The Significance of Sleep for Teens
In a world where people seek increasingly complex solutions to problems, and we are fed an endless diet of pop psychology via social media, we sometimes lose sight of the basic building blocks of well-being: namely, exercise, nutrition, social interaction, and sleep. We take our focus off these basics because they are so obvious that they become hackneyed and lose their impact. We switch off.
In the BISS school counselling room, as in my previous schools, I encounter many students who are overwhelmed, overstimulated, anxious, and emotional in ways that seem disproportionate to the challenges they face. It’s a radical thought, but what if much of what we label as ‘mental health issues,’ ‘academic stress,’ or even dismiss as ‘teenage angst’ is actually something far simpler and more obvious? Perhaps we are doing our teenagers a disservice by writing off these behaviours as ‘normal,’ or worse, as ‘clinical,’ when in reality, they are symptoms of chronic and severe sleep deprivation.
Of course, I don’t mean to be glib, as there are some students who have neurological or emotional issues that are not a result of sleep deprivation. However, I have a strong suspicion that I see many students who are extremely emotionally labile because they are staying up very late at night, often without their parents’ knowledge.
Disturbingly, many of our teenagers, when asked, “How many hours of sleep do you get a night?” tell me that they get the “normal” amount of sleep. When I push as to what they class as normal, they’ll tell me at most 6-8 hours, which is often the quoted recommended amount of sleep for adults. However, some of the students I see are getting far less than that.
So what is the recommended amount of sleep for teenagers? According to Johns Hopkins paediatrician Michael Crocetti, teens need 9 to 9.5 hours of sleep per night—that’s an hour or so more than they needed at age 10. Why? “Teenagers are going through a second developmental stage of cognitive maturation,” explains Crocetti. “Additional sleep supports their developing brain, as well as physical growth spurts. It also helps protect them from serious consequences like depression, anxiety, or drug use.” From an academic perspective, it’s more than a case of students just being ‘sleepy’ in lessons; sleep deprivation results in them being far less able to store and retrieve information from memory and has a direct impact on long-term academic success.
However, for some students, 9-9.5 hours still may not be enough. When I talked to students recently in an assembly, I asked them to stop Googling “how many hours of sleep per night” and instead ask themselves the following questions:
How many times do you hit the snooze button in the morning?
How many times do your parents have to bang on your door?
How long does it take for you to come out of that morning ‘foggy’ feeling?
Rather than accepting these symptoms as being a normal part of being a teenager, perhaps it’s time to pay attention to the possibility that what we think of as the ‘right’ amount of sleep is actually insufficient for some teens.
We know that with the onset of adolescence, teens strive for autonomy and want to make their own decisions, and this is a healthy part of child development. However, bedtime is something that we as parents in 2024 cannot afford to take a hands-off approach to, even (and especially) when it comes to our Year 12s and 13s.
Today's teenagers are not the same as previous generations. We did not have the lure of easily available electronic devices and certainly nothing close to the constant barrage of notifications, messages, and entertainment designed to captivate and hold attention. Previous generations didn't face the same level of distraction or the same intensity of temptation. The truth is, the world has changed, and so have the challenges our teenagers face.
What does this mean for us as parents? It means we need to reframe how we approach sleep, screen time, and the autonomy we give our teens. It’s no longer just about setting a curfew or trusting them to manage their own habits. It’s about understanding the very real science of adolescent brain development and recognizing that even the most well-intentioned teenager will struggle to self-regulate when faced with the pull of technology.
We need to implement stronger boundaries—not as a punishment, but as a form of care. It may be uncomfortable, and it may provoke some resistance, but ensuring that our teenagers are getting the right amount of sleep is crucial for their emotional well-being, mental health, and academic success.