When her phone lights up and vibrates, signaling that she’s received a text, she finds it hard to resist reading the message, no matter how late the hour.
“In this day and age, it’s almost rude not to respond,” Hannah, a sophomore at Solanco High School, says. “It’s kind of a social no-no.”
Hannah is also busy with cheer-leading, and academics. She figures she gets six to seven hours of sleep a night.
Teenagers are supposed to get about nine hours of sleep a night, medical researchers say. But teens are being kept awake by their cellphones, by their busy schedules, and by their own bodies’ natural rhythms.
According to the Mayo Clinic, circadian rhythms — the biological and psychological processes that follow the body’s 24-hour internal clock — direct most preadolescent children to “naturally fall asleep around 8 or 9 p.m. But puberty changes a teen’s internal clock, delaying the time he or she starts feeling sleepy — often until 11 p.m. or later.”
So when your teenager tells you at 10:30 p.m. that he can’t fall asleep, he’s not kidding: He literally may not be able to fall asleep. This is why at least one sleep researcher has called early start times for high schools “abusive.”
A study in the Journal of School Health found that more than 90 percent of teens are sleeping less than nine hours a night; one in 10 teens slept less than six hours a night. Many sleep-deprived teens sleep late on weekends, throwing their sleep patterns into further disarray.
The resulting deficit of sleep has worrying consequences — worrying enough to keep parents up at night, too.
Why sleep matters
A recent Penn State University article indicates just how crucial sleep is to the still-developing brain: Sleep is when the brain recharges, when neurons “work to make connections and consolidate memory.”
Dr. Harish Rao, director of the pediatric sleep program at Penn State Hershey, says too little sleep can change a teenager’s “hormonal profile,” causing the teen to crave more carbohydrates, put on more weight and increase his risk of Type 2 diabetes. It also causes “functional impairment” in teens, he says.
A now-retired Cornell University psychologist described sleep-deprived teens as “walking zombies.”
Alas, some of those “zombies” also drive.
Andrea Cook is the certified school nurse at Solanco High School, and the mother of three teens. She says that teens who don’t get enough sleep are more prone to distracted driving, which may lead to accidents.
Sleepy teens are also more prone to anxiety and depression. They may find their academic and athletic performance suffers. They’re more likely to get infections that make them sick.
Often, Cook says, the students who come to her office complaining of feeling unwell — headaches are a common symptom caused by fatigue — are just tired.
So she lets them take a “short rest break” on one of the cots in her office. It helps “them to get through the rest of the day,” she says. “It’s better than sending them home.”
Cook says some students are worn out from part-time jobs, and from caring for younger siblings. Not all students have “Leave It to Beaver” families, she says, noting, “Some of these kids have more responsibilities than we ever did.”
Brenda Becker, superintendent of Hempfield School District, says students who before might have been working to save for college, or to put gas in their cars, now are “helping to put food on the table, helping to pay bills.”
But it’s not just the kids in struggling families who aren’t getting enough sleep. It’s also the overscheduled kids, and the kids who have constant access to technology, she says.
“Teenagers as a whole are having much less down time,” Becker says, noting that many teens are in organized activities that keep them busy for hours after the school day ends.
Cole Boxleitner, 17, is a junior on the Solanco High School basketball team. With practice and games and homework, he generally isn’t able to go to sleep until 10:30 or 11 p.m. He wakes up for school at 6 a.m. By sixth period, he admits, “I’m feeling a little sleepy. I’m ready to go home.”
The cellphone factor
Those electronic tablets and smartphones teenagers love so much aren’t helping, either.
Rao, of Penn State Hershey, says that the light emitted by smartphones and tablets is on the blue-green spectrum, and is particularly stimulating to the teenage brain’s internal clock, making sleep difficult.
A teen should turn off his electronic devices at least an hour — ideally, two — before bedtime, Rao says, noting that if he feels compelled to read before sleeping, “an old-fashioned book,” read in low light, is a better option.
Becker, of Hempfield, advises parents to check what time their kids are communicating on their phones. “That would tell an interesting story.”
Solanco sophomore Justina Zaborskiy, 16, says it’s not unusual for her to be awake until midnight, 1 a.m. — “at the latest, 3 … 1 (a.m.) is, like, the average.”
“It’s the attraction of this little thing right here,” she says, pointing to her iPhone in its bright pink case.
She also likes to draw late at night. And she watches Netflix shows on her laptop. “I’m obsessed with ‘The Carrie Diaries,’ “ she says.
“I’m in a lot of advanced classes, and somehow I get all As,” Justina says, maintaining that her lack of sleep does not show in her grades.
Mady Weyman, a 15-year-old Solanco sophomore, estimates that she gets five or six hours of sleep at night. She has rehearsals for the spring musical after school, and takes advanced classes, so she’s swamped.
Mady says she doesn’t keep her phone in her bedroom at night. But, she admits, “I could get my homework done faster and be starting my bedtime routine earlier if I didn’t check my phone as frequently during homework time.”
Julia Allison, 17, says she’s lucky if she gets six or seven hours of sleep. A senior in the academically demanding International Baccalaureate program at McCaskey High School, Julia also has two part-time jobs and extracurricular commitments. Referring to her chronic lack of sleep, she says, “I do understand that it’s not healthy. It’s really draining. … I know my body needs to reboot.”
But there’s not much she can do about it, she says.
Teenagers “have a lot on their minds,” says Caitlin Rizzo, 17, a senior at Garden Spot High School.
When the school bell tolls
The research is clear, Brenda Becker says: High school students would be better served by schedules that allowed them to start school later in the day.
The National Sleep Foundation and a grass roots group called — rather unimaginatively — Start School Later assert that it’s counterproductive and unhealthy for high school students to be starting the school day as early as they do.
In Lancaster County, most public high schools start at, or before, 8 a.m. Some high school students are on the bus at 6:30 a.m.
For teenagers who work at night to be “productive (and) ready to learn at 7:30 in the morning is a challenge at best,” Becker says.
But changing the schedule would be akin to turning a cruise ship around, the superintendent says. “You would really have to have community buy-in to make such a major change.”
Other school districts would have to go along with the change, too, as it would affect sport schedules, and the schedule of the Lancaster County Career and Technology Center, she says.
And older siblings no longer would be home when their younger siblings get off the bus; this could be an issue for many families with two employed parents.
Still, according to a recent Washington Post article, Montgomery County in Maryland and Fairfax County in Virginia are considering later start times for high school students. A third county — Anne Arundel in Maryland — is creating a task force to study the issue.
Becker thinks the answer might lie in the Open Campus initiative, and the online programs offered by other districts. These programs allow students to take courses at times that suit their personal schedules.
Instead of forcing people into the “old industrial model,” in which students have to start and end school at the same set times, “it’s going to take us stepping back a bit and looking at things in a more innovative and creative way,” Becker says.
In the meantime, she says, kids are being taught about the importance of sleep, and about the serious consequences of getting too little of it. But “students often think they are invincible and keep going as long as they can,” she says.
Rao says he tells teens in his sleep clinic to “give me a week” — to turn off their electronic devices an hour or two before bedtime, and “take a week to experience the feeling of getting enough sleep.”
Most of them agree, he says: They do feel better.
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