Teen Sleep 101 (part 1)
No one understands the importance of sleep more than the parent of a newborn, but teen parents should be a close second. Teens need more sleep than they get. When they try and get more, they catch up all wrong complicating the issue of their sleep deprivation so much it can lead to insomnia.
Teens need an average of 9 to 9 and 1/2 hours of sleep per day. As their brain matures they are able to stay up later. So the early bed time when they were seven or eight years old simply doesn’t work anymore. They aren’t tired. The average teen is going to become tired around 10 or 10.30p. After a brief transition period (10-30min), they should sleep through the night. This will give them a wake up time of 7 or 7.30A. School frequently starts at about 8A.
This is the ideal, but rarely the case so your teen ends up staying up until midnight or 1A and falls asleep almost immediately in the beginning and since they need more sleep they hit their snooze multiple times, require a manual wake up –you, or they simply sleep through and get to school late or not at all. This is frequently the cause of poor grades for first period class. A school system in the Midwest realizing that teen’s sleep schedules changed like this moved first period to later in the morning. This resulted in increased first period grades. Since most school districts are probably not going to change when school starts its critical your teen gets more sleep. Otherwise, insomnia can develop.
Insomnia develops over a period of time. Your teen may have been sick, or on school vacation, either way there is something that causes the schedule to be thrown off either by not having to wake up to be somewhere early like school or not having to go to bed before 1A. They use naps and or sleeping-in to catch-up on sleep and this ruins their sleep deficit (the degree of sleepiness they have at bedtime) so they stay up because they’re not tired. Over time they can stay up all night because they lie there unable to fall asleep when they should. Instead, they fall asleep when they shouldn’t like in class, while driving, at work, during their sport or anywhere.
This is how insomnia develops in most teens. In part two of this series, there will be tips on how you can prevent insomnia or manage it if your teen already seems to be having difficulty sleeping.
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