Teens Are Cranky From Lack of Sleep
WASHINGTON, March 28-If your teen talks back, it may be due to sleep deficiency, according to a new study the National Sleep Foundation released Tuesday on adolescent sleep habits.
“One of the key findings is that many adolescents that get insufficient sleep are sleepy, cranky and falling asleep in school,” Dr. Mary A. Carskadon, a sleep specialist at Bradley Hospital in East Providence, R.I., said at a press conference.
“Think about our typical sense of what an adolescent is-this unhappy, cranky, irritable individual,” Carskadon said, citing lack of sleep as a cause for these moods. The study of students from 6 th grade through 12 th grade also showed that adolescents with insufficient sleep were most likely to report being depressed.
According to the study, sleep habits also affect performance in school. “Adolescents who get insufficient sleep were more likely to report getting lower grades,” Carskadon said. “Those getting optimal sleep were much more likely to report that their grades are mostly A’s, whereas those getting insufficient sleep were more likely to report getting worse grades.”
Another problem is when students are tired and get behind the wheel. “Adolescents are driving drowsy, and this is of course a major concern for the National Sleep Foundation and it should be for all of us, because now we come to what may be a potentially lethal outcome of insufficient sleep,” Carskadon said.
Fifty-one percent of students in 11 th and 12 th grades reported that they had driven drowsy at least once in the past year, and 15 percent report that they drive drowsy at least once a week. “So here we have these tired teens, just learning to drive with not much experience driving and suffering this drowsy driving effect,” Carskadon said.
On average, the study showed, only 20 percent of students were getting nine hours of sleep a night, which is the optimal amount for teenagers. The study found that 31 percent were getting a borderline amount of sleep-between eight and nine hours-and 45 percent were getting less than eight hours of sleep, which is considered insufficient.
The environmental factors that the Foundation blamed for lack of sleep were caffeine and technology. The study showed that adolescents with four or more technological items in their bedrooms, including televisions and computers, are getting 30 minutes less sleep a night and are twice as likely to fall asleep in school or while doing homework as students with fewer than four such items.
The study surveyed 1,602 adolescents across the country and was administered separately to students and their parents. One of the most drastic differences between the two sets of responses involved sleep habits..
According to the study, 90 percent of parents believe that their child is getting enough sleep, but only 44 percent of adolescents report that they are getting enough sleep. Also, only seven percent of parents believe that their child has a sleep problem, whereas 16 percent of adolescents believe they experience a sleep problem.
According to the foundation, warning signs that adolescents are not getting sufficient sleep are that the child needs caffeine to wake up, naps for 45 minutes or more on a daily basis, sleeps two or more hours later on weekends and is difficult to wake for school. Carskadon said parents can help by making sleep a positive priority, enforcing regular bedtimes and wake-times and removing technology from bedrooms.
The study compared middle school students, starting in sixth grade, and high school students, ending in 12th grade, and found that the older students are the less sleep they receive. According to the findings, sixth grade students get an average of 8.4 hours of sleep on a school night, going to bed at 9:24 p.m., and 12th grade students get an average of 6.9 hours of sleep per night, going to bed at 11:02 p.m.
The study also shows that students are not catching up on sleep during the weekends, because although they are sleeping in, they are going to bed later.
“On any given school day in our public middle schools 127,000 students will fall asleep,” Carskadon said. “In our high schools we have what I call the ‘slack-jaw droolers,’ 737,000 of them each day falling asleep in school.”
“Sleep learning has not proven to be effective,” she added.
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