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[Craftomega]

From the title most people can guess what this is about.

According to the American Sleep Disorders Association, the average teenager needs around 9.5 hours of sleep per night, possibly because hormones that are critical to growth and sexual maturation are released mostly during slumber. Yet studies show that teenagers generally get an average of only 7.4 hours a night. This is far short of the desired quota for healthy teens.
Researchers at Stanford University found in a study that teenagers require more sleep, by 1 to 2 hours, than do their younger 9- and 10-year-old siblings, who only require about 8 hours of sleep. This contradicts parents, since we tend to give later bed times and curfews to our children as they get older.
Not getting enough sleep can obstruct high brain function and a persons learning capability. there are most likely other things it can cause that we are unaware of.

Have you As a teen ever had.
    * difficulty waking in the morning
    * irritability in the afternoon
    * falling asleep during the day; see Problems at School
    * oversleeping on the weekend
    * having difficulty remembering or concentrating
    * waking up often and having trouble going back to sleep
Is so then you most likely have sleep deprivation.

So here are my thoughts, our lives as teenagers are usually controlled by our parents lives. So we go to school around the same time they go to work. So we have to wake up around the same time, and go to bed around the same time (if not later). We also have home work, and social events.
Isn't it true that we must plan for future generations, we have people trying to protect the planet, people who try to protect children from there parents and so forth. Yet teenagers lives rotate around adult lives. So what can we do about this?

I have given a great deal of thought and the only way i can see to correct this issue is to rearrange our entire social structure. to literally make everything to rotate around our children's lives. While this would be extremely hard as many parents are almost fascist in the way life must work, that they will most likely never change. So how can we fix an issue that is hindering teenagers from learning, and functioning to there maximum compatibility?

[Mortal Wombat]

Teenagers can go to bed earlier.

[Yinzer]

Teenagers can go to bed earlier.

I don't have a teen myself, but a good friend does and his teen isn't exactly begging him to go to bed earlier.  There are just so many more distractions to keep a teenager today awake than in the past.  Internet access, video games, cell phones, MP3 players, even TV has more on late night than it used to.  It takes a lot of parent policing to to keep all of that away from a teen who's determined to stay up so he can play with his or her toys.

[Mortal Wombat]

Either way it has nothing to do with society rearranging the "social structure" to fix some big problem.  It's either an issue of willpower on the part of the teenager, or discipline on the part of the parent, or some of both, depending on how independent you think kids should be at that age.  You might as well ask what society should do about small children refusing to eat their vegetables, or teenagers procrastinating on homework.

[ihateyoukenny]

While I agree that teens aren't blameless when it comes to this, it is true that most teens are wired to both stay up late and sleep in late. Teens should go to bed earlier, but, as the link says, most teens are programmed to be up late at night and sleep late in the morning; teens simply function better when they've woken up later. I do believe that if schools started later, it would improve performance in school for the majority of teens - if only a little bit.

During my junior year, the students and their parents managed to get our school to start half an hour later - at 8:10 instead of 7:40. While it wasn't a huge improvement, the following year did see a significant rise in attendance to first period and homeroom.

[Schroeder]

If I could go into work at noon instead of 7 am, then my productivity levels would probably increase for a while. But that isn't going to happen because the working world doesn't revolve around me. I have to change my sleeping habits to fit my schedule. I learned to deal with this by being forced to wake up early for school every day.

[The Furlinator]

I fall under this category of teens plagued with sleep problems and I'm probably one of the biggest offenders. I wake up at 5:45 after falling sleep around 11:30 and I can sure tell you waking up is by far the worst part of my day.

Now I do try to go to sleep earlier when I can, but the problem is that I'm such a night owl that I am clear-headed and the most focused around 9:30 at night, so that's when I do my homework. Most often, the later I stay up the sharper my thinking is. The reverse side of this obviously is that I feel horrible by morning and I don't even really start to "wake up" mentally until around 10:00 or so, 3 classes into my day. The only refuge we get is that in my school, every other Wednesday the school schedule starts an hour later, and these days have rapidly become my favorites.

So yeah I admit it's a problem and I should be getting to sleep a lot earlier than I am, it's just hard to break out of your natural sleep cycle and for me, that means being the most alert late into the night.

[AwesomeX]

Strange, I can focus either at like 4ish or late at night, around 10ish.

