Posted on 03/28/2006 11:00:51 PM PST by Termite_Commander
It's midnight. Do you know where your teenagers are?
They're up in their bedrooms, IM-ing their friends, surfing the Net, playing Halo and watching Letterman. Or maybe conjugating French verbs or reading about the Industrial Revolution.
Doing anything, that is, except what they ought to be: sleeping.
America's teens are chronically sleep-deprived, according to the National Sleep Foundation's annual poll. Only one in five gets the recommended nine hours of sleep on school nights, and by the time they reach their senior year of high school, many are missing out on 12 hours of sleep a week.
Just ask Max Zaydes. The 17-year-old Fair Lawn High School senior stayed up until 4:40 a.m. last Thursday working on a science project, then got up at 7, missing his 7:05 gym class. "That was bad," he said. "Thursday was pretty rough."
"We talk about a sleep debt," says Dr. Terry Carbone, head of The Center for Sleep Medicine at The Valley Hospital, of the adolescents she treats. "I tell them, 'You never repay a sleep debt!' And you don't."
The consequences of exhaustion are measured in school tardiness, missed homework assignments and nodding heads in class.
"I had a friend who laid her head down on the desk and fell asleep, and she didn't wake up when the bell rang," says Alicia Buksar, another Fair Lawn senior. "The kids walked out and left her there. Finally the teacher went over and said, 'Excuse me, I think you need to go to your next class.' "
Lack of sleep contributes to lower grades, depression and less participation in exercise.
It also contributes to danger on the roads: More than half of young drivers have driven drowsy in the past year, and 15 percent say they drive drowsy at least once a week, according to the poll.
"They're endangering their own lives and the lives of their classmates, who are often in those cars with them," Carbone says.
A driver who has been up for 18 hours performs at the same level on a driving test as a person who is legally drunk, she says.
Some of her patients have such trouble waking up that their parents have chosen to home school them, so they can sleep in.
Most teens miss sleep because of the normal changes of adolescence, compounded by distraction. Sleep specialists speak of circadian rhythms, or the body's internal clock. As children reach their teens, that clock shifts: They are wider awake later at night, and prone to sleep later in the morning. This "phase delay" makes it difficult to fall asleep before 11 p.m.
School schedules, on the other hand, are built around busing needs and plans for daylight sports events, among other things. Most teens must get up around 6:30 or 7 a.m. to make it to school on time.
At war with schedules
This leads to epic early-morning battles.
"I set my alarms [plural]," says Ian Dulmage, 14, of Ho-Ho-Kus, "but I'm a pretty heavy sleeper, and ignore them." Enter Dad. "First he taps me, and that never works. Then he whispers in my ear. Then he tells me to get up, starts shaking me, and finally he rips the covers off."
After Fran Holuba, turned off her alarm three times one morning last year, her mother stepped in. "Frannie, I know you're tired, but you've got to get up." She still missed the bus. "That was World War III," the Northern Highlands Regional High School senior says ruefully. "I ended up calling Ridgewood Taxi and paying $20 to go to school."
Alicia Buksar's younger brother Ryan, 15, usually gets to school on time, but first-period geometry is brutal. Teachers should recognize the symptoms: head drop and drool. "Sometimes my head almost hits the book," he says.
For many teens, the relentless schedule of extracurricular activities and homework just doesn't leave time for enough rest.
"Here was my Monday," said Holuba, who is in the top 10 percent of her class. "Wake up at 6 a.m., shower, eat and go to school. After school, I had lacrosse till 5:45 p.m., got home at 6," for a quick bite. Then she returned to school for a choir rehearsal, arrived home again at 8:45, showered, ate and began her homework at 10. Two hours later she went online to chat with friends.
She didn't crawl into bed until 1:30 a.m., only to start again 4½ hours later.
"A teen's sleep is what loses out," in the tug-of-war between early school starts and the tendency to stay up late, says Jodi A. Mindell, co-chair of the National Sleep Foundation's poll task force. "Sending students to school without enough sleep is like sending them to school without breakfast."
