, friends, and talking to boyfriends/girlfriends. (There is a single hormone, melatonin, that reduces sleep, but it is not apparent until late puberty.) Now, there are a few things you can do.
- All of the outside variables I listed above are things that can be changed, so as a parent, you need to crack down on these. These can be controlled, so they should be.
- As I said above, you need to retain a constant sleep time, so your body becomes adjusted and is used to goin to bed a certain time.
- Finally, avoid the caffeine! I know this is common sense, but it is not commonly followed. It doesn’t help, and once it does wear off, you crash, causing you to need even more sleep!
Sleep is a critical part of the teenage years, so make sure you/your teen gets enough sleep ever night.