Life & Style | Health
Why do teenagers stay up late?
It's 10:45pm and the light is still on in your teenager's bedroom. Your child is not the slightest bit tired - but you know that waking him or her early for school the next morning will be torture.
- Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
- Published: 00:00 October 30, 2009
- Image Credit: Supplied
It may be tempting to blame this behaviour on computers, cellphones and coffee. And, in some cases, those are the prime reasons for nocturnal teen behaviour.
But, researchers say, this late-to-bed and late-to-rise pattern is the way teenagers are biologically programmed - even though most school systems gloss over this when setting high school start times.
Giving teens more sleep-in time has a number of benefits, including improvements in attendance and daytime alertness and decreased depression. Most teens don't get the eight to nine hours of sleep that experts say they should, according to the US National Sleep Foundation.
Experts say they do know that the consequences are more serious than classrooms full of sleepy kids. Helene Emsellem, medical director of the Center for Sleep & Wake Disorders in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and author of Snooze... or Lose! wrote in her book that there are physical, emotional, academic and behavioural effects:
- Going without enough sleep can make a teen more likely to get sick. Why? Because the number of T-cells in the body-cells which help us stay healthy falls by 30 to 40 per cent.
- Sleep-deprived teens get more headaches than those that don't.
- Students who earn Cs and below go to sleep later and have less regular sleep patterns than students who get better grades. Sleep affects learning and memory.
- Sleep-deprived teens could be more prone to drug abuse.
The effects were studied for several years by researchers at the University of Minnesota's Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, led by director Kyla Wahlstrom. Now some US school systems have taken heed of the findings and moved to start high school at later times.
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