Teen's sleep needs

With the beginning of puberty, most young people go from being well rested to being chronically sleep-deprived. Most teenagers simply don't sleep enough. Homework, TV, friends, extracurricular activities, and telephone conversations steadily push bedtime further and further back. Some studies of teens who also have a part-time job show that teenagers who work more than 20 hours a week experience very high levels of daytime sleepiness.

It's not just that teens don't set aside enough time for sleep. Their bodies tell them to stay up late. Beginning with puberty and continuing into their twenties, their sleep-wake cycle lengthens to 25 or 26 hours, which is why most teenagers are liveliest in the evening, stay up late and sleep late the next day. The absentee rates of university students for the first class of the morning have reached 40 per cent. Some education administrators have considered accommodating this circadian shift by changing the hours of high school and university so that the school day starts later and ends later.

Benefits of sleep
When your teen does get adequate sleep, he's more cheerful, more alert, less susceptible to colds and flu, and also less accident-prone. If your son is learning to drive and is obviously dead tired, you're well within your rights to hold on to the car keys. The immediate effects of sleep deprivation are poor concentration and judgment. Some researchers go as far as to suggest that some of the impulsive and irresponsible behaviour associated with "the crazy teens" may simply be a consequence of inadequate sleep.

Teens need to learn that sleep is not wasted time. Virtually all dreaming that a person remembers occurs in the rapid eye movement (REM) segment of sleep. Dreaming may be one part of sleep that your teen appreciates, because many teen dreams are sex dreams. REM sleep is important for other reasons. Without adequate REM sleep, a person car't concentrate, makes frequent mistakes, and is more prone to depression. Your teen needs adequate REM sleep to remember for longer than a few days what she has been studying.

Your teen has probably discovered that cramming for exams actually works. She can memorize chemistry formulas at 2:00 a.m. and spew them out on an exam paper later that morning. But she may not realize that if she doesn't get adequate REM sleep, the formulas won't move on from her short-term memory to her long-term memory. That's why she flounders in chemistry class the following term.

How Much Is Enough?
As with adults, individual sleep needs vary. You'll know your teen is getting enough sleep if he awakens refreshed. But if he has to set three alarms to wake up in the morning, he's definitely not catching enough ZZZ's. The Canadian Sleep Society's recommendation is that teens should sleep one hour more of each twenty-four hours than they did in their preteen years. Their rapid body growth during adolescence requires between 9 and I I hours of shuteye. To achieve this amount of sleep, your teen's bedtime should be somewhere between 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. If that fact surprises you, it confirms how deeply sleep deprivation is ingrained in our society, as Vancouver psychologist Stanley Coren points out in his book, Sleep Thieves (Free Press Paperbacks, 1997).

During adolescence, a teen must gradually take control of his own bedtime. For a young teen, emphasize that sleep is not a disposable commodity. Reach an agreement that the Tv, computer, and CD player will be turned off at a set time; and restrict phone calls after that set hour. Although he may grumble at the restrictions, he may feel relieved, even grateful, that you're helping him get adequate rest.

Several surveys of teenagers have found that more than half wish they had more time to sleep. Try to help your teens assess their time commitments. Listen attentively, but help them make the connection between lack of sleep and poor grades, between staying up all night and succumbing to a flu virus, between fatigue and too many commitments.