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Looking for a New Year’s challenge? How about getting your teenager to sleep more hours during the week? New research out this week suggests that this is more important than we’ve realized, and that there are some dire consequences when your adolescent is chronically sleep-deprived. Indeed, teenagers with earlier bedtimes have fewer incidents of depression and think less often about suicide. Also, risk for diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity decrease with more sleep.
Health psychologists have believed for some time that adequate sleep is vital for teenagers, and that teens need nine or more hours of sleep per night, as much as young children. However, as many of us know, adolescents rarely get that much sleep because of after school obligations, late-night texting, and early start times at school. Three New York researchers in a recently published science article in the journal Sleep, suggest in their study of nearly 16,000 teenagers across the U.S., that adolescents whose bedtimes were 10p or earlier were 24% less likely to describe symptoms of depression to interviewers, and 20% less likely to admit to having had thoughts of killing themselves. However, only half of the teens in the study had bedtime set by parents to be 10p or earlier, and as much as a quarter were allowed to stay up past midnight. Professor Gangwisch, the lead author in the Columbia University study, surmises that decreased amounts of sleep affect judgment, concentration and impulse control which could ultimately hinder the ability to cope with daily stress and put a teen at risk for depression.
So even if you find it’s a struggle, it could be worth enforcing a regular and earlier bedtime for your teen. Sometimes, it helps to develop new rules such as lights out, or lights low at a certain time, rather than think that you can make your teen actually sleep. If you are very concerned about your teen’s sleep habits, taking away cell phones and ipods at night can also help. And letting them sleep in for a few hours on weekends can certainly prevent the chronic sleep deprivation scientists are concerned about.
