Speaking of Teens
#58: Why Teens Are Sleep Deprived, The Ramifications And How To Help
Guess what? Your teen’s not staying up late because they make poor choices. They’re not fighting to stay asleep in the morning because they’re lazy. It’s not their fault - it’s not a conscious decision.
Just like other fallout from adolescent brain changes (you know, the ones that make them more prone to unpleasant emotions, more likely to do risky things like party and have unprotected sex, move away from you and towards their friends, etc.), their sleep patterns take a hit as well.
And teens are chronically sleep deprived because of a combination of neurobiology, modern life, and an education system that asks too much of them after they go home and takes far too long to accept what research says is best for kids.
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Sources, Resources and Mentions:
Know Your Suprachiasmatic Nucleus
How Blue Light Affects Kids' Sleep
National Sleep Foundation's Sleep Time Duration Recommendations: Methodology and Results Summary
Why are Teenagers so Sleep Deprived?
PBS interview with Mary Carskadon
List of articles about teens and sleep and school
Teens and Sleep: The Cost of Sleep Deprivation
Bedtime Screen Use Study (2023)
Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021
Ep. 44 Teenagers and Homework Overload. Is All The Stress Really Necessary? with Christine Kaplan
National Sleep Foundation on Drowsy Driving
How to Help a Teen Who Can't Sleep
Articles from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine
Improve Sleep-Improve Teen Depression
12 Hour Sound Machines Podcast
Various Studies: Park, Woong-Sub, Kwang Ik Yang, and Hyeyun Kim. "Insufficient sleep and suicidal ideation: a survey of 12,046 female adolescents." Sleep Medicine 53 (2019): 65-69; Liu, Xianchen, Zhen-Zhen Liu, Ze-Ying Wang, Yanyun Yang, Bao-Peng Liu, and Cun-Xian Jia. "Daytime sleepiness predicts future suicidal behavior: a longitudinal study of adolescents." SLEEP 42.2 (2019); Franić, Tomislav, Žana Kralj, Darko Marčinko, Rajna Knez, and Goran Kardum. "Suicidal ideations and sleep‐related problems in early adolescence." Early Intervention in Psychiatry 8.2 (2014): 155-162.