Drag yourself out of bed some morning, struggle down to your local junior high in the middle of first period, walk down the halls and peek in a few windows. It’s a scenario right out of a “B” horror movie – The Morning of the Living Dead! (If you don’t like to get up that early, just remember the classroom scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.)

Let’s start with what we know – with the results of solid research:

• Teens need more sleep than younger kids or adults. The popular myth is that they need less. That’s wrong – they need around nine hours. They get around seven.
• Their natural rhythm is to go to sleep later and sleep later than younger kids or adults. The popular myth is that teens stay up late because of psychosocial / cultural – reasons, then can’t wake up. That’s wrong. The parts of the human brain that determine sleep patterns change their rhythm in adolescence: they feel sleepy later after sunset, they feel wakeful later after sunrise.
• Nationwide, most middle school, junior high, and high school students are starting their school day earlier than elementary students in the same district. In other words, just when they start to need more sleep, we schedule them for less.

As a result of all this, there’s a pretty good chance your teen is sleep deprived. This is from the article by Siri Carpenter which has been my main source here. You may want to read it twice – it’s pretty amazing:

Almost half of the students who began school at 7:20 were “pathologically sleepy” at 8:30, falling directly into REM sleep in an average of only 3.4 minutes–a pattern similar to what is seen in patients with narcolepsy.

What are the effects of sleep deprivation? The research says that sleep deprivation causes or is a causal factor in:

* Poor concentration (Duh!)
* Poorer alertness, cognition, memory, and understanding
* Poorer grades (and it appears that even 25 minutes less sleep correlates with grade swings)
* Traffic accidents
* Disciplinary problems
* Associations with depression and ADHD
* Difficulty controlling emotions and impulsivity.

Do I have you worried? Good – I think this is a really huge problem, one that goes largely unrecognized, and that is seldom dealt with even when it is recognized.

What can a parent do?

• Get educated. Follow some of the leads below and learn about the reasons for and the effects of sleep deprivation. Educate your child about the amount of sleep teenagers need, versus the amount they get. Pass some selected information to your school.
• Make alliance with your child. Trust her when she says she’s exhausted. Believe him when he says it’s not that he’s up late because he’s on the Internet; he’s on the Net because he can’t get to sleep.
• Make a plan. In my own practice, and with my partners, we’ve had good luck when we talk families and schools into a later start for kids who are obviously sleep deprived. Maybe next semester’s schedule can skip first period?
• Lobby for change. There are financial and time pressures that have often led to early starts for teens. But what’s the point of teaching a roomful of people who are asleep?

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Here ’s some help

My starting source is an article by Siri Carpenter that appeared in the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology, Sleep deprivation may be undermining teen health.

The National Sleep Foundation offers information that is solid and complete, up-to-date and authoritative.

The difficulties involved in changing start times are demonstrated in this article from the Washington Post.

The Brown Medical School’s Sleep Research lab also offers some helpful resources. There’s a lot of overlap with the sources above, and not all the links here are clickable. You can help them advance sleep research by encouraging someone from your school district to complete their online survey.

For you fine critical thinkers who wondered, This article demonstrates that early rising has negative effects independent of how much total sleep kids get.