Help your teen get the sleep they need for memory, mood, and growth. Create a routine, remove devices, and prioritize rest for better health and focus.
“The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.” – E. Joseph Cossman
Key Concepts:
- Sleep is responsible for 4 functions you simply cannot do without. Memories, mood, metabolism, and growth.
- In adolescents, the circadian rhythm undergoes significant changes that can affect sleep patterns. Thanks to a phase delay, teenagers naturally feel sleepy later at night (around 11 PM or later) and prefer to wake up later in the morning. Furthermore, in adolescents, melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep, production is delayed, meaning it's released later in the evening compared to adults or younger children. This contributes to the later sleep onset and the difficulty of falling asleep earlier.
- Tweens and teens need more sleep than adults – typically 8-10 hours per night. This increased sleep need, combined with the phase delay, makes it difficult for them to get sufficient sleep if they have early school start times.
- In addition to biological factors, social and environmental factors also influence adolescent sleep. Peer pressure, academic demands, extracurricular activities, and irregular sleep schedules can disrupt the natural circadian rhythm and lead to sleep deprivation.
What to do:
- Making sure your child’s bed is only used for sleeping. When they associate their bed as a place to engage in stimulating activities like reading or processing information on a screen, it becomes harder for your child to fall asleep in that same space.
- Remove devices like televisions, tablets, and game consoles from your child’s bedroom. They can use e-readers and smartphones in their rooms during the daytime, but at night they have to hand them over to you. Taking devices out of the sleeping space removes the temptation to “quickly check” for any texts, finish reading an exciting book, or put on a tv show to ‘fall asleep to’. Turn off screens an hour before bedtime.
- Give them the Data. Talk to your tween or teen about why sleep matters and how to prioritize it. Get them to hear that this isn’t about punishment or making them mad, this is about memory, growth, metabolism, and mood.
- Having a routine is, for both adults and children alike, a great way to regulate stress. Figure out your child’s sleep cycle’s timing, and discuss consistent bed and wake times to make it more likely they’ll be waking up in a lighter, non-REM sleep stage instead of being woken in the middle of their deepest rest and forced to use the parts of their brain that are still warming up. Make sure these routines help to withstand the pressure of late night cramming, or social obligations, and create a solid and smooth start to a good night’s sleep.
- Deep Breaths. Research shows that anxiety around not getting enough sleep can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you or your child begins to worry about them not getting sufficient rest every night, it’s more likely that they won’t.