What teens, as well as some of us adults, have learned to do is multi-task our text messaging with our other tasks. We text message friends while we're at the gym, while we're working, studying, eating, doing the dishes, etc. We have learned to text message and do just about anything—but sleep.
Texting among teenagers has now surpassed their daily average of phone calls. According to a study from Pew Research, half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 a month. Older girls, 14-17 year-olds, typically send 100 or more messages a day, or more than 3,000 a month. And, 15% of teen texters send more than 200 texts a day, or more than 6,000 a month.
Nearly 25% of teens in relationships have communicated with their significant others between midnight and 5 a.m. It's during these hours that new brain cells and neural connections—which connect the right and left sides of the brain and are critical to intelligence, self-awareness, and performance—grow. Stimulation during the day such as school and social interactions, gets "hard wired" into the adolescent brain during the latter stages of sleep, including REM sleep.
For teens, if they don't (or can't) average nine hours of sleep, they're left with a sleep debt, which results in poor performance, moodiness, and irritability. Their changing biorhythms allow them to naturally stay up later. As children begin puberty, the brain's circadian timing system, which is controlled mainly by melatonin, switches on later at night. (Later in middle age, this internal clock switches back, making it more difficult for parents to stay awake just when their teens are most alert.)
It can be a challenge for parents to fully control their teen's bedtime. However, it's important that some rules be made regarding texting, television, and other interactive stimuli because when sleep stages are interrupted, performance suffers the next day.
Here are some suggestions for parents to help their teen get a full night's sleep.
- Encourage teens to charge their phones at night away from their bedrooms. Pick a room that is unlikely to be visited during the night hour, e.g., a dining room or front hallway.
- Remove televisions from bedrooms. Common rooms such as family rooms, kitchens, and living rooms are perfect locations for televisions—bedrooms only encourage late night viewing.
- Create a written agreement that teens and parents can both be comfortable with that limits the hours during which teens can be in possession of their phones, watch TV, and surf the Internet.
- If the agreement is broken, enforce consequences such as confiscation of the phone, television, etc. for a day or two.
- Clearly communicate the importance of sleep and health, and describe the negative affects "burning the candle at both ends" can have.