Also, about 6:00am, but no earlier or later, and I am energized.

[Schu]

When I was a teen, I would get an average of about 7 hours maybe, maybe a little less, and if I got any more than 8 hours, I would be tired for the rest of the day. 9.5 hours would basically be a write-off as a day for the next day. I never had any of the symptoms mentioned except a little trouble sleeping (that persists to this day too) and did very well at school despite an incredibly lazy nature and terrible work ethic - the only thing that pulled me through really was that I could concentrate like no-one else and actually enjoyed learning.

Now I know I can hardly call that typical of teenagers, since to this day, 9 hours of sleep would have the same negative effect for me that it doesn't seem to have on others, but it still makes me skeptical of such a large amount of time that teenagers supposedly need for sleep, and honestly, 9.5 hours of sleep doesn't really leave that many hours left in the day.

Can someone link me to the study/whatever that suggests 9.5 hours for teenagers?

[4rcher]

I agree with MW, rearranging our entire social structure so that teens get more sleep is an excessive and unreasonable measure.  Plus rearranging society doesn't solve the problem: everyone eventually needs to learn to be responsible for themselves.  If you don't get enough sleep at night, that's your problem and you need to find a solution, not society.  Besides that, parents are "fascist" in the way life runs because they have life experience, and are the ones who make the money that supports the family.  Like Shroeder said, many of us have jobs that require us to get up earlier than we would like, so school might as well prepare teens for that by making them get up and go to school.

If a teen can't function without the amount of sleep he or she is getting, that individual needs to learn to shut off the distractions and go to bed earlier so they can get more sleep.  It's totally possible, I had to go through this exact problem in high school.  I was a serious night owl (and still am, to an extent) for a good chunk of high school, I tended to be up until at least midnight every night, and it wasn't unheard of me to finally fall asleep at 2.  I knew that I could go to bed earlier, but I just sucked it up and would sleep for 12-14 hours a night on weekends. When I was up all night, I made good use of that time, I used to get a lot of homework and reading done during those wee hours of the morning when it was quiet in the house.  But when getting enough sleep became a concern, I decided to just get my work done right after I got home, cut out some of my reading for fun and I forced myself to start going to bed between 10:30 and 11.  Even then, I was only getting about seven hours of sleep, but that was enough for me.

[not terribly clever]

My older son has to get up at 6 am to catch his bus so, according to this study, he should be going to bed at 8:30. Anyone care to guess what his response to that suggestion will be? He usually goes to bed around 10, so he averages about 8 hours a night and that seems to be plenty.

[Glenn]

The average teenager needs 9.5. Some need more and some need much less. There are people that need no more that 4 hours. Some people work better in the evening, others in the morning. Thus, anecdotal evidence is of limited use. The argument is about the difference that could be made at the level of a large group.

The basic idea is not crazy. For instance, there are certain behavioral problems in children that are more frequent when classrooms are structured in a particular way. By adapting the classroom to the needs of a minority of children, these problems are minimized and everyone (including the children who did fine the way things were before) is happier.

In this particular case, we aren't talking about managing children though. Teenagers are bright enough to understand the issues. It is just a matter of sensitizing parents and teenagers to the importance of sleep, and how to promote a good environment for sleep. Everybody has different rhythms, but there is only one school start time. It is up to every individual to adapt as best they can. Ideally, everyone would start school when they feel at the top of their game, but that is highly unreasonable.

[Fourninefoxtrot]

While I agree that teenagers probably don't get enough sleep on average, I think that's probably true for most people, most of the time.

From 7th grade until my junior year of high school, I woke up at 0530 to catch the bus for a long ride to school.  And I usually went to bed around eleven or midnight.  Yeah, there were some hard days, but I think learning how to function on little sleep was good preparation for the future.  Especially since my first job out of school was working the graveyard shift, which taught me a whole new definition of sleep deprivation, and also screwed up my ability to keep a sleep schedule basically ever since.  I'm glad I went into that job with some experience of how much lack of sleep or hours of consciousness I could tolerate without become useless or passing out.

This is not to say that everyone should do what I did.  Our bodies and minds are all a little different, and some people need more sleep, some people need less, or at least can function on less.  If sleep deprivation is impeding a teen's school performance, or just their ability to stay awake through the day, then there are steps that can be taken.  And frankly, the quality of sleep is at least as important as the quantity.  Sometimes the problem is an uncomfortable bed, or distractions through the night, or too much caffeine too late, or whatever.