Teens shouldn't think they can make it up with long naps or weekends in bed. Max Zaydes, the Fair Lawn senior, sleeps from 4 p.m. till his mother gets home at 6:30 p.m. Fran Holuba sleeps all day Sunday. "My friends know not to mess with me," she says.
'Electronic playground'
The 8.9 hours of sleep teenagers average on weekend nights just meets the optimum needed, the telephone poll of 1,600 parents and their teens found. And some kids don't even have that option: Yon Jin Koh, 14, of Ho-Ho-Kus gets up on Saturday mornings to go to an educational institute for additional classes.
One of the key problems is the "electronic playground" most teens have in their bedrooms. Computers, televisions, video games and telephones -- nearly all teens have at least one.
The temptation is irresistible. Adolescents with four or more such items in their rooms were much more likely to get an insufficient amount of sleep at night and almost twice as likely to fall asleep in school, the poll found.
"Most of my time gets lost typing mindlessly to my friends," e-mailed Jeff Luppino-Esposito, 16, of Wyckoff.
Carbone, of The Valley Hospital, concentrates on removing, or limiting use of, "the big three" -- television, video games, and computers -- an hour or 90 minutes before bedtime. These items produce a pulsating light, she says, which interferes with the brain's production of melatonin, a substance which should be maximized for sleep.
"As parents, we can get the computer or TVs out of their rooms," she says.
What surprises Carbone is how clueless parents are about their children's sleep habits. Overall, 90 percent of parents polled felt their teens were getting enough sleep at least a few nights a week.
But are parents clueless or helpless?
Zaydes says his parents have given up telling him to go to sleep. "They know I'm old enough to make my own decisions," he says.
Holuba's mother stops by her bedroom at 2 a.m. and asks if she needs help.
"The kids see the parents doing it, staying up late just to get the day done," says Dr. Theo Pavlou, of Pascack Valley Hospital's Sleep Disorder Center. "Even the adults are sleep-deprived."
Or maybe they're waiting for their teenagers to go to college, so they can finally catch up on their rest.
Yup and the parents get even less sleep holding down 3 jobs to support them.
Apparently not.
L
I did the same thing when I was a teenager and I turned out okzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
I've seen this trend reported on in a few articles here and there. When I was younger, my brother and I had fairly strict school night bedtimes. We didn't have all these electronic devices in our bedrooms. There was one family TV, etc. Yank a lot of that stuff out of kids' rooms and I would bet you'd see an improvement.
Ah, ruining and undoing all that hard won socialist indoctrination by hanging out on FR!
Bad commie! Go to your room and read some Karl Marx!
The NEA is not pleased.
Rush nailed this yesterday, saying that the governemnt education lobby would use this to deflect blame from their poor performance in education results.
He also made the point about how much news was artificailly generated from polls. This is a glaring example.
This IS Bush's fault, right?
Many people make the choice to sleep less in favor of awake activities. In the future people may sleep occasionally for revitalizing, for "recreation" or not at all.
lol Some people make the choice to sleep less to do more crack too!
Join the folding team- it's pretty cool.
The long and short of it is, parents need to be parents, not friends, buddies or pals. No child can fill their minds with the junk on TV, the excitement of video games and then expect to fall asleep easily.
Parent your child--don't be their friend.
lol Some people make the choice to sleep less to do more crack too!
That's so obvious I chose not to mention it. I guess you thought it wasn't obvious. Do you laugh at obsolescing sleep or that people chose awake activities over sleeping? No need for crack when the same feeling/sensation may be achieved without the downside effects of crack or other drugs. If the enough people want to obsolete the need for sleep it will likely be answered. That's not obvious.
Protein folding is nice and necessary yet still a tiny piece of a much larger future.
No, I just thought it was funny. haha, hee hee and all that. Humor- remember?
They might as well be getting in shape for getting no sleep in college =)
I usually slept 4-7 hours a night.
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