I love it when women start talking about the age when their child first slept through the night. You might hear, “my baby started sleeping through the night at 3 months”. or “my child didn’t sleep through the night until he was 4 years old”. I like to chime in, “my baby has never slept through the night… she is almost 13”.
While my daughter’s sleeping habits are strange and unique (she describes herself as nocturnal), teens are notorious for staying up as late as humanly possible.
Until recently, I, and many people I spoke to thought that this tendency to stay up all night was a teens way of pushing boundaries and asserting their big-kid-ness. Scientific studies however have revealed otherwise.
According to a BBC news story,
“There’s a biological predisposition for going to bed late and getting up late. Clearly you can impose upon that even worse habits, but they are not lazy.”
The story goes as far as suggesting that starting school an hour later would lead to healthier and happier kids.
Apparently,
“There’s a blip in teenagers where they need to have more sleep, but also their timing of that sleep is shifted so they want to go to bed later and get up later in the morning.
Neil Stanley a sleep researcher in the UK suggests that the reason is evolutionalry. Regardless of reason, during the teen years, the body clock jumps forward a few hours and eventually goes back to normal.
None of this information changes the fact that teens still need 9 to 10 hours of sleep and my daughter’s camp session starts at 9am. This means she should aim for a bed time of 10pm if she is going to get up (being cooperative) at 8am to eat breakfast and take the drive across town. But alas, I start telling her to head to bed at 9:45 and she says ‘just a minute’ for the next hour until I lose my cool. Fortunately for my kids, we homeschool and normally only have 1 to 2 early morning wake-up times a week.
Have a baby who can’t sleep, check out the forum Ways to get the baby to sleep.
Helping Kids Deal With Stress may be a good way to get them to go to sleep.
Read Lack of Sleep Linked to Injuries
Parents sign bedtime contracts (with school)
(cc) image by husin.sani/flickr
I also write for homeschooling, frugal, and home. See my other blogs here.