I know I'd rather have four hours' sleep in my own comfortable bed, with no TV or radio or phone or internet or other distractions, then spend 8 hours sleeping on a couch or being constantly woken up.

[tomroadrunner]

The only way the "cultural sleep revolution" would work is if the world reverted back to a subsistence farming based economy. In countries and regions where this type of economy dominates, the sun rules the day. When the sun goes down, there's no more work to do, and so you sleep. But in a trade based economy, you need a 24 hour day, because you need item A to be at location B at 8pm. Obviously, a true "day" is a constantly shifting thing, so we would need to draw up a new hour system every time the earth tilts a little bit, shortening or lengthening the amount of sunlight.

That wouldn't work, because there are too many variables. Because of that 24 hour day, we are going against our nature by getting up before the sun, and going to sleep after it has been down for hours, or vice-versa. Like some have said before me, we are trained from an early age to have to get up even though our body is thinking that we should still be asleep. But it needs to be this way, because in the way that the world economy is set up, things need to get where they are supposed to go at defined hours, and if that doesn't happen, it causes a domino effect.

Unless we all revert to a subsistence based "day to day" economy that is limited to small, non-interconnected communities, none of us are going to ever going to be on the "natural" sleep cycle, so the youth would be served well by learning to adapt to it. It's not the best situation, but it's the situation that exists.

[Raconteur]

I spent the last couple of years before University going to bed at about 4.30am and trying to get up at 8am to get ready for school. I say trying, because a lot of time I couldn't drag myself out of bed. It's not like I can get by on that little sleep-I definitely need around 8 hours-but it was and still is my own fault. I know I'd function a lot better and perform better in class if I went to bed earlier, but I just don't want to. I think most people look at it the same way. Suggesting that everybody should change their sleep schedule because I'd rather drink beer and play computer games than go to bed is ridiculous.

People have naturally different sleep patterns anyway: I'm most awake after midnight, and would gladly sleep until 3 o'clock in the afternoon, whilst a lot of people like waking up at 6am. This is one disorder that changes circadian rhythms, and I'm sure there are others.

[Craftomega]

When i said rearrange our entire social structure, i did not mean that was the only option, it was the only way i could see to do it. I left it as a question for a reason.

[Raconteur]

Okay, sorry about that. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that we don't need to do anything to make teenagers sleep patterns fit in more with society. I think that learning to organise your workload and managing to get by on very little sleep is more beneficial than the world working around us... after all, that's how it's going to be when we have proper jobs.

[Kendall]

But wasn't the point of the study he mentioned the fact that teenagers depriving themselves of sleep could be harmful to their potential growth? How its going to be is fine, but in that stage teenagers need sleep. While I'm in agreement that yes teens can just go to bed earlier, I also question whats preventing them from doing that now, because I don't think that its just a matter of teens deciding to stay up late. I'm not going to use my own experiences as the test case, but I've met numerous students who get stretched way too far, kids that wake up early to commute to school, kids that stay late at school, and then kids that go home late at night, to do homework for every class that piles it on to them. I'd imagine this isn't a majority of students because not everyone participates in after school activities, but how much of this kind of schedule is put on teens because:

learning to organise your workload and managing to get by on very little sleep is more beneficial than the world working around us... after all, that's how it's going to be when we have proper jobs.

[Kalli]

Granted, not everyone can do this, but when I had assigned reading for homework I did it on the hour long bus ride home, and I did the rest before dinner.  And if I'd missed some sleep the night before, I took a nap on the way to school.  We also had a "study period" during which we could work on assignments. 

This was up until my last two years of high school, and then I went overseas to a boarding school.  We had a curfew, so staying out late wasn't an option, but I honestly can't remember doing any homework (I had extracurricular afternoon activities and evening work duty 5 days a week).  I must have, though; because I graduated.  Even made the honour roll.

[not terribly clever]

Both of my kids do their homework when they get home from school because there's no electronics until it's done. The electronics all get shut off around 9:30. They don't have to go to bed but the TV, computers and game systems are off so they usually read for a while, fight with each other and then go to bed. So basically, we bore them into bed every night. Works like a charm.

I don't think most kids need to learn how to manage their workload. I think they just need less to do